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http://www.dvdforum.org/sc-meetingdetails.htm is where you can find the information on how the voting members of DVD Forum voted.

When applied to computers and periphals, it is always "disk" with a "k". "Disc" only came into use as the Compact Disc

Blu-ray Disc also uses "disc", as does the DVD Forum's semi-official expansion of DVD as "digital versatile disc". The pattern here is that optical storage uses "disc", while magnetic storage uses "disk".

From the PDF "Requirements Specification for HD DVD Video Application"
(http://www.dvdforum.org/gen-reqspec.htm), an official document from the DVD Forum.

Apart from the requirements listed in this document it is required that the HD DVD Video application layer will support and improve upon features offered in DVD such as regional coding, multiple menu languages,

During the 34th steering committee meeting (May 24, 2006), DVD Forum created a "HD DVD RPC Ad hoc group to work with appropriate WGs to develop a specification and enforcement plan for RPC on HD DVD-Video including region map and requirements in consultation with the studios"

http://www.dvdforum.org/34scmtg-resolution.htm

This subcommitee is shown in the DVD Forum steering committee diagram:

http://www.dvdforum.org/images/forumorg-sc-06.jpg

HD DVD regional coding was a "feature" they were working on, they were probably to be added at a later date.

From the PDF "Requirements Specification for HD DVD Video Application"
(http://www.dvdforum.org/gen-reqspec.htm), an official document from the DVD Forum.

Apart from the requirements listed in this document it is required that the HD DVD Video application layer will support and improve upon features offered in DVD such as regional coding, multiple menu languages,

During the 34th steering committee meeting (May 24, 2006), DVD Forum created a "HD DVD RPC Ad hoc group to work with appropriate WGs to develop a specification and enforcement plan for RPC on HD DVD-Video including region map and requirements in consultation with the studios"

http://www.dvdforum.org/34scmtg-resolution.htm

This subcommitee is shown in the DVD Forum steering committee diagram:

http://www.dvdforum.org/images/forumorg-sc-06.jpg

HD DVD regional coding was a "feature" they were working on, they were probably to be added at a later date.

The *ONLY* advantage Blu-Ray had was more disc space, which is unnecessary -- just look at the DVD9-sized x264 reencodes from many groups out there... They look as good as the retail disc to me (on a fairly high end TV, and I'm not blind either). On a 25GB disc, that would still leave you with 14GB left for extra audio tracks and extras. From a computer storage/backup standpoint, that DOES make Blu-Ray better, but as for a entertainment/video format, not.

I've been observing the revolt at digg throughout the day. The editors can no longer keep up with the posts. The entire digg front page (and most of the "Upcoming stories") is flooded with posts about the HD-DVD key.

Someone tried to create a Wikipedia page documenting the revolt, but that too was taken down.

Since AACS was broken 6 weeks ago, the MPAA and AACS LA have been sending out a flurry of DMCA takedown notices. However, as this example shows, the takedown notices seem to be delivered via USPS Express Mail. As mentioned, the current explosion has more than 300,000 pages mentioning the key (I don't know how many link to the Doom9 page). IIRC, Express Mail costs about USD $8 [usps.com seems to be off-line at the moment]. Sending out 300,000 notices at $8 a pop would inject $2.4M into the coffers of the United States Postal Service. Perhaps they would even roll back the rate increase that went into effect today [yeah, right].

Of course, delivering that many notices by physical mail would be prohibitively expensive, not to mention an ecological nightmare. The $2.4M would probably be better of spent combating the real pirates, rather than bloggers and video consumers.

First off, I think you missed the grandparent's point. In the spirit of the parent, who's to say that the next storage medium will be a hard drive? What if someone comes up with a cheap way to manufacture a storage medium that plugs directly into an ethernet port or something similar (or for that matter, completely different). The point here is that we don't know what the next storage medium will be.

