DVD Demystified

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DVD Consortium would be signed at a June 3 meeting. Apparently, however,
the agreement had only been that all three parties would refrain from
introducing copy protection legislation before the June 3 meeting, and
Toshiba officials later denied the reports of any sort of settlement. Despite
all this, executives at Thomson said that they were confident the issues
would be resolved and that they were ready for launch as early as summer.
As DVD progress was being attacked by the popular press, standardization
efforts were having their own problems. Sony threw a monkey wrench
into the process by proposing a completely new DVD-Audio format, Direct
Stream Digital (DSD). Sony claimed that its single-bit format was not tied
to specific sampling frequencies and sizes, thus eliminating downsampling
and oversampling and resulting in less noise. The ARA did not agree and
continued to push for PCM. Then, in the May 1996 issue of CD-ROM Professional,
guest columnist Hugh Bennet publicized a serious flaw that had
apparently gone unrecognized or was being ignored by DVD engineers. The
dye used in recordable CD media (CD-R) did not reflect the smaller-wavelength
laser light used in DVD, thus rendering the discs invisible. He
pointed out that more than 2 million CD recorders were expected to be in
use by the end of 1996 and that the recorders were expected to have written
between 75 and 100 million CD-R discs by then. A new type II CD-R
that would work with CD and DVD had been proposed but would take
years to supersede the current format, leaving millions of CD-R users out in
the cold when it came time to switch to DVD readers.
Glib Promises
Chapter 2
At a June 1996 DVD conference, participants glossed over the technical difficulties
and downplayed the copy protection schism, expecting a solution to
be announced before the end of the month. Toshiba executive Toshio Yajima
said, “It was a misunderstanding between industries.” Sixty executives
from the three sides were committed to meeting once a week to resolve the
copyright protection disputes. At the same conference, one of DVD’s most
ardent cheerleaders, Warner Home Video President Warren Lieberfarb, told
attendees in his keynote speech that 250 movie titles would be ready for a
fall launch. Lieberfarb also gave projections that player sales would be from
2.8 million to 3.7 million units in the first year. Other first-day speakers
were equally optimistic, and everyone was assured that the fall launch was
on schedule, that the 10 companies of the DVD Consortium had agreed to
establish a one-stop agency for licensing, and that the preliminary DVD 0.9
specification book was immediately available for a paltry $5000. A few days