Both formats have their drawbacks. No current home video player can play back videos directly from SD or SDHC cards; playback of videos recorded on SD camcorders must either be played back directly from the same camcorder on which the original recording was made or be transferred to a computer system and converted and authored onto a recordable DVD. And SD/SDHC camcorders can only record up to 4GB per video file (movie) due to the limitations of the FAT and FAT32 filing systems SD and SDHC cards use.

Mini-DVD discs, on the other hand, are limited to 30 minutes of recording at HQ (or XP) bitrates; thus, degraded, lower quality settings are required just to achieve any significant length of recording on a single disc.