DVD Demystified: Exploring The New Disk Frontier
"Once you see DVD, you'll never be able to go back to tape again because it's so much better…If I had a choice on a new movie of buying DVD or LaserDisc, I would get DVD."
Roger Ebert, "Siskel & Ebert"
Imagine this: your old family VCR has finally bitten the dust. You consider, momentarily, the prospect of life without movies on videotape, but like most Americans, you do not find this appealing. Off you go, checkbook in hand, to the nearest consumer electronics outlet in hopes of buying a fancy new one--not just your run-of-the-mill videotape playback machine, but one that will offer you the very latest in home entertainment technology. You want good audio, good video, and above all, a fancy-looking model with lots of buttons and lights on it.
When you enter the store, however, you see a big, imposing sign near the VCR section that has the letters "DVD" written on it. Underneath these letters, the word "Video" appears next to a shiny metallic disk that looks exactly like a standard music CD. Oh, yeah--it's that new technology you heard about a few months back, the one that's destined to take the place of videotape eventually. The stacks of CD-sized cases nearby hold plenty of movie titles that you might be interested in: Batman, The Wizard of Oz, Blade Runner, and dozens of others. A very interesting prospect, this DVD; you begin to hear those dollars in your bank account calling to you, urging you to make the leap into the land of an exciting new technology.
Then your eyes catch another sign at the opposite end of the store, near the home computers. The DVD logo is very similar to the previous one, but instead of the word "Video" underneath the logo, you see the word "ROM." Near this sign, you see dozens of software titles packaged in the same small cases, but instead of movie titles, you see games, encyclopedias, edu-tainment packages and software you would normally purchase on a CD-ROM. What's this all about? Does this mean that if you have the right equipment, you can play your DVD videos in your computer? Or that you can play computer software in the same home DVD player that sits in your living room next to the television? Confused, you ask the nearest salesperson to explain the different flavors of DVD to you, but after listening to a few minutes of his sales-speak, you're convinced that he knows little more than you do on the topic.
You want to keep up on the latest technology, but you're finding it difficult to educate yourself in the face of all this salesmanship. How are you going to answer all of those burning questions that have formed in your mind since your VCR broke down?
The answer is simple: continue reading this article. In it, you'll find the latest scoop on DVD, from the beginnings of the technology to the most recent format battles. We'll cover all of the bases, from the major types of DVD devices on the market today to the subtle variations within each type. We'll even take a peek into the future, and attempt to determine where all of this confusion is heading, and what that means to you, the consumer. By the time you've finished reading, you'll have a thorough grasp of what exactly is--and isn't--provided by this exciting new medium.
Acronyms Galore
First, let's cover a little bit of history. A few years ago, a handful of competing companies--Sony and Toshiba among them--developed two similar, though incompatible, designs for a new kind of disk-based digital home video player. Both sides rallied support behind their own designs, even going so far as to enlist the major movie distribution houses to fight for one standard or the other. At that time, the nascent technology was called Digital Video Disc (DVD for short), because its primary purpose was to provide a stand-alone digital video player for the home entertainment market.
Eventually, in the face of a format war that promised to be as disastrous to the consumer as the VHS/Beta wars were for the early VCR market, the two companies reached an accord, and agreed upon a common set of specifications for the new device. Everyone was happy--especially those consumers who followed these trends, because they didn't want to take the chance on ending up with the future equivalent of an expensive Beta VCR in their living room.
Yes, everyone was happy with the new format--everyone, that is, except the computer manufacturers. Just as music CD technology gave rise to CD-ROMs, DVD technology promised a faster, more efficient means of computer software distribution: DVD-ROM. With the advent of this new application, it seemed that the "Video" portion of the DVD acronym was a little too limited--hence, the change to the newer meaning of DVD (which is now officially in effect in the industry): Digital Versatile Disc. To further differentiate the two types of technology, the original video-software version of DVD has had the word "Video" added, which is why the sign near the home DVD players says DVD-Video instead of just plain DVD. In the end, the computer manufacturers got their wishes and DVD-ROM was born.
