So does anyone here know how the hell people get so good quality movies on a DVD Disk, and how the hell a DVD player works?

If you do, be sure to post how here, Im really curious :-D

I think the video format is mpeg2, and the physical storage is similar to CDs, except that the laser is much finer (thinner), thus the trackers are much thinner, and therefore, many more tracks in the same amount of space.

For how the high quality works....that's high-bandwidth mpeg2 streaming. Mpeg2 is a lossy compression, which means that it won't be identical to the real thing, but the higher the bandwidth stream that is used, the higher the quality.

Think about jpeg compression. This works by takign an image, and looking for "blocks" that have the same kind of colors in most the pixels in that "block." The more comrpessed this is, the larger the blocks are, and thus if two blocks look alike, the data from only one is kept, and used wherever it's "close enough". The higher the compresseision, the more "close enough" looks "closer to crap".

mpeg2 doesn't work exactly the same way, its a lot more complicated, but the idea is the same. The more amount of information you let the stream have to describe the scene, the higher the quality.The more comrpessed you want it to be, the crappier it gets.