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From DVD demystified FAQ, "The problem is that CD-Rs (Orange Book Part II) are 'invisible' to DVD laser wavelength because the dye used in CD-Rs doesn't reflect the beam."

See the section about DVD and CDR.

Check out this website... and especially the FAQ section...

It should answer most questions. It's liable to cost upwards of $10,000 (probably more like $15,000) to purchase all the hardware and software to take your LDs and transfer them to DVDs.

Laserdisc players are not gone yet -- maybe it's cheaper to get a couple backup players and forget the transfers?

The Pioneer DVL-919 is an excellent combo player.... streets for ~$1,000.

-sid

Check out this website... and especially the FAQ section...

It should answer most questions. It's liable to cost upwards of $10,000 (probably more like $15,000) to purchase all the hardware and software to take your LDs and transfer them to DVDs.

Laserdisc players are not gone yet -- maybe it's cheaper to get a couple backup players and forget the transfers?

The Pioneer DVL-919 is an excellent combo player.... streets for ~$1,000.

-sid

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq .ht ml#3.3

The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

Check out this website:

It should answer some questions. It IS possible to do it all with a decent PC and DVD-R burner. Total cost for hardware plus software? Prolly $15K. Maybe less if you shop around or get by with a lesser PC.

Good luck!
-sid

Personally, I'd rather waste some of my screen space and see the movie the way it was filmed... Pan-and-scan tends to distract me too much. And apparently, many people agree, because it seems like most of the DVDs are coming out in widescreen.

Hmm... Well, you've got a point there. I think the reason videotapes were almost universally done in pan-'n-scan and DVDs are almost universally done in widescreen is because of:

• resolution -- the letterboxed picture will look very sharp on DVD, but less detailed on videotape
• TV size -- people today have much bigger TVs (except me, I guess) than they did when movies started coming out on videotape

Some of them are crappy and do the letterboxing on the print of the DVD, and it actually plays in 4:3 mode. That's just wrong.

Ecch. That's got to suck.

I was thinking about this once... If you play a letterboxed VHS movie on a widescreen TV, the VCR will output a 1.33:1 picture. The TV will add black bars on the left and right sides, and since the movie is letterboxed, black bars will also appear on the top and bottom. The result is a small widescreen picture inside a thick black frame. The same would be true of letterboxed (not widescreen/anamorphic) DVDs.

When HDTV becomes commonplace, though, pan-'n-scan will disappear pretty quickly. People will demand widescreen DVDs so they don't have the, um..."damn black bars"...on the sides!

There are a good number of DVDs that are only available as pan-'n-scan. I'm sure Hollywood is already taking some heat for this... Just wait until people try to watch them on their widescreen TVs...

As for "extreme widescreen" (2.35:1 or greater), I'm not sure what the consensus will be about letterboxing on a widescreen TV (1.78:1). Maybe it won't be as noticeable due to the already-prominent horizontal orientation of the screen. Or maybe it will?

Does anyone know if there are any formats wider than 2.35:1 in common use? I know Ben-Hur was filmed with 2.66:1. I thought I heard 3:1 mentioned once. Anything else?

If it isn't letterboxed, you lose 43% of the picture...

Even with HDTV, some classics like Chinatown (2.35) and Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia (both 2.66 or so) will still be letterboxed because they were shot for the 70 mm and other wider ratio formats.

True. But try watching a 2.35-aspect ratio movie on a normal (1.33) TV. Die Hard With a Vengeance and X-Files: Fight the Future are two such films. The letterboxing is terrible there. Movies with a 1.85 aspect ratio exhibit minor letterboxing and are tolerable.

You and other widescreen advocates have a very good point with respect to losing part of the picture due to "reformatting." I will definitely admit that it would be really stupid to issue DVDs in pan-'n-scan only. You'd get a full frame now, but in the future, your widescreen TV will show black bars on the sides, and you'd be pissed off at the movie studios because there'd be no excuse for losing part of the picture.

It's nice when the DVD has both pan-'n-scan and widescreen versions on the same disc. But it's kind of silly to use up so much storage space with two copies of the same movie. This makes me wonder why auto pan-'n-scan isn't implemented on very many DVDs. (After you click the link, scroll down a bit to read about auto pan-'n-scan.) Basically, auto-pan-'n-scan makes the player, itself, display part of the widescreen frame fullscreen on a 1.33 disc. The disc contains only the widescreen version, but with instructions to the player that say, "If the user wants pan-'n-scan, focus on this part of the frame...then focus on this other part of the frame..., etc." Only one copy of the movie, and you can have it either way. Peace at last, with efficient use of disc space. The problem is that the "window" it focuses with can only slide left and right. It cannot zoom in or out or move up or down. There's more information about this in the DVD FAQ. The best solution, then, is to have two versions of the movie on the same disc.

