All: I'm posting this *very lengthy* but IMO informative article (sort of a DVD technology primer) in response to past posts from folks who feel that DVD technology is somehow going to take over the data storage industry in a short period of time and ultimately crush IO.
This article is from dv.com
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"Despite the confusion and varied reports, the final conversion from analog media to all-digital has begun--DVD is here. But, as with most introductions of this scale and importance, it's a complicated story that will take time to fully unfold.
For consumers, DVD is a big story because it is the first high-bandwidth digital medium capable of carrying truly high-quality digital video that can be distributed at a low cost and with an attractive form factor. And, it will have new interactive features and capacities that increase its utility.
On the interactive multimedia side, for the first time, we have a digital medium that was actually designed for video data rates. Now interactive title designers won't have to shoe-horn data onto discs that were really designed to hold only audio.
The game community is also jumping on the bandwagon. "I think the entire entertainment software industry is very, very excited about DVD," said Hugh Martin, president of 3DO. "The reason DVD is so important to our business is that what people will do is combine the functionality of a [Sony] Playstation, or our M2, or Nintendo 64 with a DVD product to get an interactive multimedia device. It's sort of a Trojan horse."
Even with all of this good news and excitement there many questions and concerns about the launch of DVD. Will DVD hit the stores this fall? Will titles be available? Have they solved the copy protection issues? Are the licensing issues resolved?
With so much uncertainty it's hard to be excited and sound credible at the same time. The good news is what's actually happening out there. Even amidst the "real soon now" rhetoric, the transition to DVD has already begun and investments are now being made in plants and equipment. But that's not to say that all is decided and resolved--far from it.
Despite the uncertainty, there remains a remarkably consistent sense of optimism surrounding this technology. "DVD is going to be here and it's going to be the best thing we've seen in a long time," asserts Jerry Pierce, Director of MCA's Digital Video Compression Center. "The price of players is going to be low enough and will drop so rapidly that they [DVD players] will be a commodity item." Jerry ought to know, too. He's seen the players, he does the encoding, and he knows his bits and wires. And Jerry is not alone in predicting some pretty exciting things for DVD and DVD-ROM.
DVD evangelist Peter Biddle says that Microsoft is "considering it [DVD title development] now; there are some titles which are obviously natural for the medium and which wouldn't take much time to release for DVD. When it makes sense for us to ship on DVD, we will be there. We view this as an inevitability."
Many Flavors, Many Players, Many Issues
Digital Video Disc, or more simply 'DVD', has been talked about and promised for more than a year from a variety of manufacturers. After neatly avoiding a VHS/Beta style market blood bath by joining forces last year, an alliance of patent-holding technology contributors agreed to pool their resources and define a unified format. Members include: Hitachi, Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Philips Electronics N.V., Pioneer Electronic Corporation, Sony Corporation, Thomson Multimedia, Time Warner Inc., Toshiba Corporation, and Victor Company of Japan, Ltd.
These are the companies who "own" the standard and make the final determination about what is included in the specification. Because of its size, it's not surprising that it has taken this group time to finalize the DVD technical details. When they are finished the final version will be licensed to disc replicators and player manufacturers.
The alliance members are making every effort to ensure that DVD meets the needs of the studios who own the fuel of this segment of the consumer electronics market: movies. For their part, the movie owners want to be sure there is very high quality, low cost, and a strong copy protection system. A digital medium delivers the first two requirements easily, but because bits can be copied without degradation (unlike analog video tape), a separate copy protection system must be devised and added to the DVD specification.
Yet another group are the computer platform providers. These include the likes of IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and Compaq. The DVD alliance want to make this group happy as well so they will buy and incorporate DVD-ROM drives into their products. The computer industry is less enthusiastic about copy protection and more excited about recordable media. But they also want cool multimedia capabilities.
While progress is being made toward meeting the needs of each of these groups, there is still some distance to go. One thing that is certain: all are committed to a successful launch in their part of the market, and nobody is backing away from DVD in favor of something else. It therefore seems likely this medium will stick and grow.
Several Flavors
There are three basic versions of the medium: DVD Video, DVD Audio, and DVD-ROM. The first two are obviously aimed at the home consumer electronics market. While the specifications for DVD Video are very nearly complete (with prototypes), DVD Audio will take longer and will involve several new sets of players who will have definite opinions about the format and its impact on the current CD market. Right now, DVD-ROM is closely tied to DVD Video. Therefore, understanding DVD Video capabilities helps clarify the distinctions between the home video and computer versions of the medium.
