Bridging DVD's Video/ROM Divide

Emedia Professional, June, 1999 by Philip De Lancie

In the same way that a browser serves as a framework For content delivery and navigation over the Internet, PCFriendly offers a portal for access to DVD content From a DVD-ROM drive.

Two years ago, when DVD-Video was first launched, the emphasis in title production was on the basics: good video and audio quality, attractive menus, and reliable performance on all set-top players. As the format has matured, however, titles have become more sophisticated, and the inclusion of extra programming above and beyond the actual feature presentation has become commonplace.

Some types of "added value" material--commentary tracks or behind-the-scenes documentaries, for instance--are delivered as part of a tide's DVD-Video zone, and thus become an integral part of the end-user experience, accessible through the same menu structure as the main feature. But today's tides are often hybrid discs that make use of the DVD-ROM zone for content intended for playback in a computer-hosted DVD-ROM drive. To access this ROM material, the user must leave behind the graphical environment created for the DVD-Video tide, and instead navigate DVD-ROM's mundane world of files, folders, and dialog boxes.

To Todd Collart, president and CEO of InterActual Technologies in Mountain View, California, this contrast between the typical user's experience of DVDVideo and DVD-ROM creates an unnecessary divide between the content in each portion of the tide. "We don't think the average consumer should have to understand the differences between DVDVideo and DVD-ROM," Collart says. "Users should simply be thinking of DVD as something that takes advantage of the best features of whatever platform it plays on."

To facilitate a synthesis of Video and ROM content, InterActual has developed PCFriendly, which Collart describes as "a complete content management system for enhancing DVD-video products for the PC marketplace." In the same way that a browser serves as a framework for content delivery and navigation over the Internet, PCFriendly offers a portal for access to DVD content from a DVD-ROM drive (Windows-only until the Mac version--to be offered as a free download to existing PCFriendly customers --debuts in late 1999). "With PCFriendly," Collart says, "users can view assets on the disc, additional assets that can be copied over to their hard drives, or assets that are online on the tide publisher's Web site. So PCFriendly is a media browser whose capabilities are defined by the content creator. The goal is to take the incompatibility-riddled landscape of DVD on the PC, and mm it into a real consumer platform."

SET-TOP PC: HOW IT WORKS

PCFriendly's standardized interface borrows the universally familiar visual metaphor of a TV and remote control. "The PCFriendly software is automatically launched when you put the disc in the DVD-ROM drive," Collart says. "You see a big TV screen with a remote control on the left side." Rather than a numerical keypad, the remote has a scrolling menu with logos or text representing the various available "channels" of ROM content. "It's very intuitive," Collart says. "A two-year-old can look at it and immediately know to click on the remote."

In addition to providing this graphical interface, Collart says PCFriendly "manages video playback, Internet connectivity, and version control for both assets and software." DirectShow may eventually minimize video playback problems for PC DVD, but for now this is one of PCFriendly's most important tasks. "Currently one of the biggest obstacles to creating hybrid tides," Collart says, "is that there is no one single mechanism for playing back DVD-Video on the computer. There is a whole variety of different APIs. Microsoft is trying to fix this with DirectShow, but it takes time for companies with their own fully tested proprietary solutions--Creative Labs, Toshiba, or C-Cube, for instance--to migrate over. The number of DirectShow-compatible decoders will increase, but right now DirectShow is only used on about five percent of the machines. In the meantime, PCFriendly is the only way that title developers can talk to most of these proprietary DVD Navigators. It supports a broad variety of proprietary approaches, and it also talks to DirectShow."

PCFriendly does not attack video playback problems by substituting its own DVD Navigator, but rather by linking users to the latest versions of the software their systems need. "Each of the decoder manufacturers we support has given us a way of detecting their Navigator," Collart explains. "We search the playback system for the currently installed DVD solution, then we check the version to be sure it is the minimum required. Based on what we detect, we know what we have to do to play video on that system. If there is a problem, a dialog box will come up briefly explaining the problem and offering a solution. For instance, if you have an outdated driver, the software will take you online to a location on our site from which you can link directly to a download location on the decoder vendor's site and get an updated driver."