Properly made DVD's (anamorphic letterboxed) are future-proofed for HDTV, which *will* become ubiquitous (thank you, FCC).

Not every country has mandated the implementation of HDTV.

It's kind of silly that they say "DVDs are for widescreen TVs" yet we are being convinced to buy them even though we only have normal, nonwidescreen TVs. It's like a game company releases a 3D shooting game like Quake that has extremely detailed graphics -- so detailed that the game plays really choppily and slowly on most computers. It is not possible to turn down the detail level. We are told, "You'll love this game -- it's the best ever." When asked about the slowness, we are told, "It's designed for really high-end 2 GHz PCs with SuperUltraGeForce512 3D graphics accelerators." We say, "But those won't be released to the public for six months!" You can play the game, yes, but until technology catches up with it...

Perhaps that was a bad analogy, but I hope you see my point. I went down to my local TV/stereo store the other day, and the cheapest widescreen TV was $5000.

If it isn't letterboxed, you lose 43% of the picture...

Even with HDTV, some classics like Chinatown (2.35) and Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia (both 2.66 or so) will still be letterboxed because they were shot for the 70 mm and other wider ratio formats.

True. But try watching a 2.35-aspect ratio movie on a normal (1.33) TV. Die Hard With a Vengeance and X-Files: Fight the Future are two such films. The letterboxing is terrible there. Movies with a 1.85 aspect ratio exhibit minor letterboxing and are tolerable.

You and other widescreen advocates have a very good point with respect to losing part of the picture due to "reformatting." I will definitely admit that it would be really stupid to issue DVDs in pan-'n-scan only. You'd get a full frame now, but in the future, your widescreen TV will show black bars on the sides, and you'd be pissed off at the movie studios because there'd be no excuse for losing part of the picture.

It's nice when the DVD has both pan-'n-scan and widescreen versions on the same disc. But it's kind of silly to use up so much storage space with two copies of the same movie. This makes me wonder why auto pan-'n-scan isn't implemented on very many DVDs. (After you click the link, scroll down a bit to read about auto pan-'n-scan.) Basically, auto-pan-'n-scan makes the player, itself, display part of the widescreen frame fullscreen on a 1.33 disc. The disc contains only the widescreen version, but with instructions to the player that say, "If the user wants pan-'n-scan, focus on this part of the frame...then focus on this other part of the frame..., etc." Only one copy of the movie, and you can have it either way. Peace at last, with efficient use of disc space. The problem is that the "window" it focuses with can only slide left and right. It cannot zoom in or out or move up or down. There's more information about this in the DVD FAQ. The best solution, then, is to have two versions of the movie on the same disc.

Properly made DVD's (anamorphic letterboxed) are future-proofed for HDTV, which *will* become ubiquitous (thank you, FCC).

Not every country has mandated the implementation of HDTV.

It's kind of silly that they say "DVDs are for widescreen TVs" yet we are being convinced to buy them even though we only have normal, nonwidescreen TVs. It's like a game company releases a 3D shooting game like Quake that has extremely detailed graphics -- so detailed that the game plays really choppily and slowly on most computers. It is not possible to turn down the detail level. We are told, "You'll love this game -- it's the best ever." When asked about the slowness, we are told, "It's designed for really high-end 2 GHz PCs with SuperUltraGeForce512 3D graphics accelerators." We say, "But those won't be released to the public for six months!" You can play the game, yes, but until technology catches up with it...

Perhaps that was a bad analogy, but I hope you see my point. I went down to my local TV/stereo store the other day, and the cheapest widescreen TV was $5000.

I don't mean to be a karma whore, but I happened to be looking into this very issue last night, and I found a whole lot of information in the DVD FAQ. In particular, this section gives details on all the various writeable DVD formats.

Personally, I'm trying to decide whether to archive all my videotapes on VideoCD now, or wait for some kind of recordable DVD format. (Quality isn't an issue for these tapes; if it was, I'd just buy them on DVD.) My main problem with VideoCD is the 74 minute capacity, which is just enough to almost, but not quite, fit an entire movie...

I don't mean to be a karma whore, but I happened to be looking into this very issue last night, and I found a whole lot of information in the DVD FAQ. In particular, this section gives details on all the various writeable DVD formats.