Now get ready for an important distinction: just as music CD players won't play most CD-ROM software, home DVD-video players are incapable of making sense out of the vast majority of DVD-ROM titles. Though the basics of the technology are the same, the two are mutually incompatible in most situations. In a nutshell, DVD-ROM is merely a means for distributing software that requires a home computer for interpretation, whereas DVD-Video is a specialized format that exists mainly for playing back videos. It is often possible, however, to play a standard DVD-Video disk on a computer with a properly equipped DVD-ROM drive. In many cases, you can even connect your PC's DVD-ROM drive to a home television for full-screen, full-motion playback of DVD videos. The crucial ingredient in this type of setup involves the introduction of an entirely new acronym: MPEG-2.
MPEG Who?
As the first letter in the DVD acronym clearly states, the chief difference between DVD and most other means of playing video in your living room is the fact that DVD-Video is digital. The information it carries is comprised of a very long series of binary numbers (zeroes and ones). By comparison, the typical VHS videotape, television broadcast, or laserdisc deals with analog information. Without getting too much into the details, suffice it to say that digital video tends to have richer colors, sharper resolution and overall cleaner playback than its analog counterpart. One look at a comparison between the playback of a VHS videotape and a DVD-Video disk will immediately show you the striking difference between the two.
Because it's digital, however, there are a number of complex processes which must be incorporated into the design of a DVD-Video player in order to make it miraculously transform all of those zeroes and ones into a moving picture on your TV screen. Chief among these processes is data compression. In its uncompressed form, digital video takes up a huge amount of space. Each frame of video can require as much as a megabyte or more to store in full detail. Multiply this by thirty frames per second, and you begin to see the problem (especially when it's a two-hour movie you're trying to fit onto a single 4-gigabyte disk). The solution to this problem for DVD Video is the new acronym we introduced a few paragraphs ago: MPEG-2.
MPEG-2 is simply a highly efficient means of compressing and decompressing digital video and audio information. Every video title released in the DVD format has been compressed using MPEG-2, and therefore requires specialized electronic hardware to de-compress it as the video is played. Which leads us back to our discussion about the differences between DVD-ROM and DVD-Video: DVD-Video requires MPEG-2 decompression hardware in order to play back the compressed video, whereas DVD-ROM does not require any hardware other than a DVD-ROM drive to function. Therefore, if you want to play your DVD-Video titles on your computer, you must have additional MPEG-2 hardware installed along with your DVD-ROM drive.
The Benefits--and Limits--of DVD Video
Besides providing a better-looking method of distributing video titles, DVD-Video has several distinct advantages over most of its analog counterparts.
For one thing, DVD disks (like analog laserdiscs) offer random access. This means that you can instantly access a given portion of the disk, without fast-forwarding or rewinding. Most DVD-Video titles take advantage of this by offering a number of selected starting points for a film, allowing the viewer to instantly zip to the exact scene he or she wishes to view.
Also included in the DVD-Video package is the ability to choose from several soundtracks--offering, for example, a selection of foreign languages to the viewer. (Closed-captioning is also possible for the hearing impaired.) Some even come with a special director's narrative soundtrack, where the director of the film will provide voice-over narration, breaking down the film in a shot-by-shot analysis and/or providing interesting and humorous anecdotes about its shooting.
To access these many functions, most DVD players have some sort of on-screen point-and-click system that's similar to a computer's graphical user interface. With this system, it's possible to arrange a series of short video clips on a single DVD with a series of branching graphical menus for organization--the bare essentials of a video and/or audio encyclopedia. Most of the world's major gaming and edu-tainment software companies are taking a close look at the possibilities that such an application would provide for their marketplace. We can expect to see a number of these DVD-Video edu-tainment titles sometime in 1998. (art note: DVD menus go near this section)
Taking the concept a step further is Digital Leisure, a company that ambitiously released a game title for DVD-Video in 1997. The game, Dragon's Lair, was already ahead of its time when it was first released into arcades over ten years ago. Consisting of a complex plot line that's broken up into numerous tiny episodes, Dragon's Lair managed to achieve a smooth merging of the very different worlds of video playback (a cartoon, in this case) and computerized game play.
According to Liz Foster, president of Digital Leisure, Dragon's Lair was not as easy to bring to the DVD-Video market as it might seem. The chief problem lay in each DVD-Video player's method of accessing the graphical user interface through the remote control. "We were having compatibility problems. Achieving compatibility with every single DVD-Video player on the market has been very difficult."
Despite of some of the glitches that the engineers at Digital Leisure encountered with the interface, the fact that they were able to come up with such a product at all points the way to a bright future for DVD-Video as a truly interactive video format.
But Can It Record?
