Father of DVD Interviewed

An Anonymous Coward writes "Interview with Koji Hase. Talks about some of the interesting history behind the DVD format, copyright protection, and competing formats for audio."

Comments

Now THAT's the attitude I like!

[Cyberdyne]

Obsolescence will remain forever a problem, Hase warns, as long as companies continue to take proprietary approaches to home networking and automation.

Somehow, I can't quite see that quote coming from the average corporate suit, where "proprietary" is regarded as a feature not a flaw...

Re:Now THAT's the attitude I like!

[cperciva]

Somehow, I can't quite see that quote coming from the average corporate suit, where "proprietary" is regarded as a feature not a flaw...

You don't understand, do you? Obsolescence is a feature, not a flaw.

Pet Peeve and question.

[line-bundle]

The worst thing I find about DVD is region encoding. Why is it there? It seems they wanted to put something to replace the PAL/SECAM/NTSC barrier. But I feel it might not help at all because people will (are?) buying Region 1 DVD player (I am from region 6 or thereabouts and things only appear for our region after decades).

And a question. Is the NTSC stuff encoded on the DVD or is it an artifact of the conversion from digital to analong of the image?

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[l1gunman]

The 'logic' behind region encoding is to allow the motion picture industry to phase the release of movies across the globe.

Not all movies are released at the same time in all countries. They usually are released in the US first, Europe and Japan next, etc. A movie may actually be released on DVD or VHS in the US before it hits the theatres in some countries.

Regional playback controls are thus an attempt to keep DVD sales from eating into theatre revenues in countries where theatre release is significantly later in time than it is in the US.

I don't agree with it, but that's the reason.

What if the hokey-pokey really is what it's all about?

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[Jordy]

I always hated this argument because old movies that are no longer in theaters are also put on region locked discs.

Examples of region locked discs (from IMDB):

* The Wizard of Oz (1939)
* Gone with the Wind (1939)
* Snow White (1937)
* Tron (1982)
* Star Trek 1 (1979)
* Casablanca (1943)
* The Maltese Falcon (1941)

I could go on and on and on.

The real reason for region control is price fixing, plain and simple.

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[cowbutt]

I always hated this argument because old movies that are no longer in theaters are also put on region locked discs.

Examples of region locked discs (from IMDB):

[snip]

I could go on and on and on.

The real reason for region control is price fixing, plain and simple.

I kinda bought Hollywood's "we want to stagger DVD release dates because we need to stagger cinema releases because we don't have enough prints to go round" argument until I noticed this for myself a couple of months ago (not having really paid much attention to DVD until then...)

This is basic economics; if you're able to artificially segment your market, you'll optimise the total revenue by charging the most each segment will pay for your product. Without region coding, europeans like me would probably be importing all our DVDs from S-E Asia or the US where they're cheaper.

Playing the DVD game ensures you'll get screwed by the content publishers because the rules have been set by them entirely to their advantage. I've chosen not to play (apart from region-free discs such as music...)

--

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[sph]

The worst thing I find about DVD is region encoding. Why is it there?

The original idea was to prevent importing movies on DVD from other regions before they actually hit cinemas locally. The point has become somewhat vague, because many discs are released only on some region, so many people have to resort to importing to get all the stuff they like. Interestingly, lately many blockbusters have opened at cinema almost simultaneously worldwide, which is definitely a good development. I wouldn't be surprised if this was at least partly because of the DVD importing still being possible despite region codes.

It seems they wanted to put something to replace the PAL/SECAM/NTSC barrier.

That barrier still exists on DVDs, but it's easier to overcome than with VHS. There are PAL and NTSC discs. Every PAL player can also play NTSC discs, but only some NTSC players can play PAL discs. If component signal is used (RGB is very common in Europe) you don't have to bother with color encodings, only whether your television can sync to 50/60Hz and display all the lines needed.

Is the NTSC stuff encoded on the DVD or is it an artifact of the conversion from digital to analong of the image?

Picture on DVD is fully digital MPEG-2, hence it has no NTSC, PAL or SECAM color encoding. Picture resolution and FPS still match either NTSC or PAL (SECAM has same specs as PAL, so there are no SECAM discs), because almost every display device used with DVDs still uses them. NTSC resolution on DVD is 720x480, while PAL is 720x576. Player handles 2:2 (PAL) or 3:2 (NTSC) pulldown on film material, and is also responsible for generating actual NTSC/PAL/SECAM color encoding if something else than component signal is used in connecting player to the display device. Needless to say, using component signal gives the best image quality you can achieve without going progressive, because it requires no additional signal format conversions after DA-conversion.

