DVD-Recordables need Hollywoods blessing before they are main stream. Where can you buy a $50 encoder/decoder anyway?????????????
e-town.com
OPEN DVD RECORDING IS HERE
Well, at least the blank discs are
by Stewart Wolpin
NEW YORK, October 13, 1998 -- The battle for recordable DVD has been officially enjoined.
Like the shot fired at Fort Sumter, TDK, joined by Pioneer and Toshiba, last week seceded from the proposed HP/Sony recordable DVD+RW standard with its Open DVD compatible rewritable DVD-RW 4.7GB format, good for thousands of rewrites.
Now before you idly rich uber-geeks rush out to your local Best Buy, The Good Guys!, Nobody Beats the Wiz, et al, so you can watch "Law & Order" while digitally recording "South Park" -- rest your sphincters. A recording DVD replacement for your VCR is WAAAAAY off. There are a couple of technical hurdles to overcome first, and more potential Hollywood/copyright protection permutations than anyone wants to shake a stick at.
Here're da facts: The 4.7GB DVD-RW standard proposed by TDK is right now a data-only format. But unlike the HP/Sony DVD+RW discs, TDK's DVD-RW discs recorded in a DVD-RW drive will play in your normal, everyday home DVD player, if the data recorded is readable (i.e. computer-video as opposed to data). TDK will start production this fall on the new discs, will quantities available in the spring, primarily for hardware makers to play with as they develop DVD recorder/players.
The 4.7GB DVD-RW is actually the fourth recordable DVD format introduced in the last year. The other three:
Pioneer has been selling its $17,000 DVR-S101 DVD-R, a write-once format, compatible with open DVD, with discs that hold "only" 3.95GB, since July. We have been told at a $3000 version will be forthcoming from Pioneer sometime in the Spring 1999.
Toshiba has been selling its SD-W1101 DVD-RAM ($699), a data-only DVD write-once deck that uses single-sided 2.6GB (approximately $35) and dual-sided 5.2GB (about $55) blanks, since March.
And then there's the HP/Sony 4.7GB data-only DVD+RW format.
Why so many formats? After all, there's really only one CD recording technology. But digital audio recording is veritable child's play compared with the rocket science needed to store digital video signals. All the current or foreseeable DVD recording decks, regardless of format, are designed for data recording, not video.
What the Open DVD compatible DVD-R and DVD-RW decks are missing are real-time MPEG encoders. You have to supplement your once and future open DVD compatible DVD recording drives with one of these $100,000 puppies first, and those are the sole province of industrial/commercial DVD burners, who gain the primary advantage from this new format.
The good news is that $300-400 MPEG encoder chip sets are being developed, which brings the vision of home DVD recordable into much better focus.
The primary problem with a DVD-RW home deck is Hollywood. You all know how persnickety the music industry is about copyright's where digital audio recording is concerned. You have to fork over five times the price for a blank CD-R for audio use just so poor artists aren't cheated out of their royalties from digital copies you make, and all digital recordings are encoded with SCMS so you can't make a digital copy of a digital copy.
If the music industry's relatively harmless paranoia about copyright protection is Randle P. McMurphy, Hollywood's is Hannibal Lecter. Remember, these are the folks who actually sued Sony over Beta and home video recording in the late 1970s. [Hollywood also sued video retailers over the First Sale Doctrine, which allows stores to buy and rent videos. And a Hollywood law firm dreamed up Divx. -- Ed.]
Universal and Disney might have sued over home recording rights (and lost), but all the studios now know what side of the tape the emulsion is on. Home video is what allows Hollywood to spend $200 million on formulaic, noisy films with no plot or acting targeted at teenagers. Hollywood also knows you won't show off your $20,000 Dolby Digital/DTS home theater system with scenes from "The Sweet Hereafter" DVD.
So it stands to reason the studios certainly don't want you to be able to make perfect digital recordings of films shown on HBO, Showtime, Turner Classic Movies, pay per view, et al. If you want to own these films, Hollywood wants you to pay for them, either in prerecorded versions, or by forcing unconscionable royalties on DVD-RW blanks.
But this re-recordable 4.7GB open DVD compatible disc is the breakthrough that will jump-start those negotiations with the Hollywood studios, and bring recordable DVD to your home that much sooner.
|
