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"D-VHS": Will it replace DVD?
1+1trouble writes "Wired News has an interesting article about D-VHS: 'JVC introduced the new D-VHS tape at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) along with a high definition television (HDTV) set that protects high definition content from being copied. Video on D-VHS tapes is uncompressed, so it's enormous. A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible...D-VHS can record and play back up to four hours of video in high definition mode -- up to 1,080 lines per screen width, or more than double the resolution of DVD...' The proposition comes in sync with the current haggle over copy-protection schemes. But, considering it's hefty price tag and DVD's head-start, it might just be relegated to the throngs of the laserdisc."
> A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30
> minutes of the video, according to company
> officials, making the trading of HD content
> over the Internet impossible...
So all one yahoo has to do is to kludge together a compressor from D-VHS to MPEG/AVI/MOV/ASX and we are right back to were we started.
Admittedly, the hardware requirements would be impressive to pull it off, but one decidated person is needed to pull it off. As well, by the time this kind of stuff becomes standard, I will own a 2GHz computer with 200 GB of storage anyways.
Nothing is impossible.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Then when you actually *get* a sale, you have to point out that, in order to play the new HDTV tapes, you not only need a new HDTV set, but one that supports the encryption used on the tape as for copy protection reasons it will only be decoded in authorized sets - no software or PC decoders involved.
I am sure the rush to such a device will be overwhelming....
--
-=DaveHowe=-
For instance, I helped to develop the CueCat, the Sony Betamax, the Yugo, MS Bob and numerous other blue ribbon products.
All kidding aside, you can't scorn the Betamax. It was, and arguably still is, leaps and bounds ahead of VHS.
Remember, Sony failed only because their license fees for the technology were so expensive. The reason? The MPAA sued Sony over the VCR and how it would cut into movie royalties. Sony was therefore at a disadvantage, trying to finance both their lawsuit and a possible verdict against them with the royalties on Beta VCRs.
JVC came in with VHS in 1977, which was a cheapo rip-off of Beta that was just different enough to not infringe on any of Sony's patents. The MPAA lawsuit was won by Sony, but the battle for the shelf under peoples' TV sets was won by VHS.
Betamax is simply a 1/2" version of Sony's legendary 3/4" U-Matic format. U-Matic was designed as an industrial format for TV stations and the like. To this day, if you have a 3/4" U-Matic videocassette, I'd be surprised if there are many TV stations in the world that couldn't play it.
Factoid: "Beta" means "closer" in Japanese; Beta VCRs were so-named because the video tracks laid down by the rotating head assembly were closer than those of the bigger and older U-Matic predecessor.
U-Matic was eventually replaced by Betacam, which is a Betamax VCR mechanism that runs the tape a lot faster for better picture quality. Betacam and Betacam SP have been *the format* for TV stations, ENG cameras, editing, etc. Finally, the torch has now mostly been passed to the D-Betacam, a digital version of the venerable Betacam which shares its heritage with the home Betamax and the U-Matic before.
And, of course, before those, was the Sony AV-3600 and other open-reel 1/2" VTRs. (I'm the proud owner of a 1975 AV-3600. Razor-sharp picture, though the AV-3600 was a low-end black-and-white model.)
Most importantly, though, if you're upset by the impotent plastic noises that your $200-at-Fry's VCR makes, you can take a look at how Ed Cushman watches TV. Sadly, I don't think you can rent a Quadruplex videotape at Blockbuster. (As recently as 1988, when I was in high school and volunteering at a low-budget community TV station, we had a Quad. It was loads of fun.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well, until someone rips the content with an efficient codec and ups it as SuperVCD or similar. Nice try, 10 years too late.
It's amazing and dangerous how often the computer community is underestimated, isn't it? You'd think that the big media producers would have learned after the MP3.
Ten years from now when gigabit ethernet represents a *slow* home Internet connection and fiber is the norm, and we're all sitting around with (...calculating based on Moore's Law...urk!) 96GHz AMD ThunderChickens, and this silly D-VHS is embraced by the consumer, it'll be interesting to see just how easily the uncompressed video *is* traded on the Internet.
Then again, you can't up video standards the way you can up processing power... Let's see, if it takes my PII-266 ten minutes to compress all of the 17-minute-long Donna Summers Macarthur Park Suite into a 256kbps MP3, how long will it take for the 96GHz ThunderChicken, even burdened down with Windows 2010 Amateur, to make a DivX?
As things are, making a DivX of a 320x240x15fps AVI file only takes about 2x the AVI's playing time.
Hollywood is naive. Or they've hopelessly forgotten the computers of 10 years ago. Or those of 10 years before that.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
2.) 2000 bucks for the thing? The mainstream market isn't going to pay for that.
3.) Just because the format is uncompressed doesn't mean it won't be used. All we have to do is come up with some compression scheme, think DIVX;). This does NOT pose a threat.
4.) It's tape, right? So it's not digital! No random access, none of those little extras that DVD has that are available right at your fingertips instantly.
