DVD

DVD (also known as "Digital Versatile Disc" or "Digital Video Disc") is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. DVDs resemble compact discs as their physical dimensions are the same (120 mm (4.72 inches) or occasionally 80 mm (3.15 inches) in diameter) but they are encoded in a different format and at a much higher density. The official DVD specification is maintained by the DVD Forum.

History

In the early 1990s two high density optical storage standards were being developed: one was the MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density Disc (SDD), supported by Toshiba, Time-Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson, and JVC. IBM's president, Lou Gerstner, acting as a matchmaker, led an effort to unite the two camps behind a single standard, anticipating a repeat of the costly format war between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s.

Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and agreed upon Toshiba's SD format with two modifications that are both related to the servo tracking technology. The first one was the adoption of a pit geometry that allows "push-pull" tracking, a proprietary Philips/Sony technology. The second modification was the adoption of Philips' EFMPlus. EFMPlus, created by Kees Immink, who also designed EFM, is 6% less efficient than Toshiba's SD code, which resulted in a capacity of 4.7GB as opposed to SD's original 5GB. The great advantage of EFMPlus is its great resilience against disc damage such as scratches and fingerprints. The result was the DVD specification Version 1.5, announced in 1995 and finalized in September 1996. In May 1997, the DVD Consortium was replaced by the DVD Forum , which is open to all companies.

"DVD" was originally an initialism for "Digital Video Disc." Some members of the DVD Forum believe that it should stand for "Digital Versatile Disc" to reflect its widespread use for non-video applications. Toshiba, which maintains the official DVD Forum site [1], adheres to the latter interpretation, and indeed this appeared within the copyright warnings on some of the earliest examples. However, the DVD Forum never reached a consensus on the matter, and so today the official name of the format is simply "DVD"; the letters do not officially stand for anything.[2]

The first DVD players and discs were available in November 1996 in Japan, March 1997 in the United States, 1998 in Europe and in 1999 in Australia. The first pressed DVD was the film Twister in 1996. The film had the first test for 2.1 surround sound. The first titles released in the U.S., on March 19, 1997, by Lumivision, authored by AIX Entertainment, were IMAX adaptations: Africa: The Serengeti, Antarctica: An Adventure of a Different Nature, Tropical Rainforest, and Animation Greats.

By the spring of 1999 the price of a DVD player had dropped below $300 US. At that point Wal-Mart began to offer DVD players for sale, but DVDs represented only a small part of their video inventory; VHS tapes of films made up the remainder. Wal-Mart's competitors followed suit, and DVDs began to increase in popularity with American consumers.

DVD rentals first topped those of VHS during the week of June 15, 2003 (27.7 M rentals DVD vs. 27.3 M rentals VHS). Major U.S. retailers Circuit City and Best Buy stopped selling VHS tapes in 2002 and 2003, respectively. In June 2005, Wal-Mart and several other retailers announced plans to phase out the VHS format entirely, in favor of the more popular DVD format. However, blank VHS tapes are still widely available since DVD video recorders are significantly less common than DVD players. Many films released to theaters from 2004 onwards are released solely to DVD format and not to VHS format. Consumers have predicted that 2006 would be the final year for new releases on VHS.

According to the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), all DVD sales and rentals (films, television series, special interests, etc) totaled $21.2 billion in 2004. The sales portion of that was $15.5 billion. In comparison, the total 2004 US box office for theatrical rentals was $9.53 billion (per the National Association of Theater Owners or NATO). While the growth of theatrical films on DVD has cooled recently, that of television programs and music video has increased dramatically.

As of 2006, some retailers, such as Best Buy, no longer offer titles on VHS media, instead concentrating solely on DVDs. The price of a DVD player has dropped to below the level of a typical VCR (although DVD recorders are still usually more expensive than VCRs); a low-end player with reasonable quality can be purchased for under $35 US in many retail stores and many modern computers are sold with DVD-ROM drives. Also popular are units that have integrated a DVD and VHS VCR into a single device; these can be purchased for under $100 US. Most, but not all, movie "sets" or series have been released in boxed sets, as have some entire seasons or selected episode volumes of older and newer television programs.