Finally, I think you're wrong about consumers thinking long-run. First off, I think consumers do look in the long run for a lot of cases. Granted, when I'm in the supermarket line deciding whether or not to buy a pack of gum, I'm not thinking in the long run. However, when my TV start getting old and unreliable and I decide to upgrade to a new one, I think about how long it will last, which formats it will support, and how much things will be chaning over the next few years among a variety of other factors before I buy it. The same thing happens when buying cars or houses.
But I see that you were trying to argue that the failure of Blu-ray or HDDVD isn't due to consumers thinking in the long-run but instead due to the lack of significant benefit (or new features, or new capabilities, or whatever you want to call it) provided by HD compared to revolutionary things like TiVo. I can definitely agree that that is a factor, but it isn't the only factor by any means, and consumers' long term thinking plays a role. Furthermore, TiVo, or DVRs in general, didn't happen quickly either. In 2005, there were under 8 million DVR users in the US, which is 8 years after TiVo was founded. The DVD format was agreed upon in 1995 (which I'll use as the start of DVDs, even though that isn't necessarily true). In 2003, 48 million homes in the US had DVD players, which obviously blows away TiVo 2 year later. I understand that DVDs really aren't an incremental upgrade in a lot of consumers' minds, but it is to others. As far as my parents were concerned, they could watch a video on a VHS player or they could buy a new player to watch the same videos. In a lot of ways, that is the same as the difference between DVDs and High Def DVDs. The point is, whether or not something is revolutionary doesn't necessarily dictate its popularity, neither does a consumer's tendency to think in the long run or how shiny something is. There are a lot of factors.

Oh, and just to add insult to injury, I'm guessing that you're probably not aware that HD-DVD is being developed by the DVD Forum, the same folks who developed and continue to work with the plain ol' DVD format. If you want to compare comparable lists, you need to look at the DVD Forum's members.

I'd copy them all down in a display of immature one-upmanship, but I don't feel like sitting here and typing out the names of all 224 companies.

Still want to argue about which format has more support?

I'm not an expert, but a properly coded film can be HD without taking such a lot of space as a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. Think H.264, or even XVid.

H.264 (AVC) playback is mandatory for HD players of both formats (as is VC-1). IMO these codecs will probably be used in preference to MPEG-2 to allow more space for the obligatory extras.

http://www.dvdforum.org/images/Forum_HD_DVD_Univer sal_24.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Specific ations

As for Xvid...well, you can't get a smaller file of equal quality from a lesser codec.

This is so stupid they should have a standards board that sets an international standard.

They did. It chose HD-DVD. Unfortunately Sony decided they didn't want to play because they'd spent money developing a format that wasn't picked by the DVD Forum, so instead they spent still more millions - billions? - to push Blu-Ray instead.

And the consumers of the world said, "Wait, fuck that! You think we don't remember getting stung by VHS versus Betamax? We'll stick with our regular DVDs, thanks."

[fx: resists]

[fx: resists]

[fx: yields]

Yeah, well, I too was once of the simple, dogmatic view. (That if you pronounce it as a word, it's an acronym; if you spell out the letters, it's an abbreviation.) But then I checked dictionaries.

(For example, Chambers says that an acronym is "usually pronounced as a word". COD similarly says "a word, usu. pronounced as such". Note the suggestive but far from prescriptive 'usually'.)

And what have you against 'DVD'? Does it not stand officially for 'Digital Versatile Disc'? (And originally for 'Digital Video Disc'?)

(1) The name is "HD DVD", use a space not a minus : http://www.dvdforum.org/hddvd-tech.htm

(2) BD has always had MPEG4-AVC / H.264 as one of its mandatory decoders.

(3) It's up to the movie companies to decide between mpeg2, mpeg4 og vc1 for each title.

(4) Some of the first BD titles will most probably be MPEG2 and of equal or better quality than MPEG4 titles, since the MPEG2 encoders are more mature and BD has the space to spare for the extra bandwidth of MPEG2.

(5) For use as a R/RW disc at home, BD's 66% extra space, faster access and faster read/write makes it the CLEAR winner.