It's also good to note that because of the slight differences between NTSC and PAL discs, well-encoded PAL disc has better picture and smoother movement than well-encoded NTSC disc.

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[MtViewGuy]

I think once digital projection for movie theaters becomes common by 2010, the idea of phased release of movies may become obselete.

The reason for phased release is simple: the very high cost of duplicating movie prints (each complete set for a 120-minute movie costs about US$2,500 to US$3,000 and you have to make about 6,000 to 8,000 prints for a blockbuster movie; you also have to factor into the cost of shipping each 35 mm print set weighing 210 pounds each for a 120-minute movie).

With the development of blue-spectrum LED lasers in the last few years, a theatrical-quality digital movie could probably fit on a single 300 mm optical disc; given today's technology to master and duplicate optical discs it'll probably be substantially cheaper to master and duplicate 8,000 optical discs than 8,000 film prints, not to mention shipping costs being a very tiny fraction of a 35 mm movie print! :-)

With that substantial drop in duplicating and shipping costs simultaneous worldwide release of blockbuster movies may become the norm, not the exception.

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[squiggleslash]

That's a commonly held view, and is not the reason, though it may be "a" reason. Traditionally, motion picture producers have divided up the rights to distribute their movie to a group of studios, rather than just one. For instance, Universal might have the "North American" rights, and Fox might have the "Rest of world" rights. The studios in turn tend to farm out redistribution of films in home video format: one company might be given the rights to the VHS version, another laserdisc/special edition DVD, another DVD, etc. Quite often, the rights are given to multiple distributors within the same market, so you might find the same film released by Diamond and Criterion, for instance, as long as the two versions are aimed at different markets.

What region encoding does it provide a means to prevent distributors who do not want to compete with one another from doing so. A producer can sell rights to a DVD producer in the US to produce US-only DVDs, knowing that they can sell to another in Europe without the European distributor believing that they'd be in competition with the US distributor. As the marketing plan for the European DVD may differ radically from the US distributor, there is a potential conflict, especially, if the US distributor is competing with another US distributor, and a price war spills over into the EU with people finding it cheaper to import dumped DVDs than buy from the EU distributor.

That's why films like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Great Escape, etc, are being region coded, despite having been released around the world decades before DVDs were even a Valentian wet dream.

This is the real reason. It has nothing to do with staged releases. It probably wasn't originally to do with screwing customers, though that's the ultimate effect.

My personal opinion: Dixons, Currys, etc, the major consumer electronics retailers in the UK, should stop selling Region Two, or even Region Free, DVD players, and start exclusively selling Region One players - which are cheaper anyway. That would seriously screw up the market - DVD importers would have a field day, DVD player buyers would have more choice, Region Two distributors would essentially be forced to sell unlocked discs or bi-regional discs or face ruin in the UK, and long term the entire concept of region encoding would be discredited to the point I doubt any attempt would be made to implement it for DVDng.

Well, I can dream...

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[nathanh]

Since NTSC is about 30fps (well 29.97) and PAL is 25fps they record DVDs in different formats i think (lets ignore SECAM). I thought a much smarter solution would be to store the film at 24fps on the disk

They do store the film at 24fps on the disc. The difference between a PAL disc and an NTSC disc is the resolution. PAL is 720x576 and NTSC is 720x480. The player converts the 24fps MPEG stream into 50fps or 60fps for the telly.

Be aware there's an incredible problem with the frame rate conversion. NTSC is 3:2 (odd frames twice, even frames thrice) which converts 24 fps into 60fps neatly. PAL is 2:2 (show each frame twice) which converts 24fps into 48fps. But PAL TVs are syncing at 50fps! So PAL DVD players actually show the movie a little bit fast to keep the frames syncing. This pitch shifts the audio track enough to be irritating, especially if you are playing DVD music (meaning music on DVD, not DVD-A).

Fortunately if you know the problem you can work around it. Some DVD players can output a bastardised format called PAL60. This is the PAL colour encoding at 60Hz. Almost any modern Australian TV supports this bastardised format.

Though an even better solution would be consumer-grade multisync TVs. Then you could sync the TV at 24fps and ignore the upsampling process. I don't know if any consumer-grade DVD player can output 24fps.

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[KH]

I see your point, but I thought the major reason of phased release is the time it takes to dub or sub-title the movies. Not everyone on earth can understand English. This could add, depending on the size of the market and resource in a particular area, significant time between the finish of the US version and others.

