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 February 1, 2005 Pleasure and Confusion in Video's Future Every so often, something pops up on the tube that I want to preserve. No matter that I’ve done this dozens of times over the years and have eventually trashed many of the recordings without ever having watched them -- I still relish the fact that, if I want to, I can replay favorite programs at my leisure. I guess it has something to do with the continued impression -- dating from decades ago -- that being able to record television programs is something of a miracle. Videotape might be technically inferior, but it still gave me some control over what I watched and when I watched it.Only when DVD recorders became available did the technical constraints of recording TV shows begin to be eased in earnest. Sure, S-VHS gave excellent video performance, but hardly anyone ever bought the machines. Regular VHS (and, before it, Beta, which, despite the legends, was just as bad) required you to put your critical faculties aside and accept that a video recording would always be somewhat muddy. A DVD recording, on the other hand, could look as good as the original program. But just as DVD recording became a reality, so did high-definition television, and the shiny new recording medium couldn’t handle the new delivery system. The data capacity of a DVD is huge by VHS or even CD standards, but hardly enough to hold a full-length film in hi-def. That means that if I want to preserve an HD program for later watching, I have to downconvert it to standard definition (or simply record the non-HD signal put out by the TV station) to record it on a DVD with today’s technology. As often as not, that means I have to watch it in SD as well. Obviously, such a situation couldn’t go on forever. The moment HDTV became a reality, the prospect of some sort of HD recording became inevitable. The results will show up on dealers’ shelves before long. (They’re already being sold in Japan for big bucks.) The English version of a Japanese trade publication plopped onto my desk recently and included a description of one company’s debut in the race to recordable hi-def DVDs. Sharp’s first such player has twin disc drives to handle both hi-def and regular DVDs, plus a 160GB hard drive that can store up to 19 hours of HD programming. According to the report, the unit, which uses Blu-ray technology, "brings users the freedom of dubbing in six directional combinations to and from the hard drive, Blu-ray discs, or DVDs, including the ability to dub five DVDs (4.7GB) onto a single Blu-ray disc." Whew! Blu-ray recorders, as the name implies, use a blue laser rather than the red variety found in regular DVD recorders. The much shorter wavelength of blue light allows it to carry far more information: a Blu-ray disc has a capacity of some 25GB per layer -- more than five times that of a normal recordable DVD. But there’s a problem that may well cause confusion in the marketplace. Although Blu-ray is backed by some of the heaviest hitters in the electronics world -- Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Philips, Samsung, Thomson, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard among them -- it’s not the only HD recording technology out there. Its rival is HD DVD, backed by Toshiba, NEC, and Sanyo. While HD DVD basically does the same job as Blu-ray, the two formats are incompatible. We can only hope that the industry will cooperate to produce a single standard, as it did with the original DVD, but that has yet to happen. Without some kind of unity, there’s likely to be another format war, like that between Beta and VHS, that may well stall the market until a winner emerges. If that happens, videophiles who choose the "wrong" system are likely to be out of luck. Don’t they ever learn? ...Ian G. Masters
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