Optical Storage Technology Association

The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) was an international <a href="/facts/Trade_association/emPa7AJG">trade association</a> formed to promote the use of recordable <a href="/facts/Optical_data_storage/D2rM4VkH">optical data storage</a> technologies and products. It was responsible for the creation and maintenance of the <a href="/facts/Universal_Disk_Format/QwlH2aPR">Universal Disk Format (UDF)</a> file system specification (derived from ISO/IEC 13346 and ECMA-167), which was notably adopted for <a href="/facts/DVD-Video/V7pyI58m">DVD-Video</a>. It was <a href="/facts/Incorporation_(business)/aB7mYbBQ">incorporated</a> in California in 1992 and dissolved in 2018.
In the autumn of 2007, OSTA spearheaded a campaign to encourage families and photographers to back up their digital photographs on compact discs.
The web site of the association provides the full digital specification books of each revision of the Universal Disc Format (UDF) starting at 1.02, as well as other whitepapers and information pages related to optical data storage. Besides the UDF specifications, differences between the revisions of the specifications can be obtained. A sub-committee of the group was the "Commercial Optical Storage Applications Group" (COSA), which helped companies implement long-term archival on optical media.

Optical Storage Technology Association open-in-new

Optical Storage Technology Association