Personally, I'm trying to decide whether to archive all my videotapes on VideoCD now, or wait for some kind of recordable DVD format. (Quality isn't an issue for these tapes; if it was, I'd just buy them on DVD.) My main problem with VideoCD is the 74 minute capacity, which is just enough to almost, but not quite, fit an entire movie...

First of all, this is really old news, according to the press release linked in the article, the recorder should be out for some months now (December 1999).

More interesting info about recordable DVDs at DVD-FAQ http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#4.3

• DVD FAQ #6.1: 6%/$6
• Nintendo Dolphin FAQ: See "Why won't Nintendo's "base" unit just include DVD playback?" ($20)

There seem to be a large number of companies that will master and press DVDs. All you have to do is supply the content and non-trivial pile of money. The CSS encoding involves licensing fees, but it isn't restricted to the big movie studios. The DVD FAQ has a section on DVD production.

I'm reading that a lot here on Slashdot, but are you sure? Read this section from the DVD FAQ at dvddemystified.com. It says that the DVD-ROM drive's firmware reads the key block on the disc and exchanges authentication codes with the CSS module of the DVD player software. If this is the case, then why would the firmware allow the key block to be copied? If it can't be copied, how do you create a bit-for-bit copy of a disc short of hacking the firmware on the drive -or- *gasp* cracking CSS?

I'm not saying DeCSS is for piracy. I do believe it's for viewing DVDs on Linux, but that's what it is intended to do. Let's not ignore what it can do. The MPAA's legal team sure won't.

But why the hell should they CARE about the home user making a copy or three?

It's been clear for some time that this isn't about piracy. As has been pointed out before:

1. Commercial, large-scale bootleggers don't need DeCSS to burn thousands of pirated copies of DVDs, and
2. For home users with a DVD drive, piracy is impractical given the media cost. (Not to mention that CDs can be copied in this same way, CDs have no equivalent of CSS, and the bottom hasn't exactly dropped out of the CD market.)

So what is the point of this? It's been suggested that they really want to control the market for drives...and that's possible, I guess, but according to the DVD FAQ, the license for CSS is free.

Could they be wanting to control the format in order to restrict use of it by independent artists? That would explain the MPAA's interest, I guess, but my understanding is that DVDs that aren't CSS-encrypted can still be played on any player.

Then there's maintaining the region control as a possible motivation...and while I'm sure studios prefer to be able to control which countries can see a movie, I somehow can't see it as being important enough for this level of attack.

I'm left with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and specifically the anti-consumer provisions that make it illegal to access content you own in a way that the copyright holder doesn't want to allow. This the potential to enormously increase the power of the MPAA and its members over the public, surely enough reason for the ferocity of the attack on DeCSS.

However - the actions and words of Judge Lewis Kaplan today notwithstanding - this is an awfully weak case for them to test the DMCA with. It straightforwardly pits the interests of the plaintiff against the right of consumers to create software for interoperability and to make fair use of content (in this case, to play legally purchased DVDs on a computer player they own).

I'm left with one of two conclusions: either there's some deep dark mystery here, or the movie industry is run by idiots. At this point I wouldn't rule out either possibility.

From the DVD FAQ
For reference, a CD-ROM holds about 650 megabytes, which is 0.64 gigabytes or 0.68 billion bytes. In the list below, SS/DS means single-/double-sided,
SL/DL/ML means single-/dual-/mixed-layer (mixed means single layer on one side, double layer on the other side), gig means gigabytes (2^30), G means billions of
bytes (10^9). See note about giga vs. billion in section 7.2.

DVD-5 (12cm, SS/SL): 4.38 gig (4.7 G) of data, over 2 hours of video
DVD-9 (12cm, SS/DL): 7.95 gig (8.5 G), about 4 hours
DVD-10 (12cm, DS/SL): 8.75 gig (9.4 G), about 4.5 hours
DVD-14 (12cm, DS/ML): 12.33 gig (13.24 G), about 6.5 hours
DVD-18 (12cm, DS/DL): 15.90 gig (17 G), over 8 hours
DVD-1 (8cm, SS/SL): 1.36 gig (1.4 G), about half an hour
DVD-2 (8cm, SS/DL): 2.48 gig (2.7 G), about 1.3 hours
DVD-3 (8cm, DS/SL): 2.72 gig (2.9 G), about 1.4 hours
DVD-4 (8cm, DS/DL): 4.95 gig (5.3 G), about 2.5 hours
DVD-R (12cm, SS/SL): 3.68 gig (3.95 G)
DVD-R (12cm, DS/SL): 7.38 gig (7.9 G)
DVD-R (8cm, SS/SL): 1.15 gig (1.23 G)
DVD-R (8cm, DS/SL): 2.29 gig (2.46 G)
DVD-RAM (12cm, SS/SL): 2.40 gig (2.58 G)
DVD-RAM (12cm, DS/SL): 4.80 gig (5.16 G)