They are digital video discs, but they can not display the DVD logo

Just to be pedantic, they're Digital Versatile Discs but they can't display the DVD -Video(tm) logo.

He probably forgot to rewind. It's not like HD-DVD is a futuristic random-access video-on-disc technology or anything like that.

;)

It's not so simple. The DVD specification (especially the CSS part of it) is not open. To build a device that will play movies you need to pay the DVD Forum to license the "book" containing the specifications. There may also be a per-device fee. The license probabably doesn't force you to manufacture region-coded devices, but may (someone else might know this) require you to pay more. In any case hardware companies enjoy this distinction: it seems their profits are maximized by charging $80 for a regular DVD player, $300 for an region-free one.

Buh what? Are you seriously proposing that recordable optical discs are less rigorously standardized than Internet markup schemes? I direct you to the DVD Forum which employs rather a lot of scientists and engineers in the pursuit of their standardization duties. By comparison the RSS community is a bunch of cavemen with stick drawings.

I didn't RTFA but, if I remember correctly, the OP has some major misinformation in his post. It was my impression that WMV9 was approved by the HD DVD groups to be supported in ADDITION to the MPEG4 codec. It didn't REPLACE the MPEG4 codec.

Provisional approval of MPEG2, WM9 (VC-9) and MPEG4 AVC(H.264) Video CODECs as mandatory for the HD DVD Video specification for playback devices, subject to (a) an update in 60 days regarding licensing terms and conditions, (b) a presentation by each of the respective licensing bodies at the next SC meeting and (c) possible elimination of any of the above CODECs at the next SC meeting.

consumes less power

is less susceptible to vibration

smaller form factor

less heat dissipated (either due to disc rpm or embedded processing)

I am personally waiting for drives that can burn to dual-layer DVD-R media. The steering committee of the DVD Forum just approved version 2.9 of their dual-layer DVD-R specification in a meeting that occured on September 22nd. It shouldn't be too long now. Getting a drive that supports both dual-layer formats is more important to me than the cost of the media itself.

I am personally waiting for drives that can burn to dual-layer DVD-R media. The steering committee of the DVD Forum just approved version 2.9 of their dual-layer DVD-R specification in a meeting that occured on September 22nd. It shouldn't be too long now. Getting a drive that supports both dual-layer formats is more important to me than the cost of the media itself.

What does DVD mean?
The keyword is "versatile." Digital Versatile discs provide superb video, audio and data storage and access -- all on one disc.

1. The DVD Consortium is now called the DVD Forum, so there is no "official DVD Consortium Document" any more.
   
2. The DVD Forum does not unambiguously specify what DVD stands for. The best you'll find on their site is the answer to the question, "What does DVD mean?", which they answer, "The keyword is "versatile." Digital Versatile discs provide superb video, audio and data storage and access -- all on one disc."
   
3. When the DVD Forum refers to the physical medium on which music, video, and data are stored, they always spell it "disc," and not "disk."
   

As the other poster stated, the difference between the two formats is almost nothing. I believe the -R format is 1 - 2 percent more compatible with standalone DVD players.

It's more of a personal thing. The -R format was developed by the DVD Forum and the +R format was developed by the DVD+RW Alliance. -R was the standard and +R was created by companies not willing to pay to use it. Personally, I use -R for that reason.

I was wondering the same thing. It evidently wouldn't be that difficult to write one (six lines of perl and all that).

According to this site it does seem to cost $10,000 per DVD format (of which you seem to need two) for a licence to produce a DVD player, though, so it may be a business case thing. The question is - would 1,000 people would be prepared to spend $20 for the right to play DVDs legally on Linux?

A) it's the -R (as we've all come to know -R) equivilent of dual layer technology? What happened to Pioneer's -R DL effort? Does this moot it, add to it, or surpass it? Will Pioneer ALSO release a -R DL format?

Pioneer is still developing a dual layer -R format. The "dash" or "minus" format is the only one sanctioned by the DVD-Forum.

