DVD Demystified

The Future of DVD
hold, consumer demand for compatibility between formats will hopefully
push manufacturers toward better cooperation.
The displacement of cassette tapes by CDs can be compared to the potential
displacement of VCRs by DVD recorders. It’s a reasonable analogy,
although widespread, easy-to-use DVD recorders will become available
much sooner than recordable CD players, which still haven’t caught on for
general consumer use. It’s interesting to note that it took until 2000, 17
years after the introduction of CD audio, for prerecorded cassette tapes to
begin disappearing completely from music store shelves. If this historical
perspective is applied to DVD, we might expect VHS tapes to begin fading
away before 2014.
Other technologies, such as hard-disk-based video recorders, will compete
with DVD recorders to become the VCR of the future, but the final outcome
will be a melding of both technologies: digital recorders with hard
disks for time shifting and DVD drives for playing movies and making longterm
copies of recordings from the hard disk.
Eventually, broadband Internet connections will reach the point where
DVD-quality video can be streamed to living rooms and offices on demand.
At about the same time, high-definition video will finally reach mainstream
status, which will require another bump in connected bandwidth. Once
again, DVD (or more specifically HD-DVD) will fill the need for the delivery,
storage, and archiving of high-bandwidth, high-quality content. Techniques
such as downloading video overnight to a hard drive will help overcome
bandwidth deficiencies, but even when high-definition video or digital cinema
are delivered in real time over the Internet, there will still be a need for
making permanent physical copies.
DVD Players, Take 2
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Manufacturers will continue to improve DVD players in the endless race to
best the competition. Future players will include digital connections for video,
audio, and direct bitstream output; video processing circuitry to improve picture
quality; progressive-scan and resolution-enhancement circuitry to make
discs with interlaced video look better on digital TVs and HDTVs; improved
interactivity; and other features such as smooth reverse play, artifact suppression,
and simulated surround sound for headphones. Future generations
of DVD players will also include phone or Internet connections for WebDVD
applications. Such connections will also make pay-per-view discs possible.
Player models from the first few years lack digital video connectors, primarily
because copy protection standards and digital interchange protocols