writable DVD: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

Emedia Professional, Jan, 1999 by Dana J. Parker

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

You can't know your players without a program. And the motley cast that's populated this odd, meandering drama called writable DVD is harder to keep track of than most, given how many entrance cues the players have missed so far. If you're among the hardy few who are still paying attention to the writable DVD drama, you know you'd need a pretty good seat and a handy pair of opera glasses to make out the subtle differences that distinguish one cast member from another, especially given the fact that two rumored entrants haven't even appeared yet.

But just because the story's hard to follow doesn't mean the unfolding drama isn't worth watching. After all, we're talking about writable DVD, the optical storage and distribution standard of the future, and its first crop of standard-bearers. So what follows is a good, old-fashioned dramatis personae, a guide to the cast of characters and a brief outline of their capabilities and capacity, plus the last year's developments in each of the writable formats based on DVD, and expectations for their ongoing evolution.

Best of all, we'll also tackle the questions you'd otherwise be whispering to your neighbor about details you might have missed.

THE CAST

DVD-Recordable (DVD-R) is the record-once writable DVD format, Book D of the DVD Forum's specifications. DVD-R drives--available from Pioneer and a handful of resellers of Pioneer's drive--are currently priced at $17,000. The drives can read pressed DVD, and can read and record once to organic dye-based DVD-Recordable media, which costs about $45, and is available from Pioneer and TDK. DVD-Recordable is analogous to CD-R, and is used primarily for authoring and testing of DVD titles, as well as some limited distribution DVD publishing. [See Hugh Bennett, "In DVD's Own Image: DVD-Recordable Technology and Promise," July 1998--Ed.]

In the past year, DVD-R hasn't changed much in either price or configuration, but big changes are in store for the very near future. At the DVD Forum conference in South San Francisco last October, 4.7GB capacity DVD-R media from several manufacturers was shown, and media manufacturer TDK added emphasis to the inevitability of 4.7GB DVD-R with its own press release and technology seminars in New York and San Francisco the following week. Also planned for next-generation DVD-R--outlined in version 2.0 of the DVD-R specification, due to be finalized in early 1999--is incremental write capability.

The real advance in DVD-R, however, is DVD-RW (DVD-Rewritable). Recently accepted for consideration by the DVD Forum's Working Group 6, and soon to be identified as DVD Forum Book F, DVD-RW is the rewritable version of DVD-R, the "other" rewritable format endorsed by the DVD Forum. When the next generation of 4.7GB DVD-R drives reaches the market, sometime in Q2 1999 at a price between $3,000 and $5,000, 4.7GB DVD-RW will come along for the ride. At the DVD Forum event in October, DVD-RW prototypes from Ricoh, Pioneer, and Yamaha (as well as an "experimental" 4.7GB DVD-R drive from Sony) made it clear that today's "any DVD-R you like, as long as it's Pioneer's" scenario will soon be a thing of the past.

DVD-RW uses a phase-change recording layer, much like CD-RW. In fact, the relationship between DVD-R and DVD-RW finds its closest analogy in the relationship between CD-R and CD-RW--and this is a comforting truth to fall back on in the "everything you know is wrong" atmosphere that surrounds the writable DVD formats. In another triumph of what common sense would dictate, DVD-R media is reliably readable in most existing read-only DVD drives and DVD-Video players (although there have been a few isolated reports of playback inconsistencies in certain brands of DVD-Video players, this is largely attributable to firmware issues and easily correctable). DVD-RW also promises an easy backwards-compatibility path; while it was originally thought to be as nearly universally compatible as DVD-R, it turns out that this was a bit optimistic. It seems that some DVD-Video players, when fed a DVD-RW disc, "see" the lower reflectivity and "assume" that they should be trying to read a dual-layer disc. Even this is a minor logical hiccup that can be remedied by a simple, no-cost change in firmware. Also, neither DVD-R nor DVD-RW media require a caddy or cartridge, though some drives may take the additional precaution of requiring that the disc be in a caddy, just as most early CD-R drives did in their infancy.

DVD-RAM, specified in Book E of the DVD Forum, stands for DVD Random Access Memory. DVD-RAM drives, available from Toshiba, Hitachi, and Panasonic, are available in internal and external, SCSI and IDE models, and are priced between $500 and $700. Media, using a phase-change recording layer, can be either single-sided in a removable cartridge, or double-sided in a permanent cartridge, hold 2.6GB per side, and cost about $25. DVD-RAM is currently readable only on DVD-RAM drives and on one model of DVD-ROM drive from Panasonic.