The Year of Mac DVD?
As DVD heats up, E4 brings the first drives to the Macintosh
By Jeffy Milstead
DVD, the high-capacity successor to the compact disc, is suddenly hot. Consumer DVD players are filling electronics stores, and more than 300 DVD movie titles are now available. They're fast becoming standard equipment on PCs. And now Apple has added support for DVD's Universal Disk Format in Mac OS 8.1.
There's just one small problem: the currently available DVD drives use the IDE interface found in PCs and Apple's latest Macs; they do not support the SCSI connections in older Mac models. As a result, drives for PCs have been available for more than a year, while Mac users have been forced to wait. However, the wait for the latest DVD wrinkle--rewritable DVD-RAM--may be over soon with drives hitting catalogs this March. Hitachi is leading the pack with its first DVD-RAM drive, but you can expect to see rewritable drives from Toshiba and Panasonic as well.
E4 Debuts
The first Macs with built-in DVD drives are scheduled to appear by mid-1998; Apple originally had planned to offer DVD by the end of last year. For now, your only choice is CoolDVD, a $499 Mac DVD upgrade kit from E4 (408/441-6060, www.e4.com).
CoolDVD consists of an internal IDE-based DVD drive, software, and a single-slot PCI card, which is used to decode the DVD MPEG 2 video stream; the card also accepts audio input from the drive. The drive works with the Power Mac 4400, the new G3 desktops, and other Macs with IDE connectors; E4 plans to offer a SCSI version of CoolDVD by March. A second optional board provides outputs for S-Video, RCA analog audio, and SPDIF digital audio.
A New Generation
E4 is using what's known as a second-generation DVD drive. The first generation of drives could read CD-ROMs, but not CD-R discs, including PhotoCD media. Current DVD drives support CD-R. And future DVD-RAM drives will be backward-compatible with all CD-ROMs.
The E4 package includes DVD player software that uses an interface similar to that found in the Apple CD Audio Player. You can control DVD movies as if you were using a stand-alone DVD player.
You also have access to unique, title-specific DVD features, such as parental restriction and the ability to choose different camera angles or alternative language tracks. |
