More on rewritable DVD............
eetimes.com
Group hopes to unify recordable DVD
factions
By Junko Yoshida, Terry Costlow and George Leopold
EE Times
(01/11/99, 3:14 p.m. EDT)
LAS VEGAS — A band of 29 manufacturers will announce a plan today to
forge a common format for digital video disks that they hope will cut a swath
through the labyrinth of competing approaches to rewritable DVD. Word of
the effort came last week as consumer-electronics companies tipped plans at
the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for additional recordable disk-based
options that could further splinter a market struggling to coalesce.
The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) has marshaled a group
of companies that will meet in South San Francisco this week to define a
single disk format, readable by any DVD player or recorder, by the end of
the year. But even participants in the effort expressed mixed feelings about
whether consumers will embrace the many products already out or in the
works.
In a move that surprised even DVD+RW development partner Sony, Philips
Consumer Electronics (Eindhoven, Netherlands) announced at CES that it
will launch a standalone rewritable-videodisk recorder next year. The drive
will use a new Philips algorithm to read the video format of today's
prerecorded DVD disks, thus allowing playback of the rewritable disks on
any regular DVD player.
"We heard over and over from our customers that they wished they had a
little red 'record' button on their DVD player," said Frans A. van Houten,
chief operating officer of the digital video business group at Philips Consumer
Electronics. The goal is to design a rewritable DVD disk that can be played
back "not in a separate box but in a compatible machine."
The system will be based on the company's 4.7-Gbyte DVD+RW format.
The drive will use real-time MPEG-2 variable-bit-rate recording to
accommodate disks that provide 2 or 4 hours of video. The recordable disks
will not have to be housed in a cartridge, as some schemes require.
Philips said its new recordable drive marks a technology breakthrough
because it allows the video recorder to use the same video format defined for
prerecorded DVDs. "Until now, it was generally assumed that a real-time
DVD-creation process was impossible," said Chris Buma, program manager
of A/V disk recording at Philips.
Separately, a working group within the DVD Forum is discussing a new
Real-Time Read/Write video-recording format, presumably for DVD-RAM.
The OSTA group has set a more ambitious goal: to create a world of
compatible disks for any DVD player by developing what could be called Son
of MultiRead. When various incompatible rewritable technologies for CDs
emerged a few years ago, OSTA members created the widely used
MultiRead specification to allow any CD disk to be read on any type of drive.
"This group's charter is to create a specification for DVD that is similar to
MultiRead," said OSTA facilitator Ray Freeman. "There's no guarantee on
this, but with MultiRead, there was also a lot of disagreement about whether
it was feasible or whether it would blow costs out of the water. If we get the
right people for the DVD effort, I think they will be clever enough to find a
solution."
The initial meeting will include representatives from drive makers Hitachi,
Matsushita, Philips, Panasonic Technologies, Mitsumi and Sony, as well as
such other majors as Adaptec, Eastman Kodak and even the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. Freeman said Toshiba, which is not an OSTA member, won't be
attending, though he said the company had been invited to the meeting.
Rewritable rivals
Currently, two rewritable technologies are nose-to-nose in the bid to
dominate the nascent market: DVD-RAM, backed by Hitachi and
Matsushita, and DVD+RW, developed by Sony and Philips. Pioneer, with its
DVD-R technology, has made some headway in professional recording
markets.
Getting the various camps to converge on a common technique will be no
mean feat. Freeman noted that the DVD Forum had sought in vain to gather
all the parties in one room to come up with a unified format.
A spokesman for that group was noncommittal about OSTA's potential for
success. "The DVD Forum has not received any OSTA proposal officially,
so it has not been on the DVD Forum's agenda yet," he said.
The spokesman said that "establishing a multiread capability among various
DVD formats was the DVD Forum's original target" but observed that it is
"not pleasant to discuss DVD-RAM and Sony/Philip's DVD+RW at the
same table."
Indeed, as Philips' van Houten pointed out last week, "the DVD landscape
today is littered with a variety of incompatible format announcements." It's an
environment over which the DVD Forum appears to have little control.