DVD Video is intended to replace VHS tape as the primary means for distributing entertainment to the home, although the process will certainly take some time. Initially DVD Video will most likely consist of linear movies encoded in MPEG-2 and Dolby AC-3 audio.
The specification for DVD Video players--the simple consumer devices that will connect to your home television set--also includes some interesting 'quasi' interactive capabilities. Simple menus, point-and-click branching, and multi-track audio could form the basis of a new class of low-level interactive titles aimed at the mass market. Some have predicted that these capabilities could be adequate for simple Myst-like applications or extended and expanded versions of linear titles.
The problem with the extended capabilities of DVD Video is that the capabilities are, thus far, completely untested and, some say, untestable until there are multiple players on the market. These functions are defined in the current specification, which is available but was not yet final at press time. So, developers will have to wait to get players in hand from a number of different vendors to find out if, in fact, they implement the extended capabilities consistently.
This is not unlike the early days of laser discs and CD players. In both of these cases, the developers who wished to push the envelope were forced to wait until there were multiple implementations of the same specification before they could dependably design a title that would work across all brands and models. In the early days of laser and audio discs some of the first models were quickly discontinued as 'fixes' and improvements were made as a result of developer feedback. DVD devices are almost certain to follow the same path.
Developer Influence
Developers have an enormously important role in the definition and determination of how the standard will actually manifest itself in hardware. Nearly all of the alliance members polled for this article emphasized the need for the development community to push the limits and fully exploit DVD in all of its forms. "The potential of the new medium has not yet been fully digested by people who create titles," stressed Jan Oosterveld, President of Philips Key Modules. "DVD is here and they [developers] need to prepare for it."
"We have to rely upon the creativity of the content providers to do things that right now we probably have no clue about," said Mike Randall, DVD specialist for Mitsu-bishi. "You know, from a personal point of view--I can't wait!" According to Greg Berkin at Intel, developers aren't waiting. "I know personally of at least 20 companies that are working on DVD/ MMX titles for either the fourth quarter of '96 or the first quarter of '97." Clearly the development community is beginning the climb up the learning curve.
DVD-ROM
Some have described DVD-ROM as simply a big bit bucket. From a data storage point of view, DVD-ROM does look a lot like a "more-better-faster" CD-ROM and, therefore, not all that big a deal. After all, the computer industry has been following Moore's Law (the Intel chairman's mostly accurate prediction that computers would continue to double in power every 18 months), so it stands to reason that we are due for a quantum jump in the capacity of storage media.
Microsoft's Peter Biddle describes DVD-ROM drive as "simply that--a drive which follows the DVD-ROM standard and which is capable of reading DVD discs. It is up to the PC to define what, if any, additional abilities are available. Watching movies is an obvious one, and we are really excited about the opportunity to make the PC a great movie-watching device, with a big screen and high resolution, plus all the cool things you can do with a PC."
Computer companies are planning to incorporate DVD-ROM drives as a basic component to next generation computers. "Intel is very committed to DVD-ROM as a corporate strategy," said Intel's DVD evangelist Greg Berkin. "We view it as part of the next generation periphera on the PC platform. It is an enabler and provides the next generation of performance and functionality to title developers and consumers."
Albert Chu at Apple Computer has had an internal task force working on DVD for most of this year, and even hosted the Interactive Multimedia Association's cross-industry meeting on DVD-ROM this past April. It appears that the computer industry is in wide-spread agreement on their intentions to support the medium and incorporate it into their products.
But DVD-ROM promises much more than just increased storage capacity. Finally a high bandwidth, high capacity distribution medium exists that can deliver a substantial improvement in multimedia quality. The possibilities are fascinating.
For one thing, DVD-ROM drives are now uniformly expected to include decoding support for MPEG 2 and AC-3 (most often in the form of an add-in card). It is expected that DVD Video titles will be compatible with the computer player version. Most consumers have been expecting that all along, but as recently as three months ago no one was certain if computer platform providers would include the extra expense.
Market research and the realization that the cross-over effect would be beneficial to acceptance seems to have convinced the computer community of the need for consistent implementations between computers and consumer electronics devices. More specifically, IDC (International Data Corporation) recently sponsored a DVD study which shows that 62 percent of computer users would be compelled to purchase a DVD-ROM drive solely to able to play movies. A more telling statistic, however, is the prediction that 72 percent would buy a DVD-ROM drive in order to gain access to new and compelling software.
