DVD Recordable Formats: Who's winning?

DVD-RW vs. DVD+RW vs. DVD-RAM, etc.

Factions duel it out in hype war... but DVD+RW seems to be winning the standards battle

Introduction

As you might have heard, DVD media outsold VHS tapes for the first time in the last quarter of 2001, and now that it's clear consumers have wholeheartedly embraced the movie industry-backed DVD format, the next question is: how to give consumers the recording capability they want, while limiting their ability to abuse copyrights. (Wouldn't want another audio CD-type debacle, would we?)

If only things were as simple as they were when Sony and Philips unveiled the audio CD. Back in those days, the industry had the good sense to rally around a single format. But lest we paint the past in too rosy a palette, it's worth noting that the powerful lobbyists in Hollywood and the recording industry were not thinking much differently than they are now.

The original Philips-designed cassette tape format was limited to a 1 7/8 inches per second transport speed, almost purely for the purpose of keeping the resulting recording quality poor enough to reduce the risk of piracy.

And when audio CDs threatened to deliver to consumers a perfect digital master of the original recording on every disc, a worried crowd of record company execs disrupted the launch event, chanting "the truth is in the groove... the truth is in the groove" as a protest. As it turned out, their concerns were justified.

Now, consumers are clamoring for a recordable DVD format and the industry has to balance consumer demands with Hollywood's reticence to allow unauthorized copying, while solving the technical challenge of delivering backward compatibility with the ever-growing base of consumer DVD players on the market.

In this article, we'll look at the pros and cons of the three main recordable DVD formats, and examine some of the opportunities that these recordable variants of the "digital versatile disc" format presents.

DVD-RAM

This is the format that refuses to die. New DVD-RAM compatible drives continue to be produced and sold, and media is still relatively widely available.The main benefits of DVD-RAM are:

• It's been on the market for several years and thus has a reasonable installed base (Apple even shipped DVD-RAM drives as a standard feature on its top-of-the-line computers for a couple of years) and, at this point, mature drivers for most operating systems.
• The disks are encased in a hard plastic shell and can be re-written a virtually unlimited number of times.
• The drive mechanisms are not expensive, selling for less than US$350 at this writing.

The drawbacks of DVD-RAM are:

• Little or no compatibility with consumer players (a Type 2 removable disc format never really caught on and Panasonic was one of the few companies even claiming compatibility with these discs).
• Expensive dual-phase media.
• Can't write to CD-R or CD-RW
• Too many technical problems in early products. PC-based recorders couldn't use the full capacity of the disks, some Macs were shipped with 4.7GB drives, others with 9.4GB drives, and so on.

See our analysis of the DVD-RAM format (here) for more details.

Current Status:

DVD-RAM as a standalone technology is essentially dead. (Apple, for example, provides no support for DVD-RAM in its newest operating systems and the drives are no longer offered as an option.) However, a number of drives currently on the market support DVD-RAM and DVD-R, providing the advantages (detailed below) of both formats, and effectively eliminating the worst drawbacks of DVD-RAM.

DVD-R

Much as it did with DVD-RAM, Apple is currently championing the DVD-R format (apparently, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a thing for high-capacity optical drives -- his ill-fated NeXT Cube debuted with an oddball Canon magneto-optical drive, and the guy's been pushing the envelope of storage technologies ever since the original Apple Lisa shipped in 1983. Now, with its Pioneer-developed DVD-R "SuperDrive" (and, subsequently, models from other manufacturers compatible with the DVD-R standard) some say Apple has once again picked an "also ran" technology.

DVD-R Pros:

• Jump-started by Apple, Compaq and a few other companies in 2001, DVD-R is currently the recordable format with the lowest-priced media.
• Drives are now relatively inexpensive: about US$300 (C$420).
• Disks now sell for C$5 each or less, if you look around.
• DVD-R drives produce disks that can be read in a wide range of home DVD players.
• The DVD "general" authoring format is well supported by a number of inexpensive and consumer-friendly DVD authoring tools
• Also writes CD-R, CD-RW

DVD-R Cons

• Multisession and/or Packet writing features are typically not available.
• Write speeds are slower than with DVD+RW
• Some implementations (e.g., Apple's "official" stance) are write-once only.

DVD-RW

According to DVD forum (the consortium backed by Apple, Pioneer and others):

DVD-R/W was the first DVD recording format released that was compatible with standalone DVD Players.

DVD-RW is a rewriteable format and it is compatible with about 69% of all DVD Players and DVD-ROMs.

DVD-R/W supports single side 4.7 GB* DVDs(called DVD-5) and double side 9.4 GB* DVDs (called DVD-10).

