DVD-ROM kits....................................
March 01, 1998, Issue: 903
Section: Features
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DVD Debuts: The first DVD drives and upgrade kits are here -- find out if their long-anticipated arrival was worth the wait
Lou Grinzo
The DVD story is a classic computer technology tale. All the key elements are there: vaporware, standards wars, compatibility problems, some stratospheric early prices and confusion at every turn. Even the technology's name stirs minor debate. Some claim it stands for Digital Versatile Disc, others say it means Digital Video Disc, and still others claim it's not an acronym at all.
In essence, DVD is simply the next evolutionary step from CD-ROM. DVD-ROMs look like CDs, but they hold far more information-anywhere from 4.7GB to 17GB, compared with a CD's 650MB. But DVD is more than just a "bigger bit bucket," which is partly why things get so complicated. DVD is a critical element of PC/TV convergence, since it's a way to distribute movies with extended features such as user-selectable camera angles and multiple language support. And finally, like CD's, there are writeable and rewriteable variations coming.
DVD is just starting to make a significant impact on the market. Estimates vary from about 300,000 to 500,000 console players ("living room" boxes used strictly to play movies) sold in the United States through the end of 1997. So far, the number of DVD drives in PCs is far slimmer. Major PC vendors just started to offer DVD drives as options at the end of 1997, and upgrade kits haven't had a significant impact yet. But by the time you read this, DVD drives should be quite common as standard equipment or options on desktop and laptop computers from nearly all vendors.
DVD Diversity
DVD technology can handle one or two layers of data per disc side. That makes for four subvarieties of DVD-ROM, the read-only version of this technology: DVD5 (single side, single layer) with a 4.7GB capacity; DVD9 (single side, dual layer), 8.5GB; DVD10 (dual side, single layer), 9.4GB; and DVD18 (dual side, dual layer), 17GB. You probably won't see double-sided drives for PCs any time soon, because of the high production cost for what would effectively be two drive mechanisms in a single unit. For now, using a double-sided disc entails manually ejecting, flipping and reinserting the disc when the software prompts you to do so.
DVD-Video, the format used for movies, is not a unique physical disc format, but a definition of the logical directory and file layout on a standard DVD-ROM-which is why you can browse a DVD-Video's contents with Windows Explorer, for example. Because of a DVD's higher capacity and use of MPEG II encoding, a complete movie with CD-quality sound will fit onto any DVD.
Writeable DVD versions have proliferated like weeds on a suburban lawn, triggering a standards war that's extreme even by the usually contentious computer industry's standards. Even product names are confusing: Pioneer developed a standard called DVD-R/W, and Sony has a competing standard called DVD+RW (see the sidebar "DVD Defined" for the latest information available on all DVD formats)
The Hardware
We looked at six DVD-ROM upgrade kits, all using EIDE drives: the Creative Labs Encore Dxr2, Hi-Val's DVD PC-to-TV Home Entertainment System, and kits from Pacific Digital Corp., Smart Storage Solutions, Techmedia Computer Systems Corp. and Utobia Corp. The Creative Labs, Pacific Digital and Smart Storage Solutions kits use a second-generation drive, while the others were still first generation. (More on first- and second-generation drives below.) All kits included an ATAPI/EIDE-interface DVD drive, an MPEG II decoder board, cables and a small selection of DVD titles.
Diamond Multimedia Systems, Panasonic Computer Peripheral Co., Philips Professional Solutions, Samsung Electronics America and Sony Electronics were unable to provide review units. One manufacturer, DynaTek Automation Systems, has "discontinued" its DVD products for now, but a representative said that she believes DynaTek will return to the market in April or May.
While installing a DVD kit is somewhat more involved than installing a bare CD drive, it's not difficult. The installation procedures for all of the kits were similar: You install the MPEG II decoder board into a PCI slot, attach the DVD drive to an EIDE channel and connect the MPEG II board to your sound board. The Creative Labs Encore and the Utobia also require a provided VGA loopback cable to place their decoder boards in-line between your existing graphics board and your monitor. This simple step took just a couple of minutes and helped the Creative Labs unit deliver the only truly viewable video performance of the kits we examined.