B) Or is this just a marketing name used by Sony for what is in fact the same DL technology used by the +R group, and the discs/drives will be basically interchangeable among the Sony/Philips standard? It's not quite the same technology. In fact, IIRC, the Dual Layer moniker is apparently not allowed to be used by the DVD+R Alliance due to DVD Forum trademarks. Most modern DVD players should be able to play DVDs from both camps.

C) Will the -R DL discs be readable in set tops or computer drives that cannot read +R/RW media but can read existing dual-layer media?

This is the $64,000 question. They should be optically identical to the player, but whether the media itself is of good enough quality remains to be seen. Probably there should be fewer problems, but the compatibility issue is so small on modern players that it's not worth it. My main concern is long-term longevity, like layer delamination and DVD rot with any writeable dual-layer format.

I don't think Sony would like paying Microsoft royalties one bit on thier bread and butter.

Sony has invested heavily on the DVD format and is looking towards the future.

Remember Sony has a high aminosity towards Mircosoft due to circumstances in the set top box market and Sony's open support for linux.

Like in the Eric Frank Russell story "U-turn", "[m]ay you live in interesting times."

No facts, no reasons, no nothing. Just "OH LOOK EVERYONE M$ IS AT IT AGAIN!! KILL KILL!!!"

You know, I've heard the DVD-RAM argument before. Since I do this for a living right now, let me mention that most people have no idea what they're buying as far as blanks go, nor as to how they treat them.

All media, including +R, -R and -RAM, need to be stored and treated properly. This means: being handled along the edges, using water-based ink pens and not labels with glue or solvent-based inks (and IMO writing along the clear spindle portion of the writeable and instead labeling on the case and making a head title in the DVD itself), storing in a covered case away from dust and mold, sunlight or any high source of EM radiation, temperature/humidity extremes, cycles of wide temperature/humidity change. This is where most people screw up, and where most people need to be educated.

Beyond that, you need to choose a blank that has good quality and the right format. Now, since the DVD Forum that makes all standard DVD players and, therefore, gives the user the best chance to play these discs 20 or 30 years down the road recommends DVD-R, use DVD-R. +R has known compatibility problems with older players though it has technical advantages. +RW and -RW are designed to be rewritten and for that reason the dyes used have less stability IMO. -RAM has inline error correction, but so do +R and -R (something like Reed-Solomon or Viterbi), and very few commercial players can use -RAM. You shouldn't need the error correction if you treat the disc properly anyway, because it's only meant as an in-line protection against small scratches. But as I mentioned, dye stability is of critical importance. Most formulations out there are crap, but there are two I have basically centered on for my customers: Mitsui Gold/Silver, and Verbatim Datalife Plus. They are expensive blanks, around $3 a piece in a spindle. However, if your goal is to retain your data, then who cares what it costs now relative to being unable to retrieve your data. Both of those specific brands of Mitsui and Verbatim guarantee data life to a minimum 100 years with temperature stabilized dyes and sealed CD surfaces. If you're a complete hard-ass, then I suggest at least going to the next tier down, which is something like Fuji, TDK, Taiyo Yuden, and possibly Maxell.

Finally, you need to use a good writer and writing methods. I trust Pioneer and Plextor, with my preference being to Pioneer primarily because they have bells and whistles related to some pretty severe error checking. That error checking takes a huge amount of time, but if you're paranoid about your data it may be worth it. Cheaper drives may do roughly the same job, but I've read some stories about people having problems with cheaper drives and compatibility. And keep your write speeds low! I wouldn't go any faster than 4x. I'm not so hard up with my time that I can't be bothered to wait an extra 8 minutes for 4x and 8x. Just like CD players, some DVD players have problems when you write faster media. Heck, I've suggested writing 2x just to be damned sure if you have the time. Paranoid? Maybe just a bit, but IMO it's not worth the risk if you really want to retain your data over the long term.