Perhaps another thing to consider is that sometimes they have to edit a movie to comply to whatever regulations they have in a particular company. There are equivalents of MPAA in other countries, too.

One more thing to consider might be, in relation to the above, each country may have their own distributors and depending on whatever the suit in the distributors think, they might want to edit. This could add some time between the releases.

Not that releasing at the same time all over the world is not impossible, but it is true that the preparation for a release in a different country can take extra resources.

On a bit off topic issue, I hate when local distributors change the titles. It's not just a matter of translating English title to German or Japanese (well, I have experiences only in those countries). They sometimes stick (sometimes extremely silly) ENGLISH title to movies that laready had an English title. Recent examples I encountered were: Miss Undercover for Miss Congeniality (couldn't spell, so I figure why they changed the title), and ``Crime is King'' for `3000 miles to Graceland.'' (Is there any law in Germany that prohibits the use of English system? BTW, the quarter pounder of cheese is called Royal TS in Germany. And yes, they sell beer in McDonnald's.) I feel pretty embarrassed when no one knows a popular movie that has an English title :(

Re:Pet Peeve and question.

[nathanh]

I know that on video they electronically lower the pitch of the audio to make up for this.. why don't they do the same for dvd?

I don't know. What you say sounds possible but I've not heard of it being done.

What about DVD on computers? surely they can output at 24fps

As you say, computer DVDs can and do output at the correct framerate with no pitch changes.

What's up with the subliminal messages?

[empesey]

From time to time, I see messages pop up on the DVD when pausing or stopping. From what I've read, everyone involved in the process has to sign an NDA to not talk about it

So what gives?

How big is a CD?

[line-bundle]

In the section concerning dataplay.com he says: This new, compact, one-inch optical disc is the digital storage medium of the future for pre-recorded or user-recorded data or tunes. Capacities for these once-recordable discs run up to 500Mb, holding more than 11 hours of high-quality MP3 files or over five hours of CD-quality music.

I had thought that one hour of CD quality music is about 600Mb, so how does he get over five hours of CD-quality music?

Re:How big is a CD?

[The-Bus]

256kbps MP3 files which can have CD-styled quality...

Re:How big is a CD?

[Cyberdyne]

I had thought that one hour of CD quality music is about 600Mb, so how does he get over five hours of CD-quality music?

One word: compression. Five hours in 500 Mb is 800 Mbits/hr, or just over 220 Kbit/sec. A well encoded MP3 at 320VBR averages less than that, and I can't tell the difference between that and the original CD.

Even truly lossless (bit-for-bit reproduction) can be achieved with better than 2:1 compression, which would make 5 hours of CD music (just under 1.5 Mbit/sec bitrate) take 1.5 Gb, so reaching 6:1 shouldn't be a huge problem IMO.

Re:How big is a CD?

[evilviper]

Sony's minidiscs are 140MB, and store 75 Minutes of CD quality audio... I've heard people say they've heard occasional artifacts, but I've got a great ear, and listen to very complex music, and have yet to hear a single artifact, so I chock those reports up to the green marker hysteria until I hear it for myself...

Not to mention Sony's SA-CD format stores a CD worth of audio, at much higher fidelity, on a regular CD...

Well I did answer your question... Either of those technologies could be imployed in this case.

Re:How big is a CD?

[evilviper]

No, the reason it holds more information is that it uses a lower bit rate, with a higher sample frequency...

You are correct that SA discs are (4 times) larger capacity than CDs, but that is only so that they can hold a 5.1 Channel layer, a stereo layer, and a legacy CD layer, on the same disc!

The fact is that the disc is 4 times larger, while the sample rate is 64 times a standard CD!

Don't get me wrong, it is very cool technology, but Sony decided to include a watermark, so I'll never be buying one.

Re:How big is a CD?

[evilviper]

I never even considered audio quality an issue. My concern with watermarking is purely the inability to make backups, rip them and play it on a PC, MiniDisc, or other portable (I never considered CDs portable).

Origins of region coding

[Anonymous Coward]

"When at midnight we finished, we must have been pretty drunk but I said: 'I will develop the system and you will give me the content, because without the content it is nothing'."

When asked for the reasons behind the region encoding, Hase said:

"I'm afraid I was very drunk at the time."

How could he be proud of his work?

[Veteran]

DVD is the bastard created when our beautiful innocent High Tech was brutally raped by the RIAA. The engineer who created it ought to be deeply ashamed of his actions as an accomplice in that rape.

