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Blazing
a trail in home recording
Pioneer New Media Technologies is the first optical media
vendor to hit the market with a combined CD-RW and DVD-RW
unit, putting two types of recordable optical storage into
a single unit. The drive records DVD-Rs at twice the speed
of previous products, and also is compatible with all of the
CD formats, including CD-ROM and CD-RW.
The DVD-RW has a storage capacity of 4.7GB, which is the target
capacity for the DVD Forum, developer of the DVD specification.
There have been recordable DVD drives on the market, DVD-RAM
drives, but they only had a capacity of 2.5GB. The company
expects that demand for converting home movies to the longer-lasting
digital format could make DVD as popular as CD. “Archiving
videotapes will be the killer app for DVD-R,” according
to Andy Parsons, senior vice president at Pioneer New Media
Technologies.
He expects that people will convert their aging videotape
libraries, which are only rated to last 15 years, with DVDs
that are rated to last 100 years. The internal drive will
have inputs for both analog and IEEE 1394 Firewire, Parsons
said. The drive will come with video editing software for
producing DVD-R discs that are then loaded into DVD players
for enjoying through the television.
Parsons said that DVD is quickly becoming entrenched as a
consumer electronics standard, and that more than 15 million
DVD players will ship this year. “Computer platforms
come and go, but consumer electronics platforms (like CDs
and videotapes) stay around,” Parsons said. Pioneer did
not announce pricing for the DVR-103, but said it would be
substantially below the $5,400 price of its previous generation
offering. Parsons said the drive is expected to be available
to OEMs in the first quarter of 2001, and that the cost of
media should drop to $10 per disc. Parsons said the DVR-103
supports copyright protection by hiding the CSS (content scrambling
system) key on the discs, which prevents disks from being
unlocked and played.
The DVR-103 is compliant with version 1.1 of the DVDRW specification,
which creates a pre-embossed area on the disk, which protects
against “bit-for-bit” copies of encrypted movies.
Parsons said that providing copyright protection is important
since people in the movie industry are often afraid of new
technology that enables illegal copying, such as when the
VCR first came out. But now they make twice as much money
on renting and buying videotapes than in theaters, he said.
“We want to see the same kind of thing with DVDs.”
DVD-R disks should be readable on the PlayStation 2 and all
but the earliest DVD players. Parsons said that DVR “authoring”
drives that use a slightly different recording method will
continue to be available without support for copyright protection.
The drives will not be available in retail stores.
They will cost $5,400, while the media will go from $28 to
32. Next year Pioneer will release a DVD-RW consumer electronics
player aimed at the home video market that has become popularized
by companies such as TiVo and ReplayTV. The drive will not
have an electronic programming guide, but will function more
like a VCR with basic recording features, Parsons said. “The
major limitation (of digital video recorders) is the lack
of removable media,” Parsons said, noting that his kids
quickly fill up the 35 hours of video that his TiVo at home
provides.
He said that in 2002 the company will sell a video recorder
that includes a hard drive for “buffer” storage,
as well as a DVD-RW drive. Pioneer began showing off the DVR-103,
which supports recording in CD-R (write once), CR-RW (CD rewritable),
DVD-R (write once) and DVD-RW formats, the last of which can
be rewritten up to 1,000 times.
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