Another opinion trend has developed in the past several months: DVD-ROM drives are now expected to grow faster than DVD Video players in the home, at least initially. Some attribute this to the multi-function use of DVD-ROM drives that are also backwards compatible with today's CD-ROMs and audio CDs. Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and others have recently stepped up their statements of support for DVD-ROM which will almost certainly lead to a string of fall announcements. Computer companies will probably outpace Hollywood's willingness or ability to mount a national consumer product launch of DVD Video during this time frame.
For interactive multimedia developers, this is very good news. An early launch of DVD-ROM drives and capacity is essential for the creative community to begin the process of building tools and techniques.
The "Standard"
Balancing the enthusiasm is the reality that (as of this writing) the specification is incomplete. It stands as a version "0.9", indicating that it is almost-but-not-quite there. Those who have the specification say it's close enough for multimedia work, but uncertainty remains until the final version is broadly released and players are available that are "1.0" compatible.
"Things are moving along well," reported Roger Dressler, technical director of Dolby Labs Licensing Corp. "We've had DVD players in here for evaluation and they look very finished. But they [the player manufacturers] always say they are using version 0.9 code because they are waiting for that last drop of the shoe to see what the protection mechanism will be."
You can order the .9 version DVD Format Book from the DVD Alliance Group for a cost of $5,000 for the first copy and $500 for additional copies. However, you must execute a formal non-disclosure agreement with them first. Also, having a copy of the draft specification doesn't mean you can build DVD players or make discs; they must issue a license to you first--once they figure out what they are going to charge in royalties. Contact information is:
Mr. Tetsuo Kadoya
SD Business Division
Toshiba Corporation
1-1 Shibaura 1-Chome, Minato-ku
Tokyo 105, Japan
81-3-3457-2473 phone; 81-3-5444-9401 fax
There are dozens of prototype players in the hands of developers, disc stamping facilities, and prospective OEM customers. Reports are that they seem to work fine, which indicates that while the cake isn't fully baked, it's nearly so.
DVD Licensing Issues Grow More Complex
Just before going to press, Philips Key Modules president Jan Oosterveld held a press conference announcing their intention to license key technology from Sony and Philips needed to manufacture DVD players and discs.
This announcement stunned DVD followers who had been awaiting the announcement of the formation of a licensing consortium from the ten DVD Alliance members, which include Sony and Philips. It has been assumed until this announcement that such a consortium would be headed by either Toshiba or Matsushita. The Philips announcement signals a breakdown in negotiations among the technology contributors to the DVD standard.
For now, DVD player and disc manufacturers must approach each of the individual patent holders in the DVD Alliance before they can legally sell DVD products. Ooster-veld expressed hope that other companies would contribute their patents to the Philips/Sony pool in order to create a"one stop shop" for DVD manufacturing rights.
While Philips and Sony own key technology that must be licensed to make DVD players and discs, other alliance members own patents to other aspects of DVD. This means that none of the Alliance members can manufacture DVD products without licenses from one another. Oosterveld stated that the Philips decision to license their patents to anyone was intended to break the logjam and to avoid antitrust action.
Philips set the royalties for DVD players (which include DVD-ROM drives) at 2.5 percent of the ex-factory cost (estimated at about $7.5 per player assuming a $300 OEM price) and $.045 per DVD disc, which is slightly higher than the Philips/Sony portion of royalties for CD and CD-ROM.
It was noted during the press conference that these royalties were separate from, and in addition to, the royalties that will be required to license MPEG 2 technology, which are projected to be about $4 per player and $.04 per disc. Royalties for other Alliance members patents were not yet available at press time.
These announcements virtually assure that the costs to make DVD players and discs will be significantly higher than for CDs and CD-ROMs. How much more won't be determined until the rest of the DVD Alliance settles on pricing for their technology contributions. Moreover, some of the Alliance members have patents applied for but not yet issued. That could mean that additional royalties might be levied after the first products are shipped.
These announcements simply amplify the future value that the industry is placing on DVD. Companies are jockeying for position at the starting gate and striving for as big a piece of the future revenue stream as they can. Once the DVD launch begins, they will have to settle for whatever ground they have taken this year.
Backwards Compatibility
It has been also widely expected that DVD-ROM drives will be backwards compatible with existing CD-ROMs and CD audio discs and the manufacturers contacted for this article have confirmed this compatibility. There is one sticking point however: recordable media. It turns out that the wavelength of the laser used to read DVD discs, which have much smaller pits for encoding bits, is not compatible with today's recordable CD-ROM media. The higher frequency DVD lasers can read stamped discs, which are highly reflective, but can't quite discern data on the darker "write once" material.
