A brief note on Digital VCR from Dvorak's column in PC Magazine, Dec 16, 1997:
"The real nail in the coffin for DVD, though, comes from its original enemy, the VCR. And by this time next year, the newest iteration of the VCR - the digital VCR - should be taking over the market. The first such device, which is backward-compatible with standard VHS, comes out this year. The digital VCR will be bundled with a DBS satellite dish from which it can record MPEG-2 movies right from the digital feed. The deck can also accept an IEEE 1394 digital feed from a digital camcorder or just record from broadcast TV digitally. I believe that much of the hype surrounding the D-VHS deck has been kept to a minimum because of its ability to make perfect copies; the opportunity to dub rented videos is hard to resist. As the home becomes more networked, it has no reason not to network in a D-VHS and use it as a massive backup device. A D-VHS cassette will hold 44 gigabytes of data, and that number should increase over the next few years. JVC, the company that pioneered both VHS and D-VHS, also expects to produce an HDTV version of the system for super high resolutions. The curious aspect of all this is Japan's fear that D-VHS won't be a success. In fact, this device will take the USA by storm and swamp DVD."
p.s. In the recent Byte article, I believe the Cube architects were giving a sub-$100 target for the DiVX encoder within 2 years (?). This would remove the price differential between Sony and CUBE encoder chips. |