The format on gaming systems

In 2000, Sony released its PlayStation 2 console in Japan. In addition to playing video games developed for the system it was also able to play DVD movies. This proved to be a huge selling point because the PS2 cost about the same as standard DVD players but could do much more. As a result, many electronic stores that normally did not carry video game consoles carried PS2s. In keeping with this tradition, Sony has announced that it will implement one of DVD's possible successors, Blu-ray, into its next PlayStation console currently known as the PlayStation 3.

Microsoft's Xbox, released a year after the PlayStation 2, also had the capability to play DVD discs with an add-on remote control kit, cementing the DVD's place in video game consoles. Nintendo's GameCube ordinarily cannot play DVDs but uses a modified 3-inch DVD for its game media. However, one GameCube model known as the Panasonic Q (sold only in Japan) allowed for DVD playback in the GameCube. Later, when the next generation Xbox, the Xbox 360 was released, DVD playback was built-in (and did not require an add-on). It is known that DVD playback will be used on the upcoming Playstation 3.

DVD recordable and rewriteable

Main article: DVD recordable

Initially developed for the need of data storage for back-up and transport, DVD recordables are now also used for consumer audio and video recording. Three formats were developed: -R/RW (minus), +R/RW (plus), -RAM (ram).

Dual layer recording

Dual Layer recording allows DVD-R and DVD+R discs to store significantly more data, up to 8.5 Gigabytes per disc, compared with 4.7 Gigabytes for single-layer discs. DVD-R DL (dual layer) was developed for the DVD Forum by Pioneer Corporation, DVD+R DL (double layer) was developed for the DVD+RW Alliance by Sony.

DVD recordable discs supporting this technology are backward compatible with some existing DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. Many current DVD recorders support dual-layer technology, and the price point is comparable to that of single-layer drives, though the blank media remains significantly more expensive. Currently the technology has severe problems with compatibility in hardware DVD players.

When a DVD disc is dual layer, there is sometimes a noticeable pause in video play. This is seemingly most notable in the movie Black Hawk Down, when a soldier's arm is severed and another soldier picks it up. A lot of confusion arose because of this (with people thinking their discs were damaged).

DVD-Video

File:DVD-Video logo-example.png

Example of how producer could show the consumer full compatibility with DVD-Video specification.

DVD-Video discs require a DVD-drive with an MPEG-2 decoder (e.g. a DVD-player or a DVD computer drive with a software DVD player). Commercial DVD movies are encoded using a combination of MPEG-2 compressed video and audio of varying formats (often multi-channel formats as described below). Typical data rates for DVD movies range from 3–10 Mbit/s, and the bit rate is usually adaptive. The video resolution on NTSC discs is typically 720 × 480 and on PAL discs is 720 × 576. However, the video file(s) on a PAL DVD-video may comprise from any of the following:

Up to 9.8 Mbit/s (9800 kbit/s) MPEG2 video
Up to 1.856 Mbit/s (1856 kbit/s) MPEG1 video
720 × 576 pixels MPEG2 (Called full D1)
704 × 576 pixels MPEG2
352 × 576 pixels MPEG2 (Called Half-D1, same as the China Video Disc standard)
352 × 288 pixels MPEG2
352 × 288 pixels MPEG1 (Same as the VCD Standard)

All MPEG video must be 25 frames per second (on PAL DVDs). 16:9 anamorphic video is only supported at 720x576. Note that some DVD-hardware or software players may play discs whose MPEG files do not conform to the above standards- however these discs are non-compliant with the specification for DVD-video. Some hardware players will now play DVD-ROMs or CD-roms containing MPEG video files - these are 'unauthored' and lack the file structure that defines a DVD-video. (These files contain extra information, such as the number of video tracks, chapters and links to extra features, which DVD players use to navigate a DVD-video).

A high number of audio tracks and/or lots of extra material on the disc will often result in a lower bit rate (and image quality) for the main feature. Total bitrate including video, audio and subs can be max 10.08 Mbit/s (10080 kbit/s)

The audio data on a DVD movie can be of the format PCM, DTS, MP2, or Dolby Digital (AC-3). In countries using the NTSC standard any movie should contain a sound track in (at least) either PCM or Dolby AC-3 formats, and any NTSC player must support these two; all the others are optional. This ensures any standard compatible disc can be played on any standard compatible player. The vast majority of commercial NTSC releases today employ AC-3 audio. The official specification for DVD audio is:

48000 Hz
32 - 1536 kbit/s
Up to 8 audio tracks containing Dolby Digital, DTS, PCM(uncompressed audio) or MPEG1 Layer2.
One audio track must have MPEG-1, Dolby Digital or PCM Audio.

