Enter: the Swiss Army Knife for multimedia
smh.com.au
Tuesday, December 9, 1997
Enter: the Swiss Army Knife for multimedia
Sam Pepi, process engineer at Pacific Mirror Image, oversees the making of DVDs.
The film, music and computer industries have hailed DVD as the next big thing after the CD-ROM. But will it improve the business bottom line? NATHAN COCHRANE reports.
DVD technology has been bogged in a standards turf war since its inception in the early 90s. The problem for business is backing a winner. Nearly a dozen standards are competing for a place in the digital sun; some are compatible, some not. The likelihood of being lumbered with a digital '90s equivalent of betamax is high.
But the last six months has given DVD proponents cause for cautious optimism. The Consumer Electronics Manufacturers' Association (CEMA) claims that more than 270,000 DVDs and DVD-ROMs have been sold in the United States since March, which puts the industry on track for 400,000 by year's end. World sales are about 600,000.
CEMA anticipates more than 1 million players will be sold in the US by the end of next year, and a further 400,000 the year after that. More importantly, sales have rebounded in the last month after a mid-year slump. DVD uptake now surpasses CD and VCR at the same stages in those products' life cycles. The industry analyst InStat expects DVD drive shipments to surpass CD drives by 1999. Although the format won't be officially launched in Australia until April, Creative Labs and Verbatim already have drives for sale (with Matsushita and Hitachi mechanisms respectively). Others should follow shortly after Christmas, and some content distributed by Village Roadshow is dribbling onto the market, to the disgust of Warner Home Video which has called on content suppliers to wait.
DVD once stood for Digital Video (or Versatile) Disc. But borrowing a page out of Intel's book on MMX acronyms, DVD now just means ... DVD.
It is a sort of Swiss Army Knife for multimedia, and the first real evidence of the much-touted convergence trend.
DVD will, its adherents claim, replace your CD player, CD-ROM, CD-R, VHS player, and perhaps ultimately your video recorder (not before 2000, due to the expensive hardware requirement of an MPEG encoder). If you are one of the few enthusiasts with a LaserDisc player, it will make that obsolete, too.
To the untrained eye, a DVD looks like a CD. It even uses a similar "pits and islands" technology. But thanks to advanced manufacturing processes and new lasers, a DVD can hold many times the information of its predecessor.
Business benefits
Will it make you more productive? Will its increased storage capacity improve your business or make life easier?
These questions were asked when CD and CD-ROM were first introduced. It is a natural law that we tend to expand to fill the space available to us and find applications in the process. Today, we would think it remarkable to buy a PC desktop without a CD-ROM, if for no other reason than that is the main way to get software onto a hard drive. So it may turn out for DVD-ROM.
DVD-ROM is more than just the ability to put every current Microsoft product on a single disk, although this sort of shovelware is likely to be one of the first applications. It offers improved back-up and storage, with seamless integration of broadcast-quality video, audio and text databases on a disc the size of a CD-ROM.
A survey by the research company IDC into uses for recordable DVD found that 40 per cent of respondents would use the technology to archive files, while another 30 per cent were interested in disk back-up.
In an ironic twist, it is likely that DVD use will take off first in the boardroom, not the lounge room. According to a report last month by Forrester Research, DVD will struggle in the music and video markets but thrive in the computer industry. Forrester notes that PC makers have eagerly embraced the technology, with a projected 53 million players (60 per cent of shipments) in US computers by 2002. But in the home hi-fi and theatre markets, where DVD was initially expected to dominate, it will capture only 7 million users (7.1 per cent) in the same time.
Different breeds
These figures may end up lower due to the continued balkanisation of the format. Ignoring lessons of recent history - DVD was formed by a coalescence of two rival formats, Multimedia CD and Super Density - there are a multitude of DVD and DVD-like formats competing for attention. One of the latest in a long line of competitors is NEC's Multimedia Video File - a 5-inch silver platter capable of 5.2GB a side, but incompatible with existing DVDs. NEC's proposal includes a digital watermarking technology to restrict piracy.
Multiple recordable DVD formats include the phase-change technology, 2.6Gb DVD-RAM, which is the favoured contender of the DVD Forum - a group of makers that jointly set standards. Also on the cards are the confusing acronyms DVD+RW, which has the support of Philips, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and other computer makers (but incompatible with DVD-RAM), and DVD-R/W which has garnered support from Japanese makers Pioneer, TDK and JVC.
Industry analyst Dataquest believes that the challenge for these two formats is to catch the marketing lead gained by the DVD-RAM camp.
Phase-change rewritable DVD+RW has a sustained transfer rate of 1.7Mb a second, and supports both constant angular velocity and constant linear velocity reading methods. DVD+RW can also read CD-RW media. The biggest advantage that DVD+RW has over its competitors is that it does not need a disc caddy.
DVD-R/W was submitted to the DVD Forum Working Goup on October 27, and is based on DVD-Recordable. DVD-R/W shares the same storage capacity as DVD-R, and is thankfully compatible with existing DVD and DVD-ROM. DVD-R, promoted by the DVD Forum as an adjunct to DVD-ROM, uses a dye-polymer technique to etch pits out of the disc and can hold 3.95Gb.
In the United States, a coalition has proposed another, totally incompatible format - DVD-DivX. This system connects the player to a modem, which in turn accesses a central computer.
