DVD-VR Spec Set

The good news out of the Tokyo Electronics Show, held earlier this month, is that DVD-based recorders could be on shelves in Japan by the end of the year and in the U.S. next spring. But with several competing standards, the manufacturers are nowhere near the kind of consensus that helped ensure a relatively smooth launch for the non-recordable DVD varieties. Lining Up Behind DVD-RAM Matsushita, Hitachi and Toshiba all said they would use 4.7- billion-byte DVD-RAM discs for DVD Video Recording (DVD-VR) applications, with Matsushita committing to a spring 2000 launch of its recorder in the U.S. and overseas. According to newsletter Television Digest, Matsushita said it is developing a dual-layer DVD- RAM disc with an 8.5-billion-byte capacity. For Hitachi, however, the emphasis is on portability - the company has been touting a camcorder design using a three-inch disc for close to a year. Matsushita also took on Philips, which demonstrated at the International Funkaustellung trade show in Berlin last month (DVD Report, September 20) that recordings made on DVD+RW discs could apparently be played back on current off-the-shelf DVD players - quite a feat, if it works, since the proponents of both -RW and -RAM admit that neither format will play back on unmodified DVD-Video hardware. Matsushita told reporters in Japan that such claims were untrue, although Philips reportedly stuck to its guns. Both the -RW and -RAM camps are working at figuring out how to engineer future player models to handle recordable discs. If DVD+RW proves to be truly backward-compatible with today's DVD-Video players, that could become a major selling point if the recorders hit the market at a time when DVD player penetration in North America is entering the double digits. As previously reported, Pioneer and Sharp both plan to launch 4.7-billion-byte DVD-RW recorders by the end of this year in Japan and sometime next year in the U.S. Philips also plans to launch a DVD+RW recorder next year, although it seems likely that machine will be held back until the arrival of 4.7-billion-byte DVD+RW discs, expected in late 2000 or early 2001. Meanwhile, the proprietary MVDisc format developed by NEC has beaten all the DVD varieties out of the gate - NEC's GigaStation is already on sale in Japan.Source: DVD REPORT, Copyright Phillips Publishing, Inc.