DVD Demystified

10
In addition to space for more data, DVD brings along high-quality audio
and video. Many new computers have hardware or software decoders that
can be used to play DVD movies. These DVD-enabled computers will be
even more effective for realistic simulations, games, education, and “edutainment.”
DVD eventually will make blocky, quarter-screen computer
video a distant, dismal memory.
Video Games
The capacity to add high-quality, real-life video and full surround sound to
three-dimensional game graphics is attractive to video game manufacturers.
The major game console manufacturers, Nintendo, Sega, and
Sony—and Microsoft with its Xbox—are all using DVD in the newest versions
of their systems. A combination video game/CD/DVD player is very
appealing.
Many past attempts to combine video footage with interactive games
have been met with yawns, but the technology will improve until it finally
clicks. Video games that make extensive use of full-screen video—even multimedia
games traditionally available only for computers—are appearing in
DVD-Video editions that play on any home DVD player and on DVD computers.
For example, the venerable Dragon’s Lair, a groundbreaking arcade
video game that used a laserdisc for movie-quality animation, is now available
on DVD-Video.
Information Publishing
Chapter 1
The Internet is a wonderfully effective and efficient medium for information
publishing, but it lacks the bandwidth needed to do justice to large
amounts of data rich with graphics, audio, and motion video. DVD, with
storage capacity far surpassing CD-ROM plus standardized formats for
audio and video, is perfect for publishing and distributing information in
our ever more knowledge-intensive and information-hungry world.
Organizations can use DVD-Video and DVD-ROM to quickly and easily
disseminate reports, training material, manuals, detailed reference handbooks,
document archives, and much more. Portable document formats such
as Adobe Acrobat and HTML are perfectly suited to publishing text and pictures
on DVD-ROM. Recordable DVD soon will be available and affordable
for custom publishing of discs created on the desktop.