The copy protection and region encoding on DVD's have nothing to do with preventing commercial pirating and everything to do with controlling what the customer can do with the product that he bought. Claiming that copy protection has to do with piracy is a flat out lie. Commercial pirates are not inconvenienced in the least by copy protection - they make a bit for bit copy of the disk and stamp them out as fast as they want. Only you - the customer is affected in what you can do with your own property . According to the RIAA 'fair use' doesn't exist, and they won't be happy until the courts agree with them.

Re:How could he be proud of his work?

[Veteran]

The only additional comment that I would like to make is that DVDs are not the result of stupidity; they are not an accident nor are the problems caused by DVDs an unintended side effect.

DVDs are an example of deliberate, intentional, malevolence at work - as is the DMCA - which makes things like DVD's possible.

The phrase : 'never attribute to malice that which may be explained by stupidity' applies to neither the DMCA nor DVDs.

Re:How could he be proud of his work?

[Veteran]

Sorry, I was wrong; I would like to make one more point. Probably the biggest problem with the formal system of higher education is that it teaches a perspective which causes people to miss deliberate malice in action.

In my opinion one of the fundamental changes which needs to occur in the educational system is to teach people how to critically differentiate accident or 'stupidity' from deliberate malice. Failing to do so grants malevolent people a license to mask their work as 'stupidly' and thus get away with it.

The reason that I put the word 'stupidity' in quotation marks is that the problem in the intellectual world is not intellectual weakness - the problem is the misapplication of intellectual strength. The strong in any field always blame the weak - not because it is the weak's fault - but because the weak can't prevent them from doing so.

It is easy to ridicule the weak - and it shifts blame from where it belongs - with the strong - to people who don't deserve it. If intellectual problems were caused by intellectual weakness then surely dirt is the cause of all intellectual trouble - since I know of few things dumber that dirt.

We - the intellectually strong - need to accept the blame for what is wrong with the world. We are the ones who have the power to change it, and we are the ones who are responsible for the problems in the first place.

The format of the future...

[evilviper]

Everyone likes to throw their hat in the ring saying either which format is the format of the future, or why nothing out there makes the cut, and their up-and-comming format will.

I'll settle this all right now and tell you what the freaking format of the future is... It's a damn hard drive in a USB2/FireWire case. If only I could find a combined FireWire/USB2 case for a Hard Drive so I could use a decent interface on my own machine, and USB on other machines.

Just think about it, if someone would just make a USB2 case that you stick a notebook hard drive in, it gets it's power from the interface rather than require a seperate power cord, and it will work in every system out there, who would want anything more?

Smaller than CDs, rewritable without any extra software, you don't erase the damn thing to change one line in a text file, huge capacity, cheap, and bootable in newer systems.

Anyone A) Know of any cases (2.5" HD cases or USB/FireWire combined cases) and B) Have any problem with that cheap, universal system, which doesn't have copy protection and beats out all others?

Other reasons for zoning

[David_R]

1. a lot of "extra features" (commentaries, documentaries, trailers) are licensed for one particular market, so can't appear on discs destined for other regions for legal purposes
   
   
2. certain zones cover a whole heap of different languages, and more subtitle / alternate soundtracks mean more physical disk space is required. As a result, some "extra features" may disappear to make room for these other languages (you may also find that the bitrate encoding of the film is also significantly less on these disks as well). This can also be applied to the differences between NTSC and PAL/SECAM pictures.
   
   Why the manufacturers don't just make different language releases, I don't know (presumably to keep costs down), but for whatever purpose, they have divvied up the zones along language lines, as well as geographical and release date-ical.

WTF are you talking about?

[glrotate]

DVD - Video (primarily)

RIAA - Audio.

The RIAA had nothing to do with developing tthe DVD format.

/. just cotinues to go down the tubes.

Re:Uhhhhh....

[Technician]

From what I've been hearing, that's partialy true. You may either get a regular DVD, A copy once DVD, an uncopyable DVD, or a DVD CSS encoded to a unique key in that recorder, playable only on that machine. The details are still in the works.

Too busy reading slashdot to research links and press.

Flash or HTML

[captaineo]

The one thing I wish were done a little differently with DVD (from the perspective of one who occasionally needs to author them) is the menu system. Instead of DVD's convoluted, proprietary menu implementation, I'd really prefer to see something like Flash or even dynamic HTML with Javascript. Imagine what DVD creators could do if they knew every DVD player had a Flash interpreter... (acknowledging of course that Flash was in a much more primitive state back when DVDs were being developed, if it even existed at the time :])

Re:Flash or HTML

[edwdig]

Wait, you're objecting to the DVD menu system because it's proprietary, yet you think Flash would've been a better choice? I could see the DHTML/JS combo, but Flash?