5.) EVEN if this thing does by some miracle catch on, if it's analog, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to rig two of these suckers up together and just copy tape to tape. Kinda defeats the uncompression-is-protection thing.
6.) I can't see why the average Joe Consumer would be enamored enough to go back to tape with nice, shiny, digital, compact DVD already here and in full swing. What I can't see to an even higher degree is the average Joe Consumer spending 2 grand on it.
I think this is another DBA (Dead Before Arrival).
They cite the large uncompressed format as a deterrent against Internet copying. Are they completely naive?
People don't copy DVD data directly over the Internet. First it's ripped from DVD to disk. Then the raw data is compressed to MPEG4 and MP3, resulting in approximately 600megabytes of data.
At no point is the 9gigabytes or so of DVD data sent over the Internet.
So what does D-VHS buy you? People will get the raw data onto their hard disks even if they have to resort to framegrabbers. Then the compressed 600megabytes image is created just as before.
The D-VHS marketting department must have been really struggling for something good to say, if this is the best they can come up with.
Success of this scheme will depend on whether the mass of consumers is wants and is willing to pay for higher resolution TV. Evidence so far is no. HDTV is not selling well.
NTSC/PAL may well suck, but its enough to get the story across and that's what most people care for. The impact of special-effects and sweeping vistas is mostly related to image viewer angle, not image resolution. Big screen TVs (which are popular) take care of this.
On the question of tape versus disk, the big advantage of disk is random access. It's of little value in video entertainment which is mostly watched serially with very few jumps.
Care to tell us the model and how much you paid for this privilege? I bet it was a wee bit expensive.
Pick up an old Sony VPH-1030 or similar, maybe a Zenith Aquastar. If you have a budget to blow and need VGA resolution, look into a Sony VPH-1270 or similiar.
All of these are three-tube machines, so they're not very portable. But the picture quality of them exceeds a lot of LCD projectors, assuming that your tubes are still good and you know how to set the convergence properly.
Don't look at one that used to be in a bar or was owned by an audio-visual rental company. Both are likely to have a lot of hours and probably even some mechanical damage. Look around for one that is being displaced by a boardroom renovation.
I once found a VPH-1041 that had come out of a boardroom. When it was installed in 1991, it was top of the line. Eventually, it was replaced with a later model that could handle SVGA. The story behind it was that one of the managers of the company wanted to take it home, so he fired it up with it pointing at a wall, and assumed it was broken. (It wasn't aligned; these need to be aligned every time they're moved.)
Since I used to work for an audio-visual company and was even trained on these things by Sony of Canada, I knew it was a good deal and was able to pick up the "broken" video projector for $100. I set it up in my living room, aligned and re-shimmed the lenses for the wall, reversed the deflection (it had been set up for rear-projection), and then did the convergence. It was low hours and would light up my wall from floor to ceiling almost as bright as a movie theater. Eventually, I sold it to a friend of mine for $1200, including installation at his house.
Quick trick: If you're pointing a video projector at your wall and are looking for a little bit more brightness, get some brush-on clearcoat paint. Go to an abrasives supply company and get some fine (about 0.050") glass bead sandblasting media. Mix that with the clearcoat, and roller it onto your wall. It gives the wall almost the same texture as a proper reflective projection screen.
If you know where to look, you don't really need to spend much.
As for the conversation about resolution, yeah, NTSC's 525 scanning lines really start to look far apart when they're spread out across the 10' height of your living room wall.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
-Rewinding
-Bigger physically (goodbye DVD shelf, hello cassette bookcase)
-Magnetic tape (now there's something that doesent degrade over time
-More expensive to manufacture
-It has to break into a format saturated market
-It's an uncompressed format, but that doesen't stop me from transferring it to a more compressed format (ANY digital media can be duplicated, this is reality after all)
-No "Special Features" like chapter lists, menus, extras (well, they could be at the beginning or end, and we all love fast forewarding through Georgie Lucas' little preamble on Star Wars don't we)
I'm sure there are a host more (dis)advantages to having digital tapes, but these ones stand out for me right now.
"Screw everything! I'm going back to BetaMax!"
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
People like shiny things. That's why DVDs and CDs took off, while MDs have struggled and tapes (both VHS and audio) have all but disappeared for mainstream consumer use. Unless your media is shiny, don't expect it to succeed.
I agree that nobody really needs a cripser image on TVs that are 13" to 32". You really DO need a crisper image if you have one of these huge TV set (typically projection rather than tube). I don't have one (not sure why anyone does need to have one) but for those that do, the image quality is really pathetic. I suspect that's what this is all about.
because DVDs scan like CDs and let you jump to any point of the movie in an instant. D-VHS would be good for recording TV shows and alike, but not produced DVDs you can buy in a store.
Yup. Because of the simplicity of mass-producing a disc media versus a tape-in-cassette media, it's unlikely that the big duplicators and movie houses are going to embrace this.
And Blockbuster probably likes the fact that they never need to worry about rewinding DVDs.
For home recording, I see this as possible; but mass acceptance of HDTV is as far off as mass acceptance of DVD recorders.