Set to slug it out over the next 12 months are the second-generation,
4.7-Gbyte DVD-RAM; DVD-R/W, a 4.7-Gbyte technology promulgated by
Pioneer; NEC's 5.2-Gbyte Multimedia Video File disk system; and Philips'
planned 4.7-Gbyte DVD+RW offering.
Sony is also working on DVD+RW but has yet to move in lockstep with
Philips on a rewritable videodisk recorder. Teruaki Aoki, president and chief
technology officer of Sony Electronics (Park Ridge, N.J.), said last week that
Sony believes rewritable video recording would require "at least an 8-Gbyte
capacity or possibly use of blue laser." The issue that concerns Sony most is
the picture quality of the recorded images, he added.
Matsushita reportedly has been working on DVD-RAM products that may
be incorporated into TVs. Hitachi has set a fall launch target for a DVD
camcorder based on an 8-cm-diameter DVD-RAM disk format. Asked last
week when DVD-RAM-based video recording might reach the market, a
Matsushita spokesman conservatively responded, "Within the next five
years."
Thierry Breton, chairman of Thomson Consumer Electronics parent
Thomson Multimedia (Paris), said last week that the company is "currently
evaluating" NEC's 5.2-Gbyte Multimedia Video File (MMVF) disk system.
Thomson has yet to reach a decision but will likely do so in the first half of
this year, Breton said. (NEC is one of the four companies that signed
agreements last month to purchase 7.5 percent equity positions in Thomson
Consumer Electronics. The others are Alcatel, DirecTV and Microsoft.)
Multimedia Video File specifications resemble those for DVD disks, although
the two are not compatible. The 5.2-Gbyte density is largely attributable to
the use of partial-response, maximum-likelihood (PRML) signal-processing
technology, which makes it possible to record in narrower-pitch tracks.
Acknowledging an irreconcilable fragmentation of some of the rewritable
DVD formats, many vendors have begun to rationalize that while
compatibility is an absolute necessity for the DVD-ROM environment, the
same may not be true of rewritable disks.
"As long as a consumer makes his personal recording and plays it back on his
own DVD rewritable system, one need not worry very much about
compatibility," said Larry Pesce, general manager of worldwide DVD
product planning at Thomson Consumer Electronics (Indianapolis).
"Everyone should be given an opportunity to press on with his own
technology that could meet consumer needs."
Pesce said Thomson Multimedia has conducted considerable research into
recording technologies at its lab in Germany. "We may or may not be doing
one of the rewritable disk technologies currently discussed in the industry.
We haven't decided yet," he said.
Robert Duncan, senior project engineer at Matsushita Electric Corp. of
America, described OSTA's efforts as "widening the formats by including
those that are not part of the DVD family." Matsushita considers
DVD-RAM the DVD Forum's official rewritable format and does not extend
the same status to the Sony/Philips DVD+RW. Choosing which formats a
multiread specification would handle could prove to be a contentious job, he
suggested.
No licensing fees
Robert van Eijk, vice president of strategic alliances and business group
marketing for optical storage at Philips Components (San Jose, Calif.),
asserted that Philips, for one, will not demand licensing fees for
implementation of the "read" features of its DVD+RW disks.
Freeman acknowledged the difficulties of hammering out a unified format but
said such an achievement would bolster market acceptance for rewritable
DVD drives, which thus far have struggled to find a market. Without
guaranteeing the success of the effort being begun this week, Freeman said
compatible products could appear next year.
"We're targeting the fourth quarter of 1999 to get the technical work done.
That means complying products could become available in the middle of
2000. I don't anticipate any difficulty getting people to adopt a completed
specification. The difficulty will be to get them together and get something
that works."
Most outside observers believe that the lack of a common technology is
hindering the market. It's also slowing acceptance of DVD-ROM drives, said
Freeman, who is also president of Freeman Associates (Santa Barbara,
Calif.), a research company that monitors optical storage.
"A buyer who has concerns about the lack of clarity for the future of
rewritable DVD has doubts about purchasing that spread to DVD-ROM.
We think market demand will be reasonably modest for rewritable."
Freeman noted that DVD-ROM drives "were late coming to market"and that
the supply problem was a factor in the market's slow takeoff.
But that problem, he said, "has cured itself over time." Now, "we think the
concern about rewritable DVD is a big part of the reason for the slow
market growth." |