Initially, in countries using the PAL standard (e.g. most of Europe) the sound of DVD was supposed to be standardized on PCM and MP2, but apparently against the wishes of Philips, under public pressure on December 5, 1997, the DVD Forum accepted the addition of Dolby AC-3 to the optional formats on discs and mandatory formats in players. The vast majority of commercial PAL releases employ AC-3 audio by now.

DVDs can contain more than one channel of audio to go together with the video content. In many cases, sound tracks in more than one language track are present (for example, a dubbed track in the language of the country where the disc is sold in addition to one in the film's original language).

With several channels of audio from the DVD, the cabling needed to carry the signal to an amplifier or TV can occasionally be somewhat frustrating. Most systems include an optional digital connector for this task, which is then paired with a similar input on the amplifier. The selected audio signal is sent over the connection, typically over RCA connectors or TOSLINK, in its original format to be decoded by the audio equipment. When playing compact discs, the signal is sent in S/PDIF format instead.

Video is another issue which continues to most present problems. Current players typically output analog video only, both composite video on an RCA jack, as well as S-Video in the standard connector. However neither of these connectors were intended to be used for progressive video, so yet another set of connectors has started to appear, to carry a form of component video, which keeps the three components of the video, one luminance signal and two color difference signal, as stored on the DVD itself, on fully separate wires (whereas S-Video uses two wires, uniting and degrading the two color signals, and composite only one, uniting and degrading all three signals). The connectors are further confused by using a number of different physical connectors on different player models, RCA or BNC, as well as using VGA cables in a non-standard way (VGA is normally analog RGB—a different, incompatible form of component video). Even worse, there are often two sets of component outputs, one carrying interlaced video, and the other progressive. In Europe (but not most other PAL areas), SCART connectors are typically used, which can carry composite, Y/C (S-Video), and/or analog RGB interlaced video signals, as well as analog two-channel sound on a single convenient multiwire cable. The analog RGB component signal offers video quality which is superior to S-Video and identical to YPbPr component video (ignoring any conversion or noise issues). However, analog RGB and S-Video signals can not be carried simultaneously, due to each using the same pins for different uses, and displays often must be manually configured as to the input signal, since no switching mode exists for S-Video. (A switching mode does exist to indicate whether composite or RGB is being used.) Some DVD players and set-top boxes offer YPbPr component video signals over the wires in the SCART connector intended for RGB, though this violates the official specification and manual configuration is again necessary. (Hypothetically, unlike RGB component, YPbPr component signals and S-Video Y/C signals could both be sent over the wire simultaneously, since they share the luminance (Y) component.) HDMI is a new digital connection similar to DVI; it carries High Definition, Enhanced Definition and Standard Definition video. Along with video HDMI also supports up to eight-channel digital audio. Some HDMI-equipped DVD players can upconvert the video to higher definition formats such as 720p and, more rarely, 1080p.

DVD Video may also include one or more subtitle tracks in various languages, including those made especially for the deaf and hearing impaired. They are stored as bitmap images with transparent background which are overlaid over the video during playback. The subtitle track is contained within the VOB file of the DVD. Subtitles are restricted to four colors (including transparency) and thus tend to look cruder than permanent subtitles on film.

DVD Video may contain Chapters for easy navigation (and continuation of a partially watched film). If space permits, it is also possible to include several versions (called "angles") of certain scenes, though today this feature is mostly used—if at all—not to show different angles of the action, but as part of internationalization to e.g. show different language versions of images containing written text, if subtitles will not do (for instance, credits). Multiple angles have found a niche in pornography though.

A major selling point of DVD Video is that its storage capacity allows for a wide variety of extra features in addition to the feature film itself. This can include audio commentary that is timed to the film sequence, documentary features, unused footage, trivia text commentary, simple games and film shorts.

Other extras that can be included on DVDs (extra to the main audio/visual programme) are motion menus, still pictures, up to 32 selectable subtitles, seamless branching for multiple storylines, 9 camera angles. And also additional DVD-ROM / data files that only can be read by computer DVD drives.