As for the drawbacks inherent in DVD, there is really only one major issue to contend with: currently, there are no DVD recorders available in the market. Although the industry managed to agree upon a standard playback format, a recordable format for DVD remains a point of contention between two different camps. One group, composed of manufacturers Matsushita (which owns the Panasonic and Technics brands), Toshiba and Hitachi are endorsing a format called DVD-RAM, which has also been sanctioned by the international DVD Forum. Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi, Philips, Ricoh, Sony and Yamaha support an opposing format, called DVD+RW. The data storage capabilities of the two formats is roughly comparable, although each claims the other format is a less reliable means of data recording and storage. Even if one format wins dominance over the other, the high cost of the hardware involved in compressing video with MPEG-2 will make recordable DVD drives an expensive prospect for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if you're looking for something that can timeshift your television programming and play back tapes recorded on a home camcorder, the good old VHS VCR is, for the time being, still your best bet. If you're looking for high-quality playback of audio and video playback, DVD-Video has become the new standard. If you want the highest playback resolution and the greatest level of interactivity, then a DVD-ROM-equipped PC/TV is the way to go.
Audio and Beyond
Whenever you're considering the purchase of a video playback device, it's very important that you take audio into the equation, because audio is an essential component of every video experience. In the realm of DVD, there are several competing audio formats, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The one that gets the most attention is perhaps Dolby Audio Labs' AC-3 specification for surround sound. In order to gain the advantages of Dolby AC-3 audio, however, you must have both the necessary audio hardware and a specially prepared DVD-Video disk that supports Dolby AC-3 audio. On the hardware side, it's worth noting that the chief difference between today's entry-level DVD-Video players and the step-up models that cost a bit more is the presence (or absence) of Dolby AC-3 audio in the player itself.
As for the current and future levels of acceptance for DVD, the numbers speak for themselves: by the end of 1998, sales of DVD-Video players is expected to reach somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million units. These numbers far surpass those attained by audio CDs and home VCRs in their first year of existence. Now, roughly twenty years after their introduction, both audio CDs and home VCRs have become an ordinary sight in homes at all economic levels. Also, DVD-ROM players have become the standard in most brand-new home computer systems. With such rapid acceptance of DVD technology in its first year of life, and with the prices of players and drives dropping fast, DVD is likely to become the playback medium of choice for the 21st century.
The Divx Variable
When Digital Video Express (DVE), a partnership between the Circuit City retail chain and a southern California entertainment-business law firm, announced last year it would release a proprietary "pay-per-play" DVD format, it sent a collective shiver down the spine of the fledgling industry.
Known as "Divx," the new players are anticipated on the market sometime this summer, and DVD-Video proponents worry that confusion over the competing formats will hurt acceptance of the technology as a whole. The fact that Divx discs only play on Divx-compatible players, and aren't compatible with the existing base of DVD-Video or ROM players, makes them bad medicine for consumer electronics manufacturers who have worked so hard to present a unified front.
As of this writing, not a single Divx player or movie title has been released. Nevertheless, several major manufacturers--including Thomson, Zenith and Matsushita-have announced they will make the players. Divx players will retail for about $100 more than other DVD players, which will cover the cost of the additional hardware and software required to operate the format. Several studios-including Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Paramount, and Universal-have committed to releasing titles in the Divx format, with around 100 titles being available upon its launch
According to DVE statements, Divx will work on a rental basis, in which you buy a disc for about $4.99, which includes ownership of the disc and a 48-hour viewing period. During that initial 48-hours, you can watch the movie as many times as you want. A modem built into the Divx player will periodically dial a toll-free number to report on your usage. At the end of the initial 48-hour period, there are several options. If you know you will never want to watch the movie again, you can simply throw the disc away. If you think you may want to see it again in the future, you can store it until such a time you are ready, then reactivate another 48-hour period, which will probably cost between $3 and $5. Some discs will be upgradable to Divx Silver status, which means you can upgrade them from your home to unlimited playback (on your Divx player only) for a one-time fee. Yet another flavor will be Divx Gold, which will entail full ownership and unlimited free playback on any Divx player (not just yours). Besides the initial $4.99 purchase/rental, all of these transactions occur on a credit card you register with the Divx office when you initially set up the player. If all this sounds confusing, DVE executives are betting the benefits will become clear once players and movie titles are available.
--Jim Mikles
Digg This!
del.icio.us
Technorati
Reddit