Wednesday, April 22, 1998

DVD the wave of the future, not the present

By BRIAN BETHEL / Abilene Reporter-New

Every so often, folks try to reinvent things.

In the beginning, we had compact discs, and they were Good. Now, everything from your car stereo to your kids' video game system uses them.

Well, as good as CDs are for storage and such, they do have their limitations.

There is only so much data you can pack onto a conventional compact disc. Admittedly, the figure is still pretty impressive, around 640 megabytes.

When CDs first started coming into wide use as a storage medium for computers, that was an incredible amount of data. But times change, and we have data drives that can store a gigabyte -- units of 1,000 megabytes -- on a single cartridge.

Even digital recordings, as good as they sound on CD, have some limitations. The 16-bit sound encoding you'll find on a standard disc is good, but it doesn't offer the nuance and tone of a vinyl record.

So, the Powers that Be (a k a consumer electronics companies) have created (drumroll, please) DVD.

If you haven't heard the buzz about Digital Versatile Discs, the latest innovation in data storage, then chances are you either a) aren't a technophile or b) don't shop at any of the "mainstream" computer outlets.

In any case, it seems like every new computer coming down the pike from Hewlett Packard, Compaq and the rest has a bright, shiny new DVD drive installed.

Big deal.

I'll be the first to admit DVD is the storage media of the future. It's designed to have more than twice the storage of a standard compact disc.

That means more realistic-sounding music, better video playback and a virtual playground of storage for software developers.

But although its day is coming, it's not here quite yet.

There are several problems with DVD that make keeping -- or upgrading -- your standard CD-ROM the better option.

First, DVD, while offering greater storage, is slower than standard CD-ROM drives.

The format is backward-compatible, but it's possible that you may actually see some degradation in performance with standard CD software. Future generations of DVD drives will alleviate this problem, but that's the key word here: Future.

Second, there's the problem of compatibility. On the data storage end of things, which of course is the DVD usage relevant to computers, there are several conflicting standards that have yet to be resolved.

Eventually, manufacturers will decide on a common denominator and move on. But until that happens, there's no 100 percent guarantee a current DVD drive will really be "versatile" enough to run all future DVD software.

The third consideration is software availability. Right now, DVD is an unproven format, and smart software developers will still continue to offer their games, utilities and applications on standard compact discs.

Compact discs are an extremely cheap storage choice; it costs a big software company a few dollars to burn a CD.

DVD is slightly more expensive, and the user base is not yet installed enough to make it an attractive option.

Hence, if you buy a DVD drive now, you'll have relatively few software choices that take advantage of your drive's capabilities, and there's no guarantee that future software will "like" your existing DVD drive.

In fact, all you can really do with a DVD drive these days is watch DVD-format movies. And who really wants to do that on a 15-inch monitor?

DVD is a format whose time is coming. It is a logical and worthy successor the the compact disc technology popularized in the late 1980s.

But good things, in this case, really do come to those who wait. DVD is the future, but unfortunately, the future isn't now.

E-mail Brian Bethel at bethelb@abinews.com