Biding Time As Disks Do Battle
Newcastle Herald
Friday May 29, 1998
WHEN I first saw a DVD-ROM drive demonstrated at a PC show in Sydney a year or so ago I was blown away by the possibilities.
A single disk, smaller than a standard CD, could carry a whole movie and reproduce sound and video in a quality that left the trusty old video player for dead.
Alternatively, a DVD-ROM disk could store enough straight audio to play all day without repeating a track.
In terms of old-fashioned ASCII text, its many gigabytes of space could handle 10,000 novels and still leave change.
In the many months since that demonstration, I haven't noticed DVD-ROMs nudging video cassettes off the shelves. Nor have I seen any DVD software titles for review.
Only recently did somebody I know buy a PC with a DVD-ROM drive pre-installed. In the light of recent industry developments this may have been a premature move.
That's because DVD-ROM, or read-only memory, is only half the DVD story.
The other half is that writable DVDs, which will put unprecedented storage capacity into the home market, are on the doorstep.
Writable DVDs open up all sorts of possibilities. As well as playing the movies, games and software that will be delivered on DVD-ROM, they will allow users to archive complete hard drives to a single disk.
They will be ideal for large files such as home movies and they will be accessed in much the same way as a normal CD.
The only complication is that a VHS-Betamax-style scramble seems to have begun, with some manufacturers aligned with DVD-RAM (for random access memory) and others determined to pursue a different method, DVD-RW (for ReWritable).
The two use different methods of writing data to the disk and are reportedly incompatible, although it seems that both will be able to read DVD-ROM disks.
DVD-RAM can store 2.6Gb on each side of a disk, with a 4.7Gb/side version in the works, compared to a reported 3Gb target for the DVD-RW.
All of which brings to mind the VHS/Betamax situation, as described by Microsoft chief Bill Gates in his book The Road Ahead.
Betamax, he notes, was the `technically superior' standard, but the first Beta tapes recorded for only an hour, compared to three hours for the alternative VHS format.
This gave VHS an early lead, which was increased when VHS technology was licensed for a low royalty.
As we all know, VHS players proliferated, video shops began to stock more VHS tapes and pretty soon Betamax machines were museum-pieces.
Gates notes that once the confusion was sorted out and the `acceptance threshold' was crossed, tape sales boomed.
DVD-ROMs haven't crossed that threshold, and my bet is that they won't until the market decides on a rewritable DVD standard.
When it does, listen out for the death-rattles from the VHS video tape format.
In the meantime, I plan to sit on the fence. May the best disk win.
TECHNOLOGY distributor Marketing Results has announced CD-Speedster, a program that it says can boost the speed of a CD-ROM drive by up to 200%.
The company says the program allows users to load games and programs faster, perform quicker CD-ROM searches and speed up graphics and audio on slower CD players.
It does this by using `proprietary caching' and `recyclable dynamic RAM' technology.
Marketing Results says the package will be a hit with users running multimedia games off CDs.
CD-Speedster runs under Windows 3.1 or 95 and sells for $49.95.
THE rumour that Anastasia Romanov, youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, escaped the slaughter of her family by the Bolsheviks is one of the most enduring of royal mysteries.
Fox Interactive takes the optimistic view and in the lead-up to the launch of the Twentieth Century Fox film Anastasia, it has announced a CD-ROM storybook that allows children to adventure with Anastasia through 1920s Russia.
Anastasia: Adventures with Pooka and Bartok, features voice-overs by Meg Ryan, who also stars in the film.
Children travel from St Petersburg with Anastasia and her puppy, Pooka, to find her grandmother in Paris.
Along the way they come up against the evil Rasputin, the bloke from the Boney-M song.
The CD features more than 60 hand-painted scenes, animation and backgrounds from the film.
It has activities that reinforce problem-solving and logic.
The CD will sell for $49.95.
© 1998 Newcastle Herald