Restrictions

DVD-Video has four complementary systems designed to restrict the DVD user in various ways: Macrovision, Content Scrambling System (CSS), region codes, and disabled user operations (UOPs).

Content-scrambling system

Many DVD-Video titles use content-scrambling system (CSS) encryption, which is intended to discourage people from bypassing the region control mechanism (see below). Usually, users need to install software provided on the DVD or downloaded from the Internet such as WinDVD, PowerDVD, MPlayer, or VLC to be able to view the disc in a computer system.

The CSS has caused major problems for the inclusion of DVD players in any open source operating systems, since open source player implementations are not officially given access to the decryption keys or license the patents involved in the CSS. Proprietary software players were also difficult to find on some platforms. However, a successful effort has been made to write a decoder by reverse engineering, resulting in DeCSS. This has led to long-running legal battles and the arrest of some of those involved in creating or distributing the DeCSS code, through the use of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, on the grounds that such software could also be used to facilitate unauthorized copying of the data on the discs.

These laws currently affect only the United States; most other countries can use de-scrambling software to bypass the DVD restrictions. A number of software programs have since appeared on the Web to view DVDs on a number of different platforms. It should be noted that de-scrambling is not actually necessary to copy a DVD -- the scrambled data can be copied without decoding it. De-scrambling is only required for playback, which proponents of non-proprietary DVD players argue is a legitimate use of a (legally purchased) DVD.

Other technical measures such as RipGuard, as well as US and international copyright law, may be used to prevent people from copying DVDs without permission from the owner of a DVD's intellectual property. Even so, in the past few years a large amount of software has been created to make copies, such as DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter.

Disabled user operations

DVD-Video allows the disc to specify whether or not the user may perform any operation, such as selecting a menu, skipping chapters, forwarding or rewinding—essentially any function on the remote control. This is known as User Operation Prohibitions, or UOPs for short. Most DVD players respect these commands (e.g. by preventing fast-forwarding through a copyright message at the beginning of a disc), although some can be configured to ignore them, particularly open source player software. Many grey market players ignore UOPs.

Region codes

Each DVD-Video disc contains one or more region codes, denoting the area[s] of the world in which distribution and playback are intended. The commercial DVD player specification dictates that a player must only play discs that contain its region code. In theory, this allows the motion picture studios to control the various aspects of a release (including content, date and price) on a region-by-region basis. In practice, many DVD players allow playback of any disc, or can be modified to do so. Entirely independent of encryption, region coding pertains to regional lockout, which originated in the video game industry.

From a worldwide perspective, regional coding has been a failure. A huge percentage of players outside of North America can be easily modified (and are even sold pre-modified by mainstream stores such as Amazon.co.uk) to ignore the regional codes on a disc. Coupled with the fact that almost all televisions in Europe and Australasia are capable of displaying NTSC video, means that consumers in these regions have a huge choice of discs.

DVD-Audio

DVD-Audio is a format for delivering high-fidelity audio content on a DVD. It offers many channels (from mono to 5.1 surround sound) at various sampling frequencies and sample rates. Compared to the CD format, the much higher capacity DVD format enables the inclusion of either considerably more music (with respect to total running time and quantity of songs) or far higher audio quality (reflected by higher linear sampling rates and higher vertical bit-rates, and/or additional channels for spatial sound reproduction).

Despite DVD-Audio's superior technical specifications, there is debate as to whether or not the resulting audio enhancements are distinguishable to typical human ears. DVD-Audio currently forms a niche market, probably due to its dependency upon new and relatively expensive equipment.

Security

DVD-Audio discs employ a robust copy prevention mechanism, called Content Protection for Prerecorded Media (CPPM) developed by the 4C group (IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba).

CPPM can be circumvented on a PC by capturing decoded audio streams in PCM format, but the underlying protection mechanism, encryption algorithms, and keys have not yet been cracked.

Players and recorders

Modern DVD recorders often support additional formats, including DVD+/-R/RW, CD-R/RW, MP3, WMA, SVCD, JPEG, PNG, SVG, KAR and MPEG-4 (DivX/XviD). Some also include USB ports or flash memory readers. Many players are priced from under $/€ 25 and recorders from $/€ 50.

DVD drives for computers usually come with one of two kinds of Regional Playback Control (RPC), either RPC-1 or RPC-2; This is used to enforce the publisher's restrictions on what regions of the world the DVD can be played. See Regional lockoutdouble.