DivX discs can be bought from a shop for about $5 (as opposed to $25 for a normal DVD), but can only be played for 48 hours. The system is unlikely to be exported outside the US, though.
DivX has sparked a fierce debate on the Net and among DVD advocates. Detractors claim it may signal the end of an open DVD format and drive a wedge into the market. Also, movie companies would be able to amass huge data warehouses of valuable information on what people watch without their consent.
Even Warner Home Video has waded into the growing controversy. Last month, at an investor conference, Jim Cardwell, executive vice-president and general manager of Warner Home Video, attacked the format. Like all other DVD format niches, DivX has its own competitor in HST, a similar concept but less punitive.
The initial specification for DVD's memory capacity is also under intense pressure. The original proposal for a single-sided 4Gb platter, is giving way to technologies that promise up to 50Gb a side. Sony has proposed a 12-18Gb DVD, Canon's Domain Wall Displacement Detection could quadruple current storage capacities, and Toshiba is working on a 15Gb version. Although these may not necessarily introduce incompatibilities with existing media.
Sound also constitutes a problem. The Dolby Digital 5.1 format - for five discrete and one low-frequency effects channels - is likely to be supplanted in some PAL territories by MPEG audio. But early PAL CD-ROMs are unlikely to be compatible with the newer format.
Protectionism
Perhaps the biggest concern for buyers of DVD-ROMs is the continuing insistence by Hollywood studios to incorporate geographic zoning into new software releases. This restricts the software that can be run on DVDs and DVD-ROMs to matching drives. Australia is in Zone 4, along with New Zealand, the South Pacific and parts of South America. Europe is Zone 2 while the cradle of popular culture, the US, is in Zone 1.
Software from the US will not run in Australia, nor will software from Europe. This allows software to be released at different times, in different places, and so restricts cross-export or parallel importation. This preserves local distributors' margins, but can result in higher prices in some areas.
Various surveys conducted on the issue have come out against zoning. One survey found 94 per cent of respondents against. Almost half said they would buy a DVD player as soon as it was released if zoning was abandoned, as against only 4.8 per cent if zoning was included.
Quiet murmurings from within DVD drive makers indicate that zoning will ultimately be abandoned once adoption rates are high enough.
One of Sony's early players had dip-switch definable zoning controls, which allowed the user to decide what zone they wanted to participate in. Creative's DVD-ROM Encore drive can be reset up to five times.
Sources within Creative have been quick to point out that there is a hack available to reset an unlimited number of times, effectively making the drive the world's first international DVD-ROM and flouting the studios. This tiny 6Kb DOS-executable can be found on several sites on the Internet, including James Ashton's DVD in Australia page.
Similarly, word has spread on Usenet newsgroups in recent weeks of a hack to break the CSS MPEG encryption scheme, allowing for true digital copies of movies. But James Ashton points out that studio fears that this will lead to mass piracy may be overstated: "I don't understand what the worry is just yet though," he wrote in an e-mail. "All it means is that it's fairly easy to get the raw MPEG stream off a DVD.
"What are you going to do with it then? I don't have 4GB of disk space to spare for every movie. If you're a pirate you might use it to press pirate DVDs but anyone with the resources to do that could crack DVD in other ways."
Ashton says that it will be a long time before rewritable DVD approaches the capacity of DVD read-only, allowing for perfect copies by home pirates.
The Federal Government, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and consumer groups have all attacked parallel importation restrictions on software in copyright law in recent years.
Biting the bullet
The biggest single threat to business in this bar-room brawl is being stuck with the equivalent of not one, but several Betamax players, before dominant niche technologies emerge. Although there are great opportunities for business to expand on multi-media applications - to merge videotape, computer and digital media - the risk of being stuck with a dud is also high.
It is also not a decision that can be avoided; those days are nearly gone. From early next year, all major makers of PCs will include a DVD drive in their configurations. Already Dell, Apple, NEC and Toshiba have released or are on the verge of releasing PCs with built-in DVD-ROMs. Making sure that these will be future- proof is a major headache.
The real advantage for DVD may not be in the ROM drives, already available. For most business the task is to find an affordable, efficient and portable mass-storage medium to back up important files and transport information. Iomega has had limited success in this regard with its Jaz and Zip formats, but it is still a niche market. CD-R and CD-RW are jgradually gaining adherents, although data storage is limited to 650Mb.
The promise of rewritable DVD technology is that it can approach the ubiquity of CD-ROM while offering converged multimedia applications. Rewritable drives debuted at more than $20,000, although this is likely to plummet to less than $1,000 by the end of 1999.
But with so many players and recorders on the starting blocks and the likelihood that many will fall away as an all-out standards war erupts next year, business may find itself shelling out for repeated upgrades. Worse, data archived on one standard may be inaccessible on future ones.
One possibility could be to settle on existing recordable or rewritable CD technologies, eschewing DVD entirely for the next two years. Although DVD makers seem intent on making their products incompatible with each other, all have acknowledged the need to maintain compatibility with the massive installed base of CDs and CD-ROMs. CD-R also has the advantage of being very cheap. It should be possible to access archives with DVD recordable or rewritable once the dust settles, probably about 2000.
The bottom line for business is to hold off until there is some compelling case to buy a computer-based DVD drive. It is an extremely fickle market at the moment and very easy to get burnt. Although some will find a use for the DVD movies, most should look to the potential to back up and archive files, which won't be affordable and available until late next year or early 1999.
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