I expect that we'll see this format eventually fail. It probably just JVC hoping to continue VHS so that they continue to get the royalties on it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You use encryption to prevent copying, not enormous files! Put some good RSA encryption on a DVD and it would be much harder to crack.
A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..
.AVI file.
Wow, these guys are pretty pessimistic on the evolution of technology... 300GB hard disks are a couple of years away at best, and their "impossible to crack" encryption scheme is a cozy but totally unsupported assertion. There's no reason to think this scheme won't eventually be cracked, at which point it won't be all that hard to DivX the content of a tape into a smaller, easily-transmitted
Beyond that, this is a stupid step backwards, and one that clearly puts the interests of consumers dead last. DVD, with all its warts, allows you to play videos on laptops, PCs, and small, easily-portable players; tapes are much more vulnerable to damage and the players are much bulkier and break down more often.
Nice try, but this isn't going to fly in the consumer arena.
The clincher for movies is always going to be what I call the Blockbuster factor. If your local video store thinks you'll have the machine, they'll carry the movies. If you think your local video store will carry the movies, you'll buy the player. But for $2000, nobody's going to start carrying movie titles when VHS and DVD are already practially guaranteed.
Digital VHS may stand a chance in the professional markets. It won't sell anywhere else, period.
They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity.
Most of the posts (up to this one) seem to have neglected the fact that these tapes will allow you to record HDTV in actual High Definition. That's kind of the point. And $2000 is really kind of cheap for the first release of a new technology. Remember how expensive calculators used to be? Apple computers?
If you set aside the whole "copy protection" and "transmission over the Internet" issues, this is actually kind of cool. Sure it would be better to have a DVD-RW that could record HDTV, but that's not possible right now-- even with compression.
I regret that the folks who announced this technology felt that they had to address those issues. And even though they brought it up first, I'm pretty disappointed that when something like this emerges, it's immediately criticized from the perspective of "they're trying to keep us from copying stuff willy nilly", rather than as a new technology that will allow us to do something we couldn't before: preserve HDTV broadcasts at home in High Definition.
Fade in:
D-VHS Tape looks over at the large server computer, and says: "RAID? Oh NO!!!"
D-VHS tape is quickly recorded and then explodes...
RAID. Kills tapes dead, where they hide.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well I doubt D-VHS will replace DVD soon. First of all the DVD has just become a standard accepted by the consumers so I doubt that the motion picture industry will run the risk of introducing a new standard so soon. On the consumer side, D-VHS has some advantages but I don't think that'll be enough for the consumer.
On the other side there are a lots of drawbacks that prevent this system to get a wide acceptance from the public:
To add a something on the motion picture industry support to HD I doubt it'll come before years. The next challenge for theaters will be to switch from analog classical film to digital projection. The only two systems demonstrated so far had resolutions of 1920x1080 and 1280x1024. Yes, that's right, that's HDTV resolution or a little bit less. So I don't think that the studios will like to give the customers the same quality they use for theaters.
And the last thing: how many customers are interested in picture quality? If many people really cared about picture quality I think that analog HDTV could have been a success in Europe or Japan and I also think that the motion picture industry wouldn't have dropped the 65mm cinematography and the 70mm prints.
No. Sorry.
The guy was wrong when he talked about not compressing the video stream. It is compressed using MPEG-2, like DVD, but not as much, so the picture quality is a lot higher (e.g., compare a 600k JPEG to a 200k JPEG of the same picture, at the same resolution).
The information is here.
The format also includes a video navigation system and automatic forwardwind and rewind mechanisms to get to the correct place on a tape. However it will take 5 minutes to get to a place on the tape that is 60 minutes away, as 12x rewind/forwardwind is the fastest available.
So even though finding things on a tape will not be a problem with this technology, it will take a long time. DVD wins this round.
The format can record 7 hours in HQ mode, and 21 hours in SD mode (same as DVD quality). DVD cannot currently record, but will be able to record soon. Draw.
Quality: D-VHS wins outright, as it uses a 14mbps stream, not a 4mbps stream like DVD.
Clunkiness. D-VHS is big and clunky. DVD is flat and nice. DVD wins this round obviously, however wouldn't a 60mm or 80mm DVD format be nice, and very portable. Should be an option for DVD-2 when it comes out with a higher capacity. However FMD might wake up soon and smash everything into the ground.
Support. DVD wins, it has won the next generation video format wars before they began. Most video stores have DVDs in stock. People own DVD players. In a couple of years this may change, but not at $2000 a player.
Features. DVD wins. Instant access to any point in a film. Additional features and information. Multiple soundtracks. Multiple endings. D-VHS is an unknown with some of these features, but they will not be as simple to use as DVD.
Lifespan: DVD if looked after will last a long time (hundreds of playings). D-VHS is an unknown, but if things follow how VHS works, then there will be a lot worse degradation than DVD. DVD wins. However, D-VHS's higher bitrate will mean that a lot more errors have to occur to mess the picture up noticably, but it has the point for quality elsewhere already. :-)
Score: DVD 6 D-VHS 1.
And I tried to be friendly to D-VHS... It will be used by broadcasters though to store material.