Recordable DVD's: Opportunity or Headache?

You'd think that recordable DVDs would be the next logical upgrade for serious users, now that CD-R/RW has pioneered the use of discs. After all, they offer 4.7 gigabytes of capacity, or seven times the capacity of a CD-R/RW. At last, you can back up your whole Windows system subdirectory onto one disc. But things don't look so attractive when you take a closer look at the world of recordable DVD formats, where the presence of a + or - is critical.

The formats:

DVD-RAM. This was the first to reach the market, and is mostly used for computer storage. Its output can be read by very few DVD players. The media can be rewritten about 100,000 times.
DVD-R (recordable once) and DVD-RW (re-recordable). These formats are sponsored by the DVD Forum, made up of some of the same firms (principally Toshiba, Hitachi and Pioneer) that launched the DVD-RAM format. They set up the DVD Forum to promote the -R and -RW formats. The format is really optimized to replace digital tape and is mostly used for digital video recording by people using their machines for video editing. The -RW media can be rewritten only about 1,000 times.
DVD+R and DVD+RW. Notice the sudden appearance of the plus sign. Various vendors (including Dell, HP, Sony, Philips, Ricoh and Thomson) claimed to be upset by the absence of any defect management feature in the -R and -RW format, making it less attractive for data storage. But other observers wondered if they just didn't like paying royalties to -R and -RW camp. The dissidents set up the DVD+RW Alliance to promote the +RW format for set-top boxes and later added the +R format. Both include defect management and advanced editing features. Again, the rewritable media can only be rewritten about 1,000 times.

Incomptability
All three camps use different media that are, when it comes to writing or rewriting information, incompatible with each other. But sources were not sure if that was really a big concern. After all, someone using his DVD drive for file archiving will not be concerned about compatibility with some other random machine. (And they should be able to read each other's output.) The big question is: will video material that the user has edited on his machine and saved to a recordable DVD be readable on a DVD player? Can you send your home movies to your mother on a recordable DVD and be confident the disc will work in her DVD player?
Sadly, the answer is no. DVD-RAM will work with very few DVD players. As for the DVD Forum and DVD+RW Alliance, both claim to offer wider compatibility with DVD players than the other camp, but various sources doubt if it even reaches 60 percent.
'Better do your compatibility testing before you leave the store,' advised Wolfgang Schlichting, analyst at IDC, the market research firm.
Oddly enough, amateur video producers might be better off at this point if they did not even use DVD's. With the right software, a cheaper CD-R/RW drive can be used to create a Video CD (VCD) which will run in most DVD players. The drawback is that VCD's only hold about 10 minutes of material - but considering the quality of most amateur material, that may actually be an advantage.

What a mess
Meanwhile, February saw an announcement by nine vendors that they would come out with another recordable DVD format. Based on blue lasers (instead of the red ones used in DVD's) the format was named Blu-ray, and offered a capacity of as much as 27 gigabytes per disc. Hardware should appear in 2003, said the group (made up of Hitachi, LG, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Thomson.)
Does this mean we can jump from CD's to Blu-ray discs and let the DVD mess become as forgotten s 8-inch floppies? Sorry, it doesn't. The Blu-ray is a response to the realization that a two-hour movie in HDTV 1,000-line format will not fit on a recordable DVD disc, which was intended for two-hour moves in 480-line DVD format. Actually, most commercial movies are in two-layer DVD's and will not fit in 4.7 gigabytes, thanks to added promotional material. Blu-ray's acceptance will likely be as fast as HDTV's acceptance, which has been advancing at glacial speeds. Sources note that the difference between TV and HDTV is visible mostly on large home-theater screens. With an average TV watched from an average distance, there is little difference.
Meanwhile, Toshiba's name is absent from the list of Blu-ray backers, and it is the leader of the DVD Forum. Toshiba has announced that it intends to develop a separate blue laser standard within the DVD Forum - meaning we are in for yet another recordable DVD standard.
But in the end, the market decides which format will be the standard, as it did in the case of Beta versus VHS. And in the recordable DVD arena, the de-facto standard at the moment appears to be the Pioneer DVD-R-RW drive that has been shipping with the Apple G4 for the past year. Apple has sold about 500,000 units, whereas sales of all the other types, combined, have amounted to only about 200,000 in the US.
So maybe the standard has already arisen. Or, given the small size of the market, maybe there is still an opportunity for someone else to set the standard. But regardless of how events unfold, it looks like the situation is not going to be simple.

Lamont Wood

Lamont Wood has been covering the high-tech market for nearly 20 years. He lives in San Antonio, Texas.