Re:Flash or HTML

[captaineo]

I don't particularly care about proprietary as in "controlled by one company," but I do dislike proprietary as in "different from standard practice for no good reason." I think it was unfortunate that the inventors of DVD went off and created their own half-baked UI system when better alternatives were in already in use. (yeah, that's about par for the course for most consumer electronics standards... =)

Nor do I really like how most DVD releases use the menu UI system. I hate wading through un-stoppable movie menus to get where I want to go. I really wish DVD had the feature of laserdisc where you could just punch in "take me to frame #18275" and it would jump there immediately.

(BTW I believe the specs for the Flash .swf file format are freely available, although I am not aware of any complete Free Software implementation.)

Re:Flash or HTML

[HamNRye]

The reason they don't have that feature, is they want to force you to sit through all of the Copyright info, and watch all of their trailers. As a father with a one year old who loves snow white, I can tell you that 3 minutes of FF'ding through DVD Garbage annoys me.

(That's why I rip 'em to VCD...)

Jason

Prediciton that DataPlay will be a lasting format.

[SuperKendall]

In the article he states near the end that he sees DataPlay becoming a widespread technology (note to others - that does not mean he nessicarily supports the format, just that he sess a future for it).

I don't with that prediciton though - for MP3 use, I'm pretty sure small HD's will remain on top. The 10 GB iPod is about the size any DataPlay player would be, and holds a lot more... plus as the tech gets better and better, the iPod advances in capacity much faster than DataPlay. He said in the interview that HD + RAM will take over for home video use, I'm not sure why he doesn't follow the same line of reasoning for audio players (or just about anything else!).

As for the other possibly use of DataPlay, cameras - I can possibly see this as the cost of a DataPlay disc (about $20) is a lot cheaper than CompactFlash... but the question is will DataPlay be used in devices much before ~500Mb compactFlash cards come down near to the price of a DataPlay disc? Furthermore, I see 500mb as being way too small to be meaningful in the future digital camera market, as resoultion and color depth improves the storage needs will grow quite a bit. Here again, I have to wonder if a HD solution will not win in the end - either an HD embedded in the camera, or seperate bluetooth enabled HD packs that you wear somewhere and that the camera transmits pictures to.

In the end, I have to think that while he might have been good at bringing a particular technology to the market, he doesn't seem like a true visionary - most of his predicitons listed in the article seem pretty simplistic to me.

It's even more easy than that.

[Inoshiro]

In Canada, a DVD of a certain movie could be about 14.99$.

In the US, that same region 1 DVD is 14.99$.

However, Canadian dollars cost less than US dollars. This is why US people should import all DVDs from Canada and never pay for them in the US, because the MPAA is just trying to segment Canada/US (which, considering NAFTA, shouldn't happen) for greater profits.

This is also why any Canadians that do online shopping will be boned hard if they don't go to the ONE Canadian DVD site online that exists: cnl.com. They have great, Canadian prices and will ship titles to the US too.

Re:You forgot one part.

[g4dget]

so anyone who holds a copyright (including you or I) can engage in price discrimination.

Copyright does not absolve you from fair business practices. Furthermore, copyright could, in principle, be revoked for specific creations if it is not found to be in the public interest.

With the doctrine of first sale and ownership of DVD players, your reasoning also doesn't really justify the industry's attempts at controlling the players.

Re:Prediciton that DataPlay will be a lasting form

[HamNRye]

Plus all of our legacy CD-RW drives should make adopting a new proprietary format with less capacity seem ludicrous.

They've been hyping DataPlay for years now, even prior to the widespread use of CD-R's. I remember a spokesman for the company talking about how DataPlay discs could be sold for 50-75 cents each. (Yes, cents) At the time this was cheaper that CD-R media.

I'm not sure that the numbers quoted in that article are correct. It may be cheaper than compact flash for $20, but that's a bunch of money for write-once media.

Stick with the cheap storage medium, human brain. There's alot of it out there, and hardly anyone uses theirs.

Jason

Re:You'd be looking for this then

[evilviper]

30 seconds on Google

That's usually my line! I guess if I'd actually been interested I'd have found it too... The price certainly isn't very attractive.

Thanks for the site in any case... I also found the 2.5" USB powered case (which also supports firewire) and strangely enough can be powered by the PS/2 port? The single drawback is that it only supports USB 1.1, not 2.0... Guess I'll have to look a little bit more.