When you finish the hardware installation and boot your system, Windows 95 detects the new PCI board and prompts you for the manufacturer's driver disk. Once this step is completed and you reboot your system, the DVD drive will work as a CD or a data-only DVD device. Before you can view DVD-Videos you must install the DVD player software, which is a quick and standard Windows software installation. The player software presents an on-screen remote control or component interface that you use to control movie playback, including changing audio tracks and camera angles (assuming the movie has these features), pause, fast forward and rewind.
The documentation for these kits was generally good, even if most were obviously derived from a common source. We found minor problems typical of new products, including poor-quality screenshots in the documentation and references to driver disks using incorrect (but still decipherable) names.
All of the the kits read data CDs and DVDs, but movie playback was questionable. On the test system, a 133MHz Pentium with 40MB of RAM and an ATI Mach64 SVGA board, only the Creative Labs Encore played a movie properly. The others all showed numerous breaks across the picture, as well as severe "ghosting" when the image was larger than about half-screen on an 800x600 resolution monitor. The standard recommendation for movie playback is a 133MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM and a PCI-based SVGA board in 16-bit color mode. But clearly even that's not adequate to guarantee acceptable performance.
We couldn't get the Utobia kit to play movies at all. The screen would show only a dark green rectangle, even though the software thought it was playing the movie. The manual seemed to say that this was a problem with selecting the proper chroma key color (a step not needed with the other kits), but the documented procedure for fixing it didn't work.
Can't We All Just Get Along?
Compatibility is the monster under DVD's bed. For example, DVD-ROM drives won't be able to read DVD-RAMs and DVD-Recordables until third-generation DVD-ROM drives appear in late 1998. Toshiba says its DVD-RAM drives will read DVD-Rs, but makes no claims about reading DVD-R/Ws or DVD+RWs. Similarly, Sony says that its DVD-ROM drives will read DVD+RWs with "very slight modifications." Translation: Currently shipping drives won't read those discs.
There's also the issue of how well DVD drives work with various types of CDs. First-generation DVD drives can read CDs, but not CD-Rs or CD-ReWritables. Second-generation drives are supposed to read CD-Rs and CD-RWs. But while all the drives we looked at could read data and audio CDs, CD-Rs provided some surprises. The second-generation drives in the Creative Labs Encore, Pacific Digital and Smart Storage Solutions kits all had trouble reading a test CD-R (containing AVI files) that we created with an HP SureStore CD-Writer Plus 7110e. All three second-generation drives could copy the AVI files from the CD-R, but none could play the copied files. The drives generated constant read errors, causing long video and audio glitches. Mysteriously, though, they all played the AVI files directly from the CD-R without trouble.
After many discussions with engineers at various vendors and manufacturers, we concluded that the problem was related to the CD-R's color. We used CD-Rs with three different recording dyes. Engineers recommend using the gold CD-Rs to minimize compatibility problems with DVD drives or even many CD drives (a problem we've seen at WINDOWS Magazine with new systems). The Pacific Digital and Smart Storage Solutions kits both had this problem. Both use the Hitachi GD-2000 DVD-ROM drive, so we called a Hitachi engineer. He said the company had taken great pains to eliminate this kind of compatibility problem, but that CD-Rs were particularly difficult to deal with. DVD drives will no doubt improve in this area in future design revisions, but it's clearly still a problem.
Even playing one of the DVD-Video titles that came with the Pacific Digital kit was an adventure, albeit not in the cinematic sense. The movie, Deadly Encounter, was aptly titled considering it only played on the Creative Labs Encore. The other kits, including Pacific Digital's, recognized the disc as a DVD volume and let us browse its contents with Windows Explorer, but their movie player software refused to play the disc and didn't display error messages. We tried repeatedly to play this title on the hesitant kits, with no luck and no clue as to the problem.
Obviously DVD is still a young-but quickly evolving-technology, so mysterious, nagging problems like these will be a fact of life for some time. That's something for early adopters to keep in mind before making long-term or expensive platform commitments.
Another compatibility issue is getting a DVD drive and an MPEG II board to peacefully coexist with your PC. A DVD drive can display a movie image on your screen in three ways:
Inlay: The video data is transferred over the system's PCI bus, just as when it plays an AVI clip from your hard drive or a CD. This is the simplest connection method, if your video board is compatible and fast enough to deliver acceptable video quality.
