| DVD Roundup January 2006
 A
Decade of DVD
On those rare occasions when the lady
who cuts my hair is out of town, I hike up the street to Garrison’s, an old-fashioned
barbershop. No fancy hair salon, it’s a great place to get a good cut and the latest
gossip.
I made just such a visit in mid-November. The owner was
occupied, so his young associate served me. When I sat down in his chair, he reminded me
that he used to work at Valley Hardware, where we’d talked at length about the DVD
format, which then had just been launched. He has since known me as "the DVD
Man." It’s OK by me -- I could be known as worse.
He remembered our conversations as taking place 15 or 16
years ago, but when I checked, I realized that 2006 marks only the tenth anniversary of
the DVD as a consumer format. Though the idea had been germinating at Pioneer for several
years, it wasn’t until fall 1996 that the first players and discs became available
for purchase. Perhaps it seems like longer ago, due to the technical advances made since
and the format’s astonishing growth. When I talked with that young man nine years
ago, I was the only person in Jefferson County, West Virginia -- which is near Washington,
DC, mind you -- to have a DVD player. I had to get all of my discs through press
connections because the local stores had none. Yesterday, a visit to my local Wal-Mart
confirmed that they stocked thousands of DVDs and only a few VHS cassettes. Next year at
this time, I doubt there will be any videotapes at all.
Titles, availability, format
In the beginning, few films were available on DVD, and
those that were were largely top-ten listings or classics that could be trotted out
without a lot of legal procedures slowing them down. There were no menus. You inserted the
disc in the player and, after a short identifying studio logo, it began to play. Some
titles were letterboxed, though not all of them. Widescreen proponents had their work cut
out for them. The idea of an "extra" back then was a theatrical trailer. In
1996, I wrote a one-page column about DVDs for Sound and Vision. Often, I
had trouble finding enough titles to fill that small space. By the time the column was
over, I had many choices.
Over the years, anamorphic widescreen has become the
preferred format. If there is a fullscreen release of a widescreen movie, it is a separate
release or the second side of a widescreen release. Titles run the gamut, from the latest
summer blockbuster to classic TV shows such as Leave It to Beaver. Menus are not
only mandatory, they’re often complex and intricately designed. Extras often take up
a second or even a third disc, and can include as many as three or four commentaries,
production featurettes, deleted scenes, games, and anything else the producers can think
up. Complete seasons of TV shows have become big business on DVD, as have music titles.
Visual and sonic quality
Even in the first days of DVD, it was clear that the images
on them looked better than those on laserdiscs. But today’s DVDs make those early
releases look like VHS tapes. The dual-layer disc became standard about five years ago,
doubling the data capacity. The sound, too, has improved -- Dolby Digital 5.1-channel
soundtracks are standard, and DTS soundtracks can be found on more and more releases. DVD
players are far better as well. Anamorphic video transfers became the norm, and S-video
connections were supplanted by component-video connections, which allow progressive scan.
And now we have DVI and HDMI connections, for signals that are cleaner than ever.
Packaging and availability
In the 1990s there were two kinds of DVD package: the
Keepcase and the snapper. The snapper, universally hated, was constructed so that cases
hung up on each other when stacked on the shelf. Warner Home Video told me that, early on,
they purchased a kazillion snapper cases and would use them until they ran out.
Hallelujah! It appears they finally have. Most releases now, including Warner titles, are
sold in Keepcases or some variation thereof. The booming of TV shows on DVD has caused
manufacturers to come up with new ideas for packaging multidisc sets; some of these have
been clever and successful, others not.
I mentioned Wal-Mart, but you can buy a popular DVD almost
anywhere: drugstores, groceries, etc. It’s a no-brainer that all video stores now
deal primarily in DVDs, and at successful rental companies such as Netflix, you can rent
almost any title without ever going to a store. The Columbia DVD Club exists, too. DVD is
popular and it’s big business. The format has as much exposure these days as Martha
Stewart; both are everywhere -- and sometimes together.
The future
This will be DVD’s golden year -- the format is at its
peak. Later, perhaps in 2006, blue-laser formats will emerge, but these are just
refinements of the current process. The next big change, I think, will be a format that
doesn’t use a disc at all, but that can be downloaded to and read by a computer.
Computers of some sort will become integral parts of our audio and video systems.
I say this because of the gym. Forced by an illness to
exercise, and now driven by a desire to be around other people who take care of
themselves, I’ve become something of a gym rat. I go to Gold’s, where everything
is great but the music, which sucks. It seems as if they go out of their way to find awful
sounds. So I bought a little Creative Zen Nano, a 1-gigabyte unit the size of a Zippo
lighter on which I can store 20-24 albums and easily strap on my arm or put in my pocket.
And, at least through Akai headphones, it doesn’t sound half bad as I work out. In
fact, it sounds darned good. Considering the progress of DVD, it seems reasonable to
assume that as technology marches on, everything will get even smaller, and we’ll be
able to store movies, music, and much more in home units that don’t require spinning
discs. And images will be even sharper -- comparable to HDTV signals. We might need larger
computer drives, but think of the savings in shelf space!
If you doubt any of this, well, that kid from the hardware
store who’s just cut my hair doubted everything I said about DVD nine years ago. I
hate to tell him (and you) so . . . but I did.
…Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com |
