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 January 1, 2006 DVD on the (Past) HorizonJust before Christmas, a flyer came through my door advertising a full-featured DVD player for less than 20 bucks. There are probably even cheaper ones that I don’t know about. That’s what happens with hot technologies: prices drop with dizzying speed. The DVD-Video disc is arguably the hottest A/V item ever, at least in terms of its acceptance by the public. I feel somewhat proprietary about DVD -- I believe I wrote the first review of a player in a North American magazine, in the March 1997 issue of Audio. Two months earlier, a brief review appeared in my column in the Toronto Star. The machine cost $600 when it hit the shelves. It had been a long time coming. The first prototype DVD players had been shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1995, but at the 1996 CES there was still nothing in the way of real product. Here’s some of what I wrote, reporting on that 1996 show: "A year ago, at the annual orgy of home entertainment goodies that is the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, Sony startled attendees with a demonstration of its new video recording medium, which could hold a full-length movie on a disc the size of a CD. "There was little doubt that such a development was in the works; observers had been talking about it for years, but nobody knew when it was likely to show up even as a prototype product. But there it was, and it looked terrific. Members of the press who were given private demonstrations, rather than the quick-and-dirty demo on the show floor, concluded that the picture quality was considerably superior to the laserdisc, and only slightly inferior to professional digital video tape. "But though Sony (and its co-developer Philips) were first off the mark, another camp immediately spoke up, to point out that it would be introducing a rival system. This group was headed by Toshiba and, significantly, Time Warner. . . . "At the 1995 show, there was only talk of this rival system; it wasn’t ready for demonstration even in prototype form at that time. But its lineage was good enough that other electronics biggies, like Panasonic and Pioneer, began to sign on, more or less sight unseen. . . . "But for once, reason seems to have prevailed. Last fall [1995], just days before the big Japanese electronics shows, the two sides announced that they had decided to merge their technologies and develop a single standard for the new type of disc. "It all happened so suddenly that visitors to the Japanese shows were treated to the strange spectacle of all the companies involved touting the new medium without having much idea of what its features would actually be. There wasn’t even a single name for it: Toshiba favored Super Density, Sony tended to prefer MCD (Multimedia CD), JVC plumped for CD Video, and Panasonic used the phrase Digital Video Disc (DVD). "In the end, the last term was chosen, but even so, when Toshiba showed their disc for the first time . . . they still hadn’t caught up with the new name. . . . "Although there is still some question about the international compatibility of the audio tracks, the video should be the same worldwide. That’s because the visual information is encoded not in the various national TV standards, such as NTSC here or PAL in Britain, but in the more general MPEG2 format. The picture is recorded at its real frame rate of 24 per second, and the information is converted to the various national standards in the playback process. "This not only means the output format is determined at the playback stage rather than the recording stage, but also that the same information can be decoded as standard 16:9 widescreen format or 4:3 pan-and-scan. The latter is accomplished by a series of hidden instructions embedded in the disc. . . . "The new technology was enthusiastically received at the Las Vegas show, and the companies mounting demonstrations were sufficiently positive about the new format that virtually all of them tended to claim it as their own invention. "If DVD were simply a replacement for and improvement on the existing video formats, it would still be welcome, but the mere showing of movies is only the start. . . . Sony was showing a very convincing demonstration of its two-layer capacity, by which the laser can be focused through a semi-transparent top layer of data to a second spiral of pits beneath, doubling the capacity. At the show, the player switched back and forth between the layers invisibly. "Also, the standard disc is half the thickness of a regular CD, so for stiffness, a blank disc will be bonded to the back. But it doesn’t have to be blank; there’s nothing to say that both sides can’t be recorded, nor that both sides can’t use two layers. If both are done, the total capacity is about 17 gigabytes -- almost 30 CDs’ worth of material, even without data reduction. . . . "And everybody anticipates that a writable DVD will be with us before long. If so, then this may become a truly universal medium. For now, the makers of DVD machines are looking mainly for backward compatibility, and all DVD players will handle your existing CDs as well. And Pioneer showed a machine that could play laserdiscs too, for good measure. "There was a definite feeling at the show that we had escaped a nasty situation -- that the decision to combine in forming a single DVD standard had averted one of the most divisive potential battles in consumer electronics. With virtually the whole industry behind it, DVD should become a mass technology sooner rather than later." In 2006, all of this seems rather old hat. It’s useful to remember how exciting and novel this technology was only a decade ago. ...Ian G. Masters
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