This incompatibility will likely cause short term frustration and problems since recordable CD-ROMs have become a big part of the development infrastructure, and they are a growing segment of the distribution system for time sensitive and short run applications.
The good news is that we may soon see new CD-ROM recordable media (sometimes referred to as CD-R2) that can be used with new DVD-ROM drives, but it isn't certain how soon such discs will become widely available. DVD-ROM recordable drives are also in development, but they are not anticipated to arrive for at least another year. That means that developers will have to make do, sometimes using 10X and 12X CD-ROM drives and recordable discs to stitch together pieces of DVD-ROM titles at the end of the development cycle.
Behind the Scenes Speculation
The final issues blocking the full scale release of DVD remain hidden, but there is plenty of speculation about what's really going on. Everyone agrees that copy protection is the most visible issue. The movie industry has steadfastly upheld their intention to withhold publishing titles until they are convinced there is an acceptable means for protecting their assets from being copied. The method of copy protection used, they insist, must also be applied to computers. Therein lies the problem.
For months the issue has been debated. Initial proposals from the Motion Picture Association of America and the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association included legislation that mandated the implementation of a technical specification for monitoring media bit streams. The computer industry rejected this scheme immediately since it basically required that all bits be monitored for the presence of copy protection information--an impractical task to implement computationally.
More recently, and with input from several computer companies, a scheme was presented that encodes content bit streams so they are useless until they are passed through a decoder in the player. Each decoder hardware chip is equipped with a decryption key that can be matched with a key on the physical disc (and hence only readable by a DVD player or drive). Once the keys are matched, the bitstream is decoded and delivered to the television or computer. This way only the bits that are copy protected are scrambled; regular data isn't affected.
The proposed copy system, put forth by Matsushita, has been broadly accepted by all the industry participants, though many say there are still details to iron out. Some venture to say that the lack of final and formal approval of the system is actually a delaying tactic to permit some companies to catch up to those companies already poised to ship their products. Regardless of the last minute jockeying for position, it seems clear that the copy protection question has pretty much been resolved and is now being tested in premastering and disc manufacturing facilities.
More quietly, but still with apparent unity, proposed anti-circumvention legislation is being drafted to put some teeth behind the technical safeguards being proposed. When intellectual property owners implement a "locked door" by using copy protection, the proposed legislation would make it illegal for people to try to break that door down. What isn't clear yet is whether such draft legislation would contain technical detail, or, for that matter, if it would ever make it into law.
While there is broad support for the concept of anti-circumvention legislation, it seems clear that it won't make it into law prior to the launch of DVD products and therefore isn't a major near-term factor. But that could change overnight.
The final back-room negotiations that cause angst among some in the industry revolves around licensing. As mentioned earlier, the technologies used in DVD and DVD-ROM are based on a thick stack of patents owned by various members of the DVD Alliance in various proportion. In order to legally make DVD players or discs, a manufacturer must have a license for all of these patents.
Since it is impractical to negotiate a license for each of the patents one at a time--they number in the hundreds according to some--a licensing consortium must be established (as occurred with MPEG-2 patents earlier this year). This consortium determines the license and royalty fee for discs and players.
The fees for CD-ROMs are about $.10 per disc, paid by the disc manufacturer to Philips (who divides the royalties with Sony), and about $.40 for drives. The fees for DVD discs haven't been set at this writing, but are estimated at $.35 or more per disc. This causes major hand wringing among service providers and non-DVD Alliance member player manufactures.
Charging Forward
That hasn't stopped manufacturers from steaming forward at full speed. John Town of Nimbus, the second largest CD manufacturing company, says they are investing heavily and will be ready to stamp discs in early September.
Jerry Pierce, director of the MCA Digital Video Compression Center reports "we are setting up to do encoding right now. We've got a fairly hefty backlog of titles that are in the process of being done." Clearly the question about copy protection, legislation, and licensing are not holding back progress.
Tools of the Trade
The maturity of tools for creating DVD Video and DVD-ROM titles is generally reported to be "adolescent," good enough to launch, but hardly polished or complete. But no major developmental roadblocks are thought to exist for initial titles. It will simply cost a bit more and be more complicated at first. But then again, that's true for all new technologies.
On the DVD Video 'authoring' and premastering side, a number of service bureaus are springing up. Many are being supplied by tool provider Sonic Solutions, one of the early leaders in the field. Sonic provides the means to encode, optimize, and blend MPEG-2 and AC-3 streams in preparation for the mastering process. These tools are likely to find their way into dozens of service providers in the coming months.