So, in short, DVD-RAM may be good, but you need to be able to read and use it in as many players in the end as you can. It has the lowest compatibility, though I think it would've made an excellent format choice in the end. Sometimes the standard isn't dictated by what's the best (i.e. -RAM vs. +R and -R), but you have to look at all the variables in the equation too.

DVD-R is the only format that the DVD-Forum endorses. I don't see a hint of +R or +RW anywhere in there. Just because Sony, Microsoft, or any number of other manufacturers are endorsing +R/+RW means nothing. Just because there are more drives in the store being purchased as +R/+RW means nothing. One could easily make the same argument for the +R/+RW only camp in introducing -R/-RW compatibility in their products. Besides that, +R/+RW media is both more expensive and newer. The -R/-RW media has been around a while, and this is why you see it for cheaper.

You want maximum compatibility, stick with -R. The nice folks in the story proved it. You don't know if someone will try to play the DVD you write on an older player. It'd suck for someone to get caught not being able to read what they have.

Note: How the parent got modded up this high is beyond my level of understanding.

Doesn't support +R/+RW.

DVD-R/RW media are cheaper (especially DVD-R, which you can now get for under $1 each). The DVD-R and -RW formats are from the same organization (the DVD Forum...site doesn't seem to work with Mozilla) that's behind DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and DVD-ROM, so compatibility should be less of a concern. (I think they also did DVD-RAM, but that's definitely a niche format.)

DVD-R is the only format that has been approved by the DVD Forum. It has the most hardware available for recording, and it is supported in more DVD drives and DVD players than DVD+R. DVD+R will soon fade from existance. If you want to be safe in the future and you want people to be able to read your DVDs, go with DVD-R.

Try some of these:

• dvdrw.com - Official DVD+RW Site
• dvdrhelp - lists some differences
• dvdplusrw.org - has some info on dvd+r plus some comparisons
• DVD FAQ
• Pioneer's Info
• DVD Forum - consortium supporting DVD and DVD-R, but not DVD+R

http://www.dvdforum.org/faq-dvdprimer.htm

Just wondering if anybody knew what sort of specs you'd want for your Linux box to run NWN.

It shouldn't be that different from the Windows specs, seeing as they're running on the same hardware. From the Neverwinter Nights page:

• Pentium® II 450 MHz or AMD K6 450 MHz
• 128 MB RAM
• 1.2 GB HD space
• 8X CD-ROM drive
• 16 MB OpenGL 1.2 video card
• 56K modem

Now, if you want a playable game that runs faster than one frame per second:

• Intel Pentium 5 or Athlon Clawhammer processor
• 1024 MB RAM
• 4.7 GB HD space
• CD-ROM drive fast enough to shatter CDs
• NVIDIA GeForce 5 video card or equivalent
• T1 Internet connection

DVD-R is the officially supported standard of the DVD Forum.

I just ordered a DVR-A04 for $299 I've seen the OEM for $249. The quality DVD+R drives were in the paper this weekend for $449 (HP @ CompUSA). The DVD-R disks ($2-$3) are near half the price of the DVD+R ($5-$6) disks. DVD-R has near 100% compatibility while +R is at about 70% and if you have an early model DVD player it has almost no chance.

I have used the DVR-A03 for over a year and have had no problems.

And once you have a market that exists, that will probably very rapidly have cheap blank discs, recorders, PC recorders, etc does anyone seriously consider that "HD-DVD" (blurry MPEG-4 on DVD-9...) has any chance of surviving? I can stick 12 full DVD-9 movies to one Blu-Ray flipper without re-encoding, so its kinda no-brainer.

And if you read specs, people, you already know that both formats (Blu-Ray is already "ready", HD-DVD still under negotiations) will include support to older formats (VCD, SVCD, DVD).

