Is it time to junk your video cassette recorder or CD player now that there is the new digital video disc? Jack Schofield advises caution
It’s the next big thing since the last big thing, which might have been Sony’s MiniDisk or Philips’s digital compact cassette or DAT audio tape, or CD- interactive (CDi) or whatever. That list shows how hard it is to launch a new format, be it for music, films or computer software.
Many consumers have suffered from previous ”format wars” – notably the battle between VHS and Betamax videotape systems. They know it’s expensive to back a losing format and don’t want to make the same mistake twice. But with the launch of digital video disc (DVD) the consumer electronics industry seems to have learned the same lesson.
Simon Heller is a marketing consultant working for the DVD Committee, a British suppliers’ group, which is about to launch a publicity campaign. It is, he says, an example of ”companies putting aside their own sales and marketing strategies for the good of the format”.
In this case, Sony, Philips, JVC, Panasonic, Pioneer and Toshiba are all on the same side, and it’s not hard to understand why. Compact cassette tapes have been around since the Sixties, video tapes since the Seventies and CDs since the early Eighties. By now they are all ”mature” formats, which means most potential buyers have already got one and don’t really want another.
What the suppliers want is a new format that will keep production lines turning for another 20 years. If you once bought all your favourite records on vinyl and then bought them again on CD, the industry loves you.
Similarly if you’ve bought all your favourite movies on VHS tape, you’ll want to buy them again on DVD-video disc. And that’s because DVD will provide higher quality, greater ease of use and more durability and – this is the lesson learned by manufacturers – DVD players will also play your audio CDs. The consumer pays, but everyone wins.
DVD has the same basic format as CD. DVD will thus benefit from some of the huge economies of scale that have helped make CDs so cheap to produce. But DVD is different as computer technology has moved on in the past 16 years and it’s now possible to put much more data on the same size disc. This increased capacity is useful in itself but DVD doubles it and has the capacity to double it again. The first doubling comes about because where audio CDs have only one layer of data, DVD can have two layers. When the laser in the playing equipment reads the top layer, the bottom layer is out of focus, and vice versa.
The second doubling comes from an even simpler idea: use both sides of the disc. DVD, unlike CD, allows for double-sided discs. Expanding the disc’s capacity solves the main problem with the CD format. While it had enough capacity to hold one or even two vinyl LPs, it couldn’t manage a full-length Hollywood film. Using data compression, about 74 minutes was the best you could get.
As DVD has so much more capacity than CD, it’s possible to do much more. Since one layer of data on a video disc can hold a movie lasting 135 minutes, it’s possible to put four films on a dual- layer, double-side disc. This has practical applications. It means that, for example, publishers can put a TV- style (”pan & scan”) version of a film on one layer and a widescreen (”letterbox”) version on another. The extra capacity could also be used to provide different cuts of a film or ”branching” videos with multiple storylines.
DVD also has space for cinema-style sound tracks using six loudspeakers, different language versions, subtitles, lyrics for karaoke and so on. Of course, not all DVD discs are going to have these features, but the capability is there.
And as with CD, there are many other potential uses, which is why manufacturers are calling them digital versatile discs rather than digital video discs. In fact, the most rapid adoption may not be in DVD players but in the personal computer and games console markets. Datamonitor predicts that in five years 78% of the software bought by European consumers will be delivered on DVD-ROM instead of on CD- ROM.
Fujitsu launched the first computer with a built-in DVD-ROM drive at the end of 1996. Mass market computer companies such as Time and Gateway are offering PCs with DVD-ROM drives in Britain and read/ write or recordable drives may also become popular.
But versatility can also create confusion. For example, Panasonic touts the fact that its DVD-RAM computer drive can read DVD-ROM, DVD- video, DVD-R (recordable), audio CD, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW (read/write) and video CD formats, and it foresees the time when DVD-RAM drives are small and cheap enough to use in video cameras. Richard Todd, Panasonic’s UK representative, says: ”DVD is all encompassing.”
Although computer read/write drives can’t produce DVD discs that can be read by today’s DVD players, ”eventually, the aim is that all the DVD formats will be compatible and interchangeable”. There has already been a spat between backers of different types of writable DVD, but Todd says the DVD-RAM version that Panasonic uses has been approved by the DVD Forum, the organisation that controls DVD standards.
There’s another spat brewing between different approaches to audio. As well as playing today’s audio CDs, DVD players could be used to provide better sound reproduction, by using much higher sampling rates and storing a more accurate record of the music.
A DVD Forum working group is due to decide on a DVD-audio standard this month and it is clearly not going to support another proposal from Sony and Philips called SACD (super audio compact disc). Andy Clough, editor of What Hi- Fi? magazine, says he expects the group to allow for three different ways of storing hi-fi on DVD, ”and two of them won’t play on existing DVD players”.
The one that will play on almost all of them – multi-channel Dolby Digital – is, he says, ”more oriented towards surround sound than straight audio”. It may appeal more to home cinema buffs than hi-fi purists.
Super audio CD does have an appeal. Since the DVD format provides for two layers of data, it says, why not use one for DVD-audio and the other for CD? SACD’s advantage is that music publishers will only have to produce, and consumers will only have to buy, one dual-format CD.
Aware that standards battles are anathema to consumers, Philips’s representative, Marijke van Hooren, is ready to put a Dutch finger in the dyke. SACD, she says, ”is still a technology discussion. We’re showing the world why we think it’s a good solution for backwards compatibility. But we haven’t entered into any product discussions yet, and you cannot exclude the possibility that the two groups will find a solution.”
As for the read/write formats, Van Hooren points out that most are aimed at professional uses like disc mastering and computer storage, which are of no relevance to consumers.
”You need to have a world standard for DVD-video and DVD-ROM,” she says. ”But a DVD-RW format for consumers, where you really need far more storage capacity, we don’t see that happening in the next two to three years.” Like the DVD-audio format, DVD-RW is still under discussion, and some onlookers doubt that it will ever be a practical way for consumers to record television programmes.
In sum, while DVD may one day turn out to be a universal panacea, at the moment it’s mainly just a better way of playing back movies for those who want it, and can afford it.
So what should consumers do? ”It’s very simple,” says Clough. ”Sit back and wait! It’s early days yet, and I think there’s a lot of mileage left in audio CD. It’s not going to disappear overnight.”