Dvd - The Next 'must Have'
The Age
Monday June 30, 1997
DIGITAL video discs - DVD-ROM to its intimates - is the next wave of technology likely to hit your Mac, and your credit card. It has already taken off in the United States, where experimental Macintosh 5400s have been making the rounds demonstrating what is to come.
Apple has said this set-up is not necessarily a harbinger of production machines, but makes clear that DVD-capable Macs are in the pipeline. The company has also said it will have DVD-equipped PowerBooks on sale next year. Third-party makers are already in the field with MPEG-2 decoders for the fast and powerful PowerBook 3400.
This immediately raises the question of how the international traveller can watch a couple of DVD movies on a computer that has a battery life of three hours? Answer: you carry still more batteries or fly airlines that offer power plugs for notebooks on their seats.
For the moment, however, you'll need to think a bit before you fork out your money.
Some movies have been published on DVD, and more will come, but transcription is expensive and the potential market is still too small to attract many vendors.
There is also a problem with copyright protection. Because of rampant piracy, movie studios have set up an encryption system. They have divided the world into six regions and given each a code that is burned into the DVD. Your DVD drive must have the correct code to recognise the content on a disc.
This means that, if you have a PowerBook with an Australian DVD drive, you would probably not be able to play a movie bought in the US.
Solution: it's probably sensible to buy an American DVD drive; at least the Yanks will have the biggest library of movies. Yonder, again, lie questions of economic and cultural colonisation.
In Australia, at least one company (New Magic, of Caulfield, Victoria), is now distributing DVD cards and drives, although so far not for the Mac. New Magic is using Pioneer drives, but Sony, Hitachi, Toshiba and Panasonic drives are also on sale in the US and doubtless will become available here.
For the moment, however, DVD is not really a plug-and-play project. You need a Mac-compatible disc player, the driver software to go with it, plus video and audio decoder hardware.
If you look around on the Internet, you'll probably find US dealers offering a product called the CoolDVD from E4. CoolDVD sells for under $US600 and has pretty much all you need in one box.
This includes a PCI card containing MPEG-2 video decoding and Dolby AC-3 audio decoding, the drive itself, and CSS decryption.
However, the drive has an IDE interface and will not work with Macs that have only a SCSI bus. The alternative to the all-in-one CoolDVD is to buy a drive and an MPEG-2 decoder separately. In the US, the drives sell for under $US400 and MPEG-2 decoders for anywhere between $US400 and $800.
You'll also need a Mac-compatible driver. (The demo Macs use a MasonX MPEG-2 decoder and a Matsushita DVD-ROM drive.) MPEG-2 is the standard used for digital satellite television transmissions.
It, and AC-3 are the best available, although they are not essential. DVD also supports the earlier MPEG-1 and MPEG sound compression.
Indeed, DVD drives also recognise old-steam CDs, audio and ROM. For now, they will not read recordable CDs or Kodak Photo CDs because these use pigments, not the microscopic pits found on production discs. The very short wavelength laser of the DVD cannot recognise the colors.
Despite these complications, DVD is with us now, and is bound to grow.
In the US, the menu seems to be limited to a dozen or so movies and a disc containing the contents of every known telephone directory in the 50 states of the union. By the end of the year, we'll probably be drowning in the stuff.
A DVD-ROM is capable of holding about 16GB of information - the equivalent of 25 CDs.
DVDs look very much like CDs and are a refinement and extension of CD technology using lasers of narrower wavelength. Also, the DVD has up to four layers, against the CD's one. If all of those layers were to be used, one disc - looking very much like the standard CD of today - could hold eight hours of movie quality video and sound. Further, the soundtrack could be offered in several languages, each available at a mouse-click. This latter trick is far from new. Philips showed it on their laser disc more than 20 years ago, but it's still impressive.
Without doubt, this will add considerably to the total weight of information flooding over us. We might possibly be on the edge of achieving a storage system larger than our capacity to usefully employ. In any event, the audio CD could still survive, simply because it suits the medium better.
We might also hedge the bets by keeping an eye on early essays into the information avalanche business, such as Telstra's Big Pond, which is capable of dumping 100MB of whatever from the Internet on to your hard drive in a nano-blink - assuming you have 100MB of free space on your drive.
© 1997 The Age
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