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Copy-Protected Digital VHS
DragonMagic writes: "BBC carries this story regarding the comeback, certain studios hope, of the video tape against the dominating sales of the DVD. Fox, Universal, Dreamworks SKG and Artisan Entertainment are releasing a series of blockbuster movies onto the format D-VHS, developed by JVC. DVHS offers High Definition TV technology and the possibility of copy prevention, and is able to play old VHS tapes as well."
DVHS is HD, DVD is not.
Q.
As it is digital, the quality will be as good as that of DVD.
....for a few weeks. Then they start to rot and de-res, and you get bad JPG-like blotchiness on the screen.
DVD does not offer HDTV resolution. The widescreen modes can play on a HDTV screen and give you pretty good quality, but it's not as good as HD.
The ideal format would be a DVD-style disk with blue lasers, and a writable/rewritable format available at the launch date. You just know they'll bungle it, but.... But if they had that, it would have enough storage space to do HDTV resolution video while being a nice optical medium. If they delivered writable/rewritable features with it, you could use it to record stuff.
This format would best be introduced in 3-5 years. People will have already converted their collections over to DVD and be looking for new media purchases, HDTV will be more available, and the hardware to make it usable as a substitute for a VCR will be there, too.
The main reason why the DVD format does the NTSC/PAL encoding is to make the player simpler, BTW. That, and good 24fps to 60fps conversion is a pain in the rear to do right in cheap hardware. With an HDTV-format DVD, they might do things the right way.
Gentoo Sucks
A press-release-looking document on the D-VHS specs is at http://www.jvc-victor.co.jp/english/products/vcr/D -VHS-e.html
e .html
It looks like the first idea behind these units were to record digital satellite links in DSRs (Digital Satellite Recorders). Here's another press release from 1997:
http://www.jvc-victor.co.jp/english/D-VHS/d970601
Progressive scan DVD play (either your tv does progressive scan, like the Sony XBR Wega TVs do, or your dvd player does) is plenty good enough for me. WAY better than NTSC, and especially VHS.
But it all depends on the restoration and digitalization quality of the DVD, too.
You may wonder why anyone would launch a new tape format in 2002; but D-VHS has actually been around for several years.
If you can read Japanese you can read the press release for the launch of Hitachi's first D-VHS machine in August 1998 here; otherwise you might like to take a look at this press release from 1999 which announces the first HD consumer VCR, which used D-VHS and was manufactured by Panasonic.
When D-VHS kit was first being developed it was all but impossible for consumers to record to DVD, so D-VHS looked like it might have a future. But DVD recording technology started to become affordable very soon after, so I guess by the time the manufacturers were ready to really push D-VHS in the West it was a non-starter.
And I can't say I'm surprised the major studios are looking at it - for the time being at least, no-one's hacked the copy protection, which is more than can be said for DVDs!
Divx the product is not the same as DivX the codec. Do some homework.
Interesting bits:
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,
And:
The HDCP system can't be broken, however, because only high definition sets will have the HDCP decoder, according to Dan McCarron, national product specialist in JVC's color TV division.
Heh, "can't be broken". Well, we'll just have to wait and see.
Personally, they can do whatever the hell they want. If they want to make it too hard for me to watch movies, then I won't. No skin off my back.
-Mike
High end DVD players with progressive scan outputs will give you a better picture on a HDTV set, but no, it is not a HDTV picture. I think that DVD's best output is 480p; compared with HDTV at 720p or 1080i.
The problem is that DVDs are currently too small to hold and entire movie at HDTV resolution. There are efforts underway to create a new, next generation HD-DVD player that would use blue or purple lasers that would allow for smaller pits on the disc, and therefore greater storage capacity, but for now these are in the prototyping stage only, and aren't expected to come to market for another 4-6 years or so.
D-VHS, on the other hand, will support HDTV resolutions, and will allow you to record a HDTV signal. There may or may not exist ulterior motives on the studios part to get people to buy into D-VHS, but unfortunately for now, of you want to record or view HDTV quality movies, D-VHS is your only alternative.
This is perceived as an interstitial technology by the participating studios in order to provide high-def films to home theatre owners. The expense of the tapes and players to the end users will ensure that only fairly price-insensitive purchasers will be interested, and this in turn will keep the number of DVHS releases low (production costs for videotapes are extremely high relative to digital media, and, unlike DVDs, you can't run small batches).
All the studios are still on board with high-def DVDs, but they're going to use DVHS to tide the high-end consumer over until the new technologies hit the market.
-Baka!
Strictly speaking its more expensive to produce different players for each region than it is to produce one player and use some software limitation to restrict what kind of picture it can generate. All the digital TV boxes I worked on used a Euro-DENC to convert the frame buffer into an RF signal that a TV could decode. The Euro-DENC would produce NTSC/PAL/SECAM etc. depending on what parameters you programmed its registers with.
Different hardware increases the cost of producing each box, different software is a one of f cost in development. When you're target sales are thousands the extra cost of different hardware is larger than cost of more versatile software.
It's not completely clear in the press release, but the only full resolution material that will playback on these machines will be prerecorded tapes released by the studios.
You thought you could just record HighDef off the air and time shift it? Not a chance. You can record in VHS mode and a reduced bit rate digital mode, but not in full High Def.
The Content owners need "protection" you know? I was almost expecting to see that use would require you to plug a phone in so that the machine could call back to JVC and report back.
I have to agree, a good HD-TV with a good source, is like looking through a window.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Sure it does. Think of the video rental retailler. They have to buy most VHS tapes at upwards of $100, while they get the DVDs for the same price that consumers do. On top of that, there seem to be some VHS tapes that are never sold to the general public, yet are finding a way to DVD because they're so cheap to produce.
Of course you're probably talking about the $35 DVDs as opposed to the $5 to $20 DVDs that I tend to get.