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DVD’s Relationship to Other Products and Technologies 77<br />
If you really want to copy to VHS, hook the audio/video outputs of the<br />
DVD player to the audio/video inputs of your VCR, and then record the disc<br />
to tape. You’ll discover that most of the time the resulting tape is garbled<br />
and unwatchable. This is because of the Macrovision feature designed to<br />
prevent you from doing this. Refer to “What Are the Copy Protection<br />
Issues?” in <strong>Chapter</strong> 1.<br />
Will High-Definition DVD or 720p DVD Make<br />
Current Players and Discs Obsolete?<br />
Not for a long time. HD-DVD is just becoming available. HD stands for both<br />
high density (more data on a disc) and high definition (better quality picture).<br />
The first commercial Blu-ray HD-DVD recorders appeared in Japan in April<br />
of 2003, over seven years after DVD was introduced there. The recorders<br />
are designed for home recording only (not for playing prerecorded HD<br />
movies), and only work with Japan’s digital HD broadcast system.<br />
New DVD formats will slowly supercede the original DVD format, but new<br />
players will play old DVD discs and often make them look even better (with<br />
progressive-scan video and picture processing). However, new HD-DVD<br />
discs won’t be playable in old DVD players (unless they are special hybrid<br />
discs in both HD and SD format). Your collection of standard DVDs will be<br />
playable for many years to come, and titles will only become obsolete in the<br />
sense that you might want to replace them with new high-definition versions.<br />
Consider that U.S. HDTV was anticipated to be available in 1989, yet<br />
it was not finalized until 1996 and did not appear until 1998. Has it made<br />
your current TV obsolete yet? See “What About the HD-DVD and Blue<br />
Laser Formats?” for details on HD-DVD, and see <strong>Chapter</strong> 6 for more information<br />
on the future of DVD.<br />
Ironically, computers supported HDTV before set-top players, because<br />
double-headed DVD-ROM drives with appropriate playback and display<br />
hardware meet the 19 Mbps data rate needed for HDTV. This led to various<br />
720p DVD projects that use the existing DVD format to store video in<br />
1280�720 or 1920�1080 resolution at 24 progressive fps. It’s possible that<br />
720p DVDs can be made compatible with existing players (which would<br />
only recognize and play the 480-line line data).<br />
NOTE: The term HDVD has already been taken to mean highdensity<br />
volumetric display (see www.3dmedia.com).<br />
Some have speculated that a double-headed player reading both sides<br />
of the disc at the same time could double the data rate or provide an<br />
enhancement for applications such as HDTV. This is currently impossible
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