You really want to look here for answers to your questions. To be brief, region codes prevent movies from being played in markets where they aren't released yet. You can get codefree DVD players that will play any DVDs. There's a copy-protection scheme called Macrovision which prevents recording onto VHS by messing with the automatic gain. Not all disks have it. It too can be defeated, either by disabling in hardware or software the code which turns it on, or by using a device which cleans the signal.

Just for your information about why DVD is better than laserdisc in regards to laser rot and superior capacity (== quality) of DVD. HTH.

From the DVD FAQ: Laser Rot and Will DVD Replace Laserdisc?.

-BK

Just for your information about why DVD is better than laserdisc in regards to laser rot and superior capacity (== quality) of DVD. HTH.

From the DVD FAQ: Laser Rot and Will DVD Replace Laserdisc?.

-BK

From the DVD FAQ:

[1.12] What about DVD-Audio or Music DVD?
When DVD was released in 1996 there was no DVD-Audio format, although the audio capabilities of DVD-Video far surpassed CD. The DVD Forum sought additional input from the music industry before defining the DVD-Audio format. A draft standard was released by the DVD Forum's Working Group 4 (WG4) in January 1998, and version 0.9 was released in July. The final DVD-Audio 1.0 specification was approved in February 1999 and released in March. DVD-Audio products will show up in late 1999 at the earliest (Panasonic has announced DVD-Audio/DVD-Video players for October 1999). The delay is being caused by the slow process of selecting copy protection features (encryption and watermarking). A watermarking technology was supposed to have been chosen from the top two contenders: Aris Technologies and Blue Spike. (Aris press releases in late June touted itself as the winner but there has been no official announcement.) Proposals from Cognicity, IBM, and Solana were eliminated during testing, although Solana later merged with Aris.) The evaluation process is being done by major music companies in conjunction with the 4C Entity, comprising IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba. It's possible that the RIAA's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) could push the introduction of DVD-Audio into 2000.

DVD-Audio is a separate format from DVD-Video. DVD-Audio discs can be designed to work in DVD-Video players, but its possible to make a DVD-Audio disc that won't play at all in a DVD-Video player, since the DVD-Audio specification includes new formats and features, with content stored in a separate "DVD-Audio zone" on the disc (the AUDIO_TS directory) that DVD-Video players never look at. New DVD-Audio players are needed, or new "universal players" that can play both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio discs.

Plea to producers: Universal players won't be available for some time, but you can make "universal discs" today. With a small amount of effort, all DVD-Audio discs can be made to work on all DVD players by including a Dolby Digital version of the audio in the DVD-Video zone.
Plea to DVD-Audio authoring system developers: Make your software do this by default or strongly recommend this option during authoring.

DVD-Audio (and universal) players will work with existing receivers. They output PCM and Dolby Digital, and some will support the optional DTS and DSD formats. However, most current receivers can't decode the high-definition PCM audio (see 3.6.1 for details), and even if they could it can't be carried on standard digital audio connections. DVD-Audio players with high-end digital-to-analog converters (DACs) can be hooked up to receivers with two-channel or 6-channel analog inputs, but some quality will be lost if the receiver converts back to digital for processing. Future receivers with improved digital connections such as IEEE 1394 (FireWire) will be required to use the full digital resolution of DVD-Audio.

The music industry has requested an "embedding signalling" or "digital watermark" copy protection feature. This uses signal processing technology to apply a digital signature and optional encryption keys to the audio in the form of supposedly inaudible noise so that new equipment will recognize copied audio and refuse to play it. Audiophiles claim this degrades the audio.

In the meantime, the DVD-Video standard includes surround sound audio and better-than-CD audio (see 3.6.2).

Sony and Philips have developed a competing Super Audio CD format. (See 3.6.1 for details.) SACD provides "legacy" discs that have two layers, one that plays in existing CD players, plus a high-density layer for DVD-Audio players. Ironically, initial price for these dual-layer discs will be higher than for a standard CD plus a standard DVD. Sony released version 0.9 of the SACD spec in April 1998, the final version is expected in April 1999. SACD technology will be available to existing Sony/Philips CD licensees at no additional cost.