Overlay: The MPEG II decoder board is physically cabled between your current VGA board and your monitor. This method seemed to work best and didn't cause any other compatibility problems in our testing, although it does add one minor step to the installation procedure.
VMI 1.4/S3 LPB direct connect: A ribbon cable attaches the MPEG II board to your video board. The video board must have the appropriate connector and support either the VMI 1.4 or LPB specification for this to work.
If you want to view DVD movies on your PC, you'll have to research video board compatibility and performance.
Finally, there's the issue of Windows NT compatibility. The DVD player software in all these kits is Windows 95 only. That means you can still use a DVD drive under NT to read data discs, but you can't play movies. Only Sony would provide a time frame for NT support, claiming it would arrive in mid-1998.
Despite these problems and limitations, it's unfair to say DVD is in a state of chaos. The DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-R and DVD-RAM standards are accepted by the DVD Forum, the consortium of hardware manufacturers overseeing the DVD standards process. Sony has submitted its DVD+RW to the forum for approval, and Pioneer is awaiting judgment on its DVD-R/W. Given the importance of these companies to the DVD industry, you can expect both formats to receive the stamp of approval. The real questions then are how great the incompatibilities between all the writeable formats will be, and how long it will take to iron them out. And those questions still can't be answered.
Got Content?
Movies and video-enhanced games are fine, but what about business software? When we asked software companies about their plans to distribute products on DVD, the response was underwhelming. Representatives from Adobe Systems, Corel Corp., IBM Corp., Symantec Corp., Lotus Development Corp., MapInfo and Visio Corp. all said they had no immediate plans to issue anything on DVD, although about half took pains to say they were interested in DVD and were closely watching the market. Microsoft Corp. had recently started shipping a special DVD version of its Encarta encyclopedia, but nothing else.
Why the delay in delivering business content on DVD? Part of the reason is the minuscule installed base of DVD drives, though it's also a question of need-or lack thereof. A spokesperson for Visio pointed out that Visio Pro 5.0 is a large product, but still takes up only a small portion of a standard CD. Even Visio's mapping product, which includes gigabytes of data, isn't scheduled for conversion to DVD format in the near future because the company would have to provide both CD and DVD versions for some time.
The most interesting comment came from a Lotus representative who said, "While DVD does extend the size and usefulness of media, it is still media (as compared to electronic). The feeling is that by the time there is a critical mass of DVD read capability there, it will be 'old' technology compared with e-business and electronic distribution." In other words, the availability of the Internet as a research tool will likely steal some of DVD's thunder.
In the short run, massive reference works will form the main DVD business staple. For example, the PhoneDisc PowerFinder USA One contains 115 million U.S. residential and business listings and census data on a single DVD. At 3.8GB, PowerFinder USA One comes in a bit under the simplest DVD-ROM capacity, and it eliminates the need for a six-CD tower or changer for businesses that use the title in a networked environment.
Good Buy or Good-Bye?
For most business users, it's good-bye for now. There's still little reason for DVD on the desktop unless you watch movies or play games for a living. And thanks to the compatibility and interoperability problems still plaguing DVD, businesses are probably better off shunning the technology until it matures and stabilizes.
The writeable DVD versions do provide the one bright spot for businesses, however. They could turn into a powerful tool for distributing large amounts of custom data within a company. But even this assumes that a business can ensure that all its DVD-ROM drives can read both DVDs and CD-Rs produced in-house.
DVD is the logical evolution of CD as both a medium and a content-delivery system, and it's a genuinely promising and exciting development. But, in the short run, most business users will be better off sitting back and letting it evolve some more.
Contributing editor Lou Grinzo is president of Lou Grinzo Consulting and author of Zen of Windows 95 Programming (Coriolis Group, 1995). John Gartner is technical editor for CMP Media's TechWeb. Contact them care of the editor at the addresses on page 20.
SIDEBAR: Are You Ready For DVD?