Competitors and successors

There are several possible successors to DVD being developed by different consortiums: Sony/Panasonic's Blu-ray Disc (BD), Toshiba's HD DVD and Maxell's Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD).

The first generation of holographic media with 300 GB of storage capacity and a 160 Mbit/s transfer rate is scheduled for release in late 2006 by Maxell and its partner, InPhase.

On November 18, 2003, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported the final standard of the Chinese government-sponsored Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD), and several patents for it. However, since then the format has generally failed to live up to expectations.

On November 19, 2003, the DVD Forum decided by a vote of eight to six that HD DVD will be its official HDTV successor to DVD. This had no effect on the competing Blu-ray Disc Association's (BDA) determination that its format would succeed DVD, especially since most of the voters belonged to both groups.

On April 15, 2004, in a co-op project with TOPPAN Printing Co., the electronic giant Sony Corp. successfully developed the paper disc, a storage medium that is made out of 51% paper and offers up to 25 GB of storage, about five times more than the standard 4.7 GB DVD. The disc can be easily cut with scissors and recycled, offering foolproof data security and an environment-friendly storage media.

As reported in a summer, 2005, issue of Popular Mechanics, it is not yet clear which technology will win the format war over DVD. HD DVD discs have a lower capacity than Blu-ray discs (15GB vs. 25GB for single layer, 30GB vs. 50GB for dual layer), but Blu-ray requires changes in manufacturing machinery and techniques and is thus more expensive.

In April, 2000, Sonic Solutions and Ravisent announced hDVD, an HDTV extension to DVD that presaged the HD formats that debuted 6 years later. [3]

This situation—multiple new formats fighting as the successor to a format approaching purported obsolescence—previously appeared as the "war of the speeds" in the record industry of the 1950s; see gramophone record for details of that situation. It is also, of course, similar to the VHS/Betamax war in consumer video recorders in the late 1970s.

It is possible that neither Blu-ray, HD DVD, nor a next-generation optical recording products will succeed. The storage capacities of hard disk drives and solid-state memory have grown faster than those of optical discs (since CD's introduction year, 1983, storage capacity of HDDs grew by a factor of about 100,000, from 5 MB to 500 GB, while the capacity of Blu-ray is only 90 times larger than CD), and all three are much more capable of storing general consumer content —such as photos, music, and video— than in the past. Hard disk drives having a few terabytes of storage capacity will be on the market before 2008. A terabyte is equivalent to about 2000 CD-ROMs, 130 DVD-9s, or 20 dual-layer BDs. However, hard disk drives and memory cards are at the moment hundreds of times more expensive than optical discs (US$50 or more compared to $0.50), so they will never replace discs as a publishing format. The price per gigabyte of a hard disk drive, $0.40 ($200/500GB), is growing closer to that of a DVD-ROM, $0.06 ($0.50/8.5GB), or BD-ROM, $0.03 ($1.50/50GB), or recordable DVD-5, $0.10 ($0.50/4.7GB), and is lower than the cost of a recordable DVD-9, $0.30 ($2.50/8.5GB), or BD-RE25, $1.20 ($30/25GB). Direct access to large amounts of information is much more convenient with a hard disk drive. As broadband becomes fast enough (40 Mbit/s and higher) and more widely available, physical media will become less important as a distribution format.

The new generations of optical formats have restricted access (anti-copy mechanisms), and it is therefore possible that consumers will ignore them as they did with Super Audio CD.

Direct-to-DVD

The popularity of DVDs has caused the term "direct-to-DVD" to widely replace "Direct-to-video" (see main article). However, the lucrative market for DVDs has resulted in less stigma for direct-to-DVD releases as compared to direct-to-video releases. Some minor films can be made with a small budget and turn a profit on DVD sales alone, and some are made specifically for this purpose.

References

Bennett, Hugh. Understanding Recordable & Rewritable DVD. OSTA Home Page. April 2004. Optical Storage Technology Association. 30 Apr. 2006. http://www.osta.org/technology/dvdqa/
Labarge, Ralph. DVD Authoring and Production. Gilroy, Calif.: CMP Books, 2001. ISBN 1578200822.
Taylor, Jim. DVD Demystified, 2nd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2000. ISBN 0071350268.

External links

Official