A standard DVD alignment tray has a circular inlet for the DVD disc as well as catch guards to keep the disc in place while the drive motor grabs the disc. The DVD trays on most DVD readers are made from a single piece of plastic, either cut or pressure molded into the necessary shape. Some older DVD drives have mechanical tabs for the user to lock the disc into the tray with his thumbs; however, these locking mechanisms ultimately proved unnecessary and are no longer commonly used.
Multidisc DVD alignment devices can take the form of something as simple as a home DVD player with the capacity to read three DVDs at once. More complex variations use an oversize tray and complicated mechanical devices that choose a DVD from a large stock in a manner not unlike an old-time jukebox. This variation is used for applications like hotel movie viewing and in DVD rental vending machines. While most DVD rental vending machines do not actually touch the DVD itself, they need to be carefully tuned devices to prevent damaging the disc or packaging through rough handling.
Enclosed variations on the digital video disc are quite common in Japanese computer electronics, though as of November 2010 these variations have not caught on in North America. Popular formats of the enclosed digital video disc are Sony's minidisk format, and the universal media disc used in the PlayStation portable PSP console. Despite its name, the UMD format is anything but universal; blank discs and compatible writing drives remain unavailable to mainstream consumers.