Same old thing,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
onlineinc.com
NEWS BRIEFS
Members of DVD Forum Forge Separate Paths Toward DVD Patent Licensing
Six of the leading developers of DVD technology--Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Time Warner Inc., Toshiba Corporation, and Victor Company of Japan Ltd.--have announced that they have come to an agreement on a joint patent licensing program for DVD. The companies authorized Toshiba to execute the licensing program, with regional assistance from Matsushita and Hitachi, for a package of the essential patents from the six companies in order to expedite the worldwide introduction of DVD. Licenses for a package of these patents will be available for products that are compliant with DVD formats approved by the DVD Forum. These arrangements cover essential patents for DVD-Video and DVD-ROM. Licenses will be available with royalties of 4 percent for each DVD-Video player, DVD-ROM drive, and DVD decoder with a minimum royalty of $4, and 7.5 cents per DVD disc.
Sony, Pioneer, and Philips were not part of the agreement, having announced their own patent licensing program in April 1997. Their group proposed a 3.5 percent license fee for DVD players and 5 cents per disc. The only DVD Forum member not to join either group--Thomson Multimedia--has developed a third, and as yet undisclosed, licensing program.
DVD Forum Agrees on Standardization for DVD-R Discs
The DVD Forum has completed standardization for the first generation of DVD-Recordable (DVD-R) discs. According to the group, the format is a write-once system that is compatible with DVD-Video and DVD-ROM formats. The format is expected to be most useful to developers and manufacturers who need to produce small quantities of discs for test marketing, promotional use, or private use. Under the specifications for DVD-R version 1.0, each 12cm disc will hold 3.95GB of data per side. The group has also announced an 8cm version of the system, capable of holding 1.23GB per side. In contrast, DVD-Video and DVD-ROM discs can hold 4.7GB on each side. Since April, when version 0.9 of the DVD-R specification was announced, a group of 20 hardware and storage media companies has been testing the system in the DVD-R Advisory Group. Despite having just finalized the version 1.0 specification, the DVD-R working group will begin working on the next-generation system, which is expected to match the 4.7GB per side capacity of pressed DVD. Also in the works for the next-generation system is a copyright protection system. The DVD Forum consists of companies that own patents related to the DVD system; members include Hitachi, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Mitsubishi Electric, Victor Company of Japan (JVC), Pioneer Electronics, Sony, Toshiba, Philips Electronics, Thomson Multimedia, and Time Warner.
Sonic Solutions Product Integrates With DVD-R Writer for Desktop DVD Creation
Sonic Solutions has announced that Sonic DVD Creator will integrate with Pioneer's DVD-Recordable drive, giving users the ability to create DVDs on the desktop. Sonic Solutions says that DVD Creator enables DVDs to be produced in half the usual time because encoding, emulation, and authoring can all be done on a single Macintosh workstation. By adding support for Pioneer's new DVD-S101 DVD-R drive, the higher costs of using glass masters for checking discs or replicating small quantities of DVDs are eliminated. A DVD-R disc can hold up to 3.95GB of data on each of its sides, for a total of 7.9GB. That amounts to six times the capacity of a CD-R disc on each side. DVD-R discs, a write-once medium, are usable on any DVD playback device, including both DVD-ROM drives and DVD-Video players.
(Sonic Solutions, 101 Rowland Way, Suite 110, Novato, CA 94945; 415/893-8000; Fax 415/893-8008; sonic.com) |