Although you might be ready to use your computer to watch full-length movies or play the latest games with DVD, your PC might not be prepared. The DVD format uses a high compression ratio for storing multimedia data. This requires additional processing power to play back the audio and video, translating to greater CPU and memory requirements for a DVD system than is typical for a general-purpose business PC.
DVD-ROM kit manufacturers specify a minimum of 100MHz or 133MHz Pentium processor and 16MB of RAM-but to maintain the full-frame rate, a 200MHz system with 24MB is a smarter setup.
DVD drives are the same size as CD-ROM drives, so they should fit into your system with no problem (although you might need to get drive rails). The drive attaches to an available EIDE connector, but you can't attach it to the same chain as your CD-ROM drive unless your PC has Windows 95 SR2 installed. Second-generation DVD-ROMs support CD-Recordable in addition to CD-ROM, so you might not need your CD-ROM drive any more.
The MPEG II playback board requires a free PCI slot. You'll still need your existing audio and video adapters. Your system also needs a Sound Blaster-compatible sound card and a video card with 2MB or more of memory. Some DVD-ROM drives use Microsoft's DirectX technology to mix the MPEG II video with the images on screen. This requires a DirectDraw-compatible card. If you use one of these, don't remove DirectX support if you uninstall Internet Explorer 4.0 or you'll have to reinstall drivers.
The other pieces you need are included with the DVD drives or kits. Some MPEG cards use a VGA pass-through cable, so the MPEG card goes between your VGA board and your monitor. Others pass data through the PCI bus, and still others connect the MPEG board directly to the VGA board with a ribbon cable. None of the connections are complicated, but you should always check a kit's system requirements before buying to make sure your system is compatible.
Microsoft has said Windows 98 and NT 5.0 will include native DVD support, which should simplify matters.-John Gartner
SIDEBAR: DVD Products
Drives/Upgrade Kits
Creative Labs PC-DVD Encore Dxr2
Creative Labs
$379.99
800-998-5227, 408-428-6600
Winfo #626
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DiamondMultimedia Maximum DVD Kit
Diamond Multimedia Systems
$399.95
800-468-5846, 408-325-7000
Winfo #796
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Hi-Val PC-to-TV Home Entertainment System
Hi-Val
$499.99
714-953-3000, fax 714-648-0300
Winfo #629
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LG Electronics DRD-810B
LG Electronics USA
$279.95
800-243-0000, 201-816-2000
Winfo #797
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Pacific Digital DVD-ROM Upgrade Kit
Pacific Digital Corp.
$379
714-252-1111, fax 714-252-9397
Winfo #798
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Panasonic LF-D101 DVD-RAM
Panasonic Computer Peripheral Co.
$799
800-742-8086, 201-348-7000
Winfo #799
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Philips DRD-5200 DVD-ROM Upgrade Kit
Philips Electronics
$599
800-235-7373, 408-453-7373
Winfo #800
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Samsung SDR-230
Samsung Electronics America
Price not yet set
800-933-4110
Winfo #801
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Smart Storage Solutions DVD ROM Kit
Smart Storage Solutions
$339
800-473-0923
Winfo #802
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Sony DDU100E DVD-ROM Upgrade Kit
Sony Electronics
$499
800-352-SONY, 408-432-0190
Winfo #803
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Techmedia DVD Kit
Techmedia Computer Systems Corp.
$499
800-379-0077, 714-379-6677
Winfo #804
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Utobia Hollywood DVD MPEG-2 Kit
Utobia Corp.
$249
888-4-UTOBIA, 626-855-5080
Winfo #805
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Software
AAA Map'n'Go DVD Deluxe
DeLorme
$74.95
800-452-5931, 207-846-7000
Winfo #806
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Encyclopedia Electronica
Xiphias Corp.
$79.95
310-841-2790, fax 310-841-2559
Winfo #808
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Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia 1998 Deluxe DVD-ROM
Grolier Interactive
Price not yet set
203-797-3530, fax 203-797-3130
Winfo #809
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Microsoft Encarta DVD-ROM Reference Suite 98
Microsoft Corp.
$129.99
800-426-9400, fax 425-936-7329
Winfo #807
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PhoneDisc PowerFinder USA One
PhoneDisc
$249.95 annually
800-284-8353, 402-537-6770
Winfo #810
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc.
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