In this paper a fixed-delay trellis search with decision feedback (FDTrS/DF) for high-density DVD systems (4.7-15GB) is proposed and implemented with FPGA. The proposed FDTrS/DF is derived by transforming the binary tree search structure into trellis search structure implying that FDTrS/DF performs better than the singnal detection techniques based on tree search structure such as FDTS/DF and SSD/DF. Advantages of FDTrS/DF are significant reductions in hardware complexity due to the unique structure of FDTrS composed of only one trellis stage requiring no traceback procedure usually implemented in the Viterbi detector. Also in this paper the PDFS/DF and SSD/DF orginally proposed for high-density magnetic recording systems are modified for the DVD system and compared with the proposed FDTrS/DF. In order to increase speed in the FPGA implementation the pipelining technique and absolute branch metric (instead of square branch metric) are applied. The proposed FDTrS/DF is shown to provide the best performance among various signal detection techniques such as PRML, DFE, FDTS/DF and SSD/DF even with a small hardware complexity.