Good article:

http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=83

...and some extra info:

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/2641.cfm
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/blu-ray.cf m
http://www.sony.co.jp/en/SonyInfo/News/Press/20020 2/02-0219E/
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/hd-dvd.cfm
http://www.dvdforum.org/forum.shtml

I think an important reason the movie industry wants CSS is to control the players and not the $20 fee. The player manufactures need to license CSS and part of the license probably requires the implementation of region coding. Region coding does not benefit the manufacturers who otherwise would not add that feature. As for supporting the development of the DVD technology, the MPAA is not a key player. The manufactures cooperated and setup a system for licensing and sharing revenue from patents, see http://www.dvdforum.org/ for more details. Even with CSS cracked by DeCSS, in order to manufacture a hardware DVD player the payment of licensing for patents are needed. For a Linux system playing DVDs the patent fees have been paid by the manufacturer of the DVD hardware.

From my understanding, your point is totally correct. The purpose of a trade secret is to provide a legal means of prosecuting when somebody "spills the beans" and discloses stuff they've seen, such as what Xerox should have done with Steve Jobs at the PARC with their GUI interfaces.

In terms of DVD technology, this is a house of cards that is ready to fall apart from somebody trying to poke a hole at it.

Take a look at the DVD Licensing Agreement if you want to look at some perverted licensing agreements. This IS the trade secret agreement the DVD licensing authority is going to try to enforce. The CSS agreement is a seperate license, but nevertheless it is still along the same lines of thought.

The authority of the intellectual property agreements come from Article I, Section 8, clause 8 which says: "The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" Since trade secrets don't have a time limit (at least the DVD Forum's doesn't) I can't see how it can promote the progress of science or art.

Please let people know how silly the DVD licensing agreement really is, and how the DVD Forum is actually preventing the development of DVD technology as a video medium. You would be able to have your home movies on DVD for $1 + video transfer costs right now if it weren't for the stupid licensing requirement that are actually preventing people from exploiting the technology.

Imagine just what the WWW would be like if you had to pay $10,000 to obtain the specs for http, and deciphering shttp would get you into a similar lawsuit like this one over deCSS.

It's not just signing an NDA - it's big bucks. In the many thousands of dollars (See www.dvdforum.org - $5k for the specs, $10k for the license, I think) For your average linux hacker, official access to the specs isn't possible, and it would disallow source distribution. Now, I'm not saying that if you can't afford it, that you should steal it. I don't know the legalities involved with reverse engineering the format, but I don't think that it constitutes theft. Distributing copyrighted works clearly does, but deciphering an algorithm is a bit more murky.

I think that most people involved in this debate are not arguing that we should abolish intellectual property. Most people agree that the movies are copyrighted works, and should be protected as such. Most people also fail to see how reverse-engineering the format so that legally acquired DVDs can be watched on the platform of choice is a criminal act.

One of the problems with DVD-Video in general is that it hasn't been patented. If it were, the spec would be in the public domain and all of this discussion would be pointless except for trying to decide just how much of a royalty each of the original developer of DVD would be getting when for-profit copies of open source DVD software was sold.

If you look at the DVD Fourm's licensing non-disclosure agreement you will find that it is quite restrictive. Mainly this is because DVD hasn't been patented, but instead they are persuing a course of protected under trade secret laws. If you spill the beans then your will be roasted alive.

The Linux DVD folks are trying to get a DVD-Video player working, and right now the knowlede is being spread by osmosis or some other very painfully slow process. About half of the group has signed the DVD Forum's agreement, and the other half are busy trying to hack at DVD trying to understand how it works. The folks who know DVD are saying "yeah, you are close" or "the specs for that part of DVD are actually ISO 13818-3" or something like that to give them a hand.

Eventually all of the information regarding DVD-Video will be made, one way or another, public knowledge. Unfortunately there won't be an open source DVD player until this happens.

Umm, the DVD Forum. You know, the people who hold the DVD specs tighter than ... well, you know.

If you don't follow their rules, they revoke your access to the specs and impose a rather serious fine.

Go to the DVD Forum's web site and read this crap for yourself. (http://www.dvdforum.org/)