DVD Demystified

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specification. Not surprisingly, the final 2.0 version was held up by work on
copy protection features. HP announced that its first DVD+RW drive would
be out in June. The Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association
(CEMA) announced that digital television (DTV) sales over the previous
seven months came to a total of 25,694.
At the E3 conference in May, Nintendo said that its upcoming DVDbased
game console, code-named Dolphin, would play DVD movies. Later it
was revealed that only the Matsushita (Panasonic) versions of the box
would play video, since Nintendo was concentrating on a bare-bones, lowestcost
version. At the same conference Nuon admitted that players using its
chip would not be out in 1999. Nuon, which had once been a unique avantgarde
technology, was losing its avantness and gaining competitors.
Patents and Protections
Chapter 2
In June 1999, the other patent pool, comprising Hitachi, Matsushita, Mitsubishi,
Time Warner, Toshiba, and JVC commenced worldwide joint licensing
of patents essential for DVD-Video players, DVD-ROM drives, DVD
decoders, and DVD-Video and DVD-ROM discs. Sony announced that it had
developed a single-chip laser with dual wavelengths; 650 nm for reading
DVDs, and 780 nm for reading CDs. Oddly, Sony said that it intended to use
this breakthrough technology only in the PlayStation 2.
The 4C group said that at its June 11 meeting it expected to pick a watermarking
technology for its content-protection framework. The competing
proposals were from the Galaxy group (Hitachi, IBM, NEC, Pioneer, and
Sony) and the Millennium group (Macrovision, Digimarc, and Philips). June
came and went with no decision. 1999 came and went with no decision.
2000 came and looked to go with no decision. Related efforts by the Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) fared better, when at the June 23-25 meeting,
100 companies from the music, consumer electronics, and information
technology industries adopted a specification for portable devices for digital
music.
On June 16, Divx announced its own obituary.
At the PC Expo, on June 22, Philips announced that its 3.0G DVD+RW
drive would be out in September 1999 for $700. At the same conference a
year earlier, Sony had made a similar announcement of DVD+RW availability
in 1998.
About this time, 4.7G DVD-R drives finally began shipping to anxious
developers, many of whom would have gladly paid the old $17,000 price,
rather than the new $5,000 price, if it would have gotten the drives to them
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