To assist DVD and DVD-ROM developers, Intel established their DVD Authoring Studio in August of this year. This facility is optimized to develop titles to run on PCs with Intel's MMX technology and is equipped with digital and analog editing, video capture, editing, and compression for both MPEG-2 and Indeo video.
The Intel facility, like others, uses DVD authoring stations from Sonic Solutions. These systems provide all the functionality necessary to produce a DVD disc image for mastering, including real time encoding of MPEG-1 and -2 vid-eo, and real time en-coding of six- channel Dolby AC-3 surround sound. Software is included to create the master digital tape, which is then sent to the pressing plant for mastering.
On the East Coast, Crush Digital Video in New York was formed to provide complete premastering services ranging from interactive design and programming to MPEG-2 and AC-3 encoding. Other DVD facilities include WEA Warner Advanced Media Operations in Olyphant, PA; Pioneer Video Mfg. in Carson, CA; and Warner Brothers Home Video in Burbank, CA.
Creating a DVD-ROM
On the DVD-ROM side the tool set will initially be based on extensions of existing authoring products. Macromedia Director, for example, is already being used to manage MPEG 2 streams, as well as other digital video types, and the company is preparing new DVD video tools for this fall. Developers of DVD-ROM titles are able to start development now using today's tools with the knowledge that incremental additions will be made available early this fall.
"The important message to developers is that we will make it easy for people to leverage the same tools they use today [for CD-ROM] for DVD-ROM," said Philip Schiller, vice president of product management at Macromedia.
Microsoft reports that they will be providing software support for DVD in OSR3 (OEM Service Release 3) which is currently planned for release in Q1 '97. This support will be via a DVD ATAPI class driver, a UDF file system, and supporting software, probably including a DVD player application.
Of course some developers, particularly those who want to stretch the boundaries, will want to "roll their own." This somewhat riskier path may well spur the development of an entirely new class of DVD specific tools. But, that will take time.
The biggest development headache for early developers will be the lack of easy and cheap emulation. While this problem will decline over the next year or so, it represents a real cost of time and money for the first titles. In the meanwhile, services are springing up to fill the gap.
LaserPacific Media Corporation of Hollywood is partnered with Optical Disc Corporation (ODC) to provide the producers of DVD titles with the industry's first practical way to make a DVD reference "check disc" prior to replication. In so doing, ODC's DirectCut process promises to break one of the anticipated bottlenecks in DVD production as there is currently no way to make a true DVD disc short of the complete replication process. DirectCut creates a playable disc that is identical to the eventual glass master that will be made in the final DVD disc mastering process.
The Internet Connection
The past year's Internet craze has left some wondering if there is any medium other than the World Wide Web that matters. Wiser minds remind us that different media types tend to co-exist, each favoring their respective strengths. Very high bandwidth, multimedia rich content isn't one of the Internet's strengths, and probably won't be in the near term. For this reason a large number of developers and platform providers are exploring hybrid DVD-Internet applications called "connected applications" which are described as "a new category of software that matches client-based enriched media content with real-time information from connected sources."
A hybrid approach does play to the respective strengths of the two distribution systems: DVD has rich experiential media capability, whereas the Internet has connectivity, communications, and timeliness. To-gether they create interesting possibilities.
Microsoft's Biddle suggests that "DVD ultimately marks the end of analog distribution. Experience in creating DVD titles and content will lead naturally to the use of digital networks for content delivery as bandwidth for those networks increases." Martin at 3DO raises the ante: "We've already architected a system that has most of the 'world' resident on your local machine on a CD-ROM and just positional information and status is sent over the internet. DVD allow us to have a much richer environment and much higher quality video while using the same low bandwidth Internet connection."
Intel has found that two specific hybrid applications categories are creating a great deal of excitement among DVD/Internet developers: reference and games. On it's face these seem like perfect examples of the blending of value. Encyclopedias need and devour huge amounts of space with text, pictures, videos, sound, and animations. Yet they go out of date and don't cross-reference elsewhere. A hybrid application could solve that with a built-in browser.
Great games are immersive. DVD can provide a rich environment with incredibly complex imagery, sound, and experience. Local access provides predictable latency. Add a connection to the Intenet and instantly the local world can share players, supplemental data, and enhancements. The upshot is that DVD is thought to be a compliment to Internet, not a competitor. Certainly for high bandwidth multimedia applications this would seem to be true.
The Launch
By the time you read this, new announcements will no doubt have been made about the availability of players and drives. "
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*** Oops, I reached SI's maximum message length. Please check out
the concluding paragraph at dv.com |
