Digital Versatile Disc
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Updated 25 March 2002
Now becoming the standard for distributing video, DVD creation was the major reason I upgraded to Windows XP. With discs of 4.7GB capacity there was just no way of filling a disc, given the 4GB limit of the FAT32 file system used by Windows 98 and ME.
I've been using my Pioneer A03 DVD-R burner since June 2001 and am very happy with its performance. This drive was the first burner to be released at a price low enough to appeal to the hobbyist, and writes both recordable (DVD-R) and rewriteable (DVD-RW) discs. It does not support the rival DVD+RW format which is not part of the official DVD standard.
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Authoring Options
A problem for the early adopters of this technology was finding a good authoring programme at a price point affordable to the enthusiast rather than Hollywood! Today more and more authoring programmes are being released, and their specification improving.
SpruceUp
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One of the first DVD products aimed at the home user, SpruceUp was released in December 2000. Since this was prior to the launch of affordable DVD-Rs most people used it to create a "mini DVD" (DVD disc image written onto a CD-R using a standard CD burner). Good practice for when the DVD burners finally arrived!
Unfortunately Spruce technologies was bought out by Apple and their products are no longer sold, which is a shame since SpruceUp allowed users to create their own buttons and menus in photoshop, rather than being limited to supplied "themes". Whilst it is limited to 4:3 video, (April 2002 16:9 is possible! see my 16:9 page), still menus, and a single audio track, this is still one of my favourite programmes due to the high degree of control afforded to its users.
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The full version of the programme included the option of including a demo version of itself, capable of producing 2 full DVDs. This demo can often be found floating around the internet, just be aware there is no longer any way of registering the product to obtain a serial number.
Sonic MyDVD 2.3
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Another of the early DVD authoring programmes MyDVD 2.3 shipped with A03 DVD-R burner. A very basic programme, produced by Sonic this version does have the advantage of supporting 16:9 widescreen video, although in most other aspects it is very limited. Audio is uncompressed PCM only, which takes up 4 times as much space as the MPEG Audio used by SpruceUp, limiting the length of footage that can be put on each disc.
There are many different versions of MyDVD/DVDit, often bundled with various DVD burners. Whilst some of the latter versions have probably improved overall, only this early version (2.3) actually supports 16:9 video.
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Ulead DVD Workshop
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Moving up the range of authoring programmes, DVD Workshop is capable of motion menu's with audio, built in MPEG2 capture and can output to DVD, SuperVideoCD and regular VideoCD. Again no obvious 16:9 support, but if a 16:9 video is imported into the programme, then a 16:9 disc will result. Care has to be taken to avoid re encoding the video during the authoring process however, since this will result in the loss of the 16:9 flags.
A 30 day demo of this programme is available from the Ulead.com, as well as Movie factory a very simple, wizard driven DVD authoring package for those just getting started with producing there own discs.
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Pioneer DVR-A03
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This is my DVD burner, one of several makes currently vying for market dominance. It writes to "4.7GB DVD-R general" discs, and cannot include the CSS (copyright scrambling system) used by commercial discs. Given the current number of DVD ripping tools available today I really do not see this as a big disadvantage to these budget DVD-R burners.
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An alternative to purchasing your own DVD-R burner is to use the technique developed by Ross Mclennan known as "DVD by Remote". This involves creating a DVD project (which can be up to 4.38GB), spanning it across a series of CDR discs and then posting them off to someone with a DVD burner.
A word of caution
One reason for the desire to produce ones own discs is due to the perceived high quality of DVDs in comparison to other solutions. In many cases people try SuperVideoCD, end up with a disc that shows macroblocking and other artefacts, dismiss the format out of hand and assume DVD is the solution to all their problems.
Whilst there is no denying the superior quality of DVD with its sophisticated menus, higher resolution and lower compression, (720 pixels by 576 pixels compared to 480 pixels by 576 pixels, data rate up to 9800kbs instead of 2600kbs), it is still dependant on care being taken in producing the best MPEG2 file possible. If you cannot produce a decent quality SuperVideoCD then chances are you will be disappointed with your DVD. When I look back at some of my first SuperVideoCDs I created around July/August 2000, they look absolutely horrible! However the ones I produce today are very acceptable, the level of macroblocking and artefacts are similar to that one sees on many channels on a digital cable TV feed.
Playback
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Whilst computers handle this new standard with few, if any problems, the situation for standalone players is not quite so good. The situation is now improving however, with the vast majority of new players having no trouble with DVD-Rs, although support for the DVD-RW version is more limited.
Originally my standalone player (Samsung 709) would not play my home burnt DVDs until I upgraded the firmware in it to 3.31, see my Computer Video post for details. The Samsung happily plays DVD-Rs written to quality media, but it does exhibit some skips when attempting to play the cheap, unbranded media that is about at the moment, and also steadfastly refuses to play the DVD-RW discs.
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In order to allow easy experimentation I eventually ended up buying a Yelo 800 from LynxDV.com, which is one of the few current players that will handle all variations of this standard, as well as all varieties of VideoCD and SuperVideoCD. If you are interested in putting video onto optical media for playback on a TV, a player such as this is a real must.