Star Trek

The Flip Sides of DVDs

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The place - a busy shopping mall. Two twenty-something guys. The conversation sounded something like this:

"I just paid twenty bucks for this DVD. What a rip (off)! Those... Hollywood guys make millions of dollars and they were too... cheap to even print on the DVD...". Sadly, before I even had a chance to conjure up a reply they had stormed off.

Yes, it's true that some "Hollywood guys make some pretty good coin, and it's not surprising that publishers are trying to find ways to cut costs as prices fall at the retail level, but this is not the case here.

If the young lads would have looked a little closer before making any assumptions, there's a pretty good chance they would have realized that they purchased a double-sided DVD. It likely had the full screen version of the movie on one side, and the widescreen version on the other. Perhaps they got more than they had bargained for and $20 bucks may have been a good deal after all.

DVD by the Numbers

Let's have a look at the most common DVD formats for factory pressed commercial movies.

The first format is DVD-5. (Single-sided, single-layer, 4.7Gb capacity). Actual playing time will depend on a number of factors including the bit rate, the amount of data transferred in a second and the audio it contains. Let's call it roughly a little more than 2 hours of playing time.  
 

To satisfy the enthusiast and of course to entice you to buy, DVDs today are packed with hordes of "extra" stuff compared to the original VHS releases, The "stuff", or bonus features may include: Director's commentary, deleted scenes, movie trailers, biographies, language tracks subtitles in various languages and much more. A mere 4.7Gb just won't cut it.

Most Common Format

Enter the DVD-9. (Single sided, dual-layered, 8.5GB capacity), about 4 hours playing time. The dual layer is created by using 2 substrates "glued" together with a transparent adhesive allowing the laser beam to read both layers from one side of the disc. Some DVD-9 discs can be identified in that they may port two bar codes in the inner hub area and they also may have a slight gold tinge to the underside.

What the lads bought was a DVD-10 or simply 2 DVD-5 discs bonded together, back-to-back. The reason that DVD-10's print area is limited to the hub area is that DVDs, and CDs as well, are read by a beaming a laser to the underside of the disc. Since both sides are being used, the readable area must be clear.

If you guess that DVD-18 is two DVD-9s glued back to back, then you are somewhat correct. Working with 4 layers, two sets of dual layers, requires a modified process compared to DVD-10. According to DVD Demystified, this process offers challenges in term of manufacturer's yield (number of usable discs per batch) and end-user playability issues,

Consequently, less than 1% of all titles are in the DVD-18 format and some publishers are still moving away from them.

There are a number of other formats, not used specifically in the movie industry. One example is the Hybrid CD/DVD, which is slowly gaining interest in the music industry. It's a standard audio CD, backed with a DVD-5.

Blu-Ray & HD-DVD

As we enter the era of high definition video, so does the growth in the demand for larger storage capacities. Currently there are two formats vying for the top spot in the high definition standard - Blu-ray, and HD-DVD.

Can you remember Beta and VHS?

The Blu-ray Disc Association has over 150 members and is supported by companies such as Apple, Dell, HP, Hitachi & Philips, 20th Century Fox and Disney.

Their rival, HD-DVD, has over 230 members, including, Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft. Paramount Pictures and Universal.

Blu-ray (BR) discs have capacities of 25GB and 50GB for single and dual layer discs respectively. Comparatively, HD-DVD discs capacities are 15GB & 30GB. BR discs would require manufacturing plants to re-tool and add extra equipment, whereas HD-DVD plants could expand upon the existing technology.

There are some members that are playing both sides of the fence. Is it the features, the quality, price, or who else is on board? A report in PC WORLD, says Thompson, a "core-backer" of Blu-ray, will support HD-DVD and HP, which originally signed up with Blu-Ray camp has now pledged support for HD-DVD citing costs as main factor. In the studios, Warner Bros and Paramount, who originally supported HD-DVD, announced that they would release disks in both formats.

With the Consumer Electronics Show set for Jan 5-8, 2006 in Las Vegas, it will be interesting to see who will put on the higher definition show and how many with either switch sides or remain on the fence.

Holograms Anyone

According to Carl A. Snape, founding editor of One-to-One, a trade publication for the media manufacturing industry, while the formats fight, the next generation, HVD or Holographic Versatile Disc is already being designed. In the December 2005 issue, Snape says that a single HVD will be able to hold 1TB (terabyte) of data or the equivalent of 110 DVD-9's with the expectation of ultimately increasing this to 4TB. Snape says what makes the technology interesting is not only the storage capabilities of this format, but the access speed will better the current DVD format 40 times over.

The future is nearer than we think.

Greg Gazin, can be reached at gadgetguy "at" telus.net".

i do agree with the remark about dvds being too expensive. especially the special editions and boxed sets. its interesting that there are 3 different formats competing with each other. it will be interesting to see what happens with that.