Current status:

Delivering the best compatibility with the bulk of consumer DVD players, the recorders are now inexpensive (US$169 is the lowest price we've seen to date), software support is provided by virtually all DVD authoring packages, and the media is inexpensive and widely available. Although Apple's marketing campaign that all but ignores the drive's rewritable capabilities, the Pioneer DVD-A03, A04 and A05 (and other Apple-branded "SuperDrive" equivalents from other manufacturers) are in fact all DVD-RW drives. It is Apple's software that isn't packet-writing compatible or multisession friendly.

At this writing, a further twist is the fact that some of Apple's iMacs include a Sony DW-U10A drive (the OEM version of the Sony DRU500A retail product) -- a device supposed to be capable of writing discs in either the +RW or -RW formats. However, the Apple implementation of this drive supports only the DVD-R standard, apparently due to Apple's decision to arbitrarily disable the +RW capability in the drive's firmware. Apple has stated only that the drives do not support DVD+RW. The company says it "supports the DVD-R standard due to increased compatibility with consumer players and the availability of more affordable media."

DVD+RW

The DVD+RW format is backed by some heavy hitters in the industry, including Microsoft and HP, which now ships the drive as a standard feature in some of Pavilion home computers. Offering compatibility with consumer DVD players almost as good as DVD-R, the chief benefit of the DVD+RW format is its emphasis on rewritability. (The DVD+RW Alliance has a comparison chart detailing several other key advantages.) HP's drives ship with a utility to set a bit fooling older DVD players into thinking the discs are standard DVD-ROM media for improved compatibility. (Details.)

DVD+RW Pros

• HP, citing statistics from market researcher NPD Intelect, says DVD+RW was the market share leader in November 2001. By 2003, DVD+R/+RW drives were the dominant format in the industry.
• Relatively inexpensive drives -- currently about C$600.
• Good compatibility and performance with Windows PCs. (Mac compatibility is limited, however.)

DVD+RW Cons

• Expensive media (at this writing, there is a huge discrepancy between wholesale and retail prices. Our wholesale sources tell us that, in Feb. 2003, prices for DVD+R media dropped to the same level as DVD-R discs, yet retail prices are still about $16 per disc -- clearly, there's massive profit-taking going on here!)
• Some questions remain about compatibility with write-once (DVD+R) media. Current drives, HP says, will require an upgrade.
• Compatibility with consumer DVD players -- particularly older ones -- is a bit iffy.

Current Status:

• DVD+R/W has some better features than DVD-R/W such as lossless linking and both CAV and CLV writing.
• DVD+R is a non-rewritable format and it is compatible with about 84% of all DVD Players and DVD-ROMs. (HP's tag-setting utility improves compatibility further.)
• DVD+RW is a rewritable format and is compatible with about 70% of all DVD Players and DVD-ROMs.
• DVD+R/W supports single side 4.7 GB* DVDs(called DVD-5) and double side 9.4 GB* DVDs(called DVD-10).

The following is a chart provided by the DVD+RW Alliance detailing the key differences between the competing -R/RW and +R/RW standards.

Comparison tables

1) Recording modes vary between DVD+RW video recorder models.

5) In order to meet Video Recording Mode specifications.

6) As implemented in Pioneer's model DVR-55 and DVR-77H.

2) As implemented in Pioneer's model DVR-7000.

3) As implemented by Panasonic and on Pioneer's model DVR-55 and DVR-77H.

4) Only accessible on DVD+RW video recorder, ignored by DVD player.

6) As implemented in Pioneer's model DVR-55 and DVR-77H.

Dual Format Drives

Currently, the dual-format Sony DRU500A drive (and similar units), compatible with both -R/-RW and +R/+RW formats is the product that comes closest to delivering the optimal mix of price/performance and compatibility with the widest array of software titles and consumer players. We expect these drives, and others with similar support for multiple standards, to continue to be popular until one format or the other completely dominates the market.

The Wild Card

The wild card in this equation is the consumer. While CD-recorders have proven to be phenomenally popular, rewritable media has sold poorly. As well, we have seen the emergence of technologies such as MPEG-4 and the underground favorite "DivX, " along with freely available programs that allow consumers to "rip" DVD videos and transcode them into a format capable of fitting an entire, high-quality, movie onto one or two CD-R discs. This, we think, is the "hidden competitor" faced by the industry. For most consumers, a video CD or DivX-encoded disc is at least as good a solution as that presented by any of the current generation of DVD recordable formats.

CD-R/RW Pros

• Extremely inexpensive media (at 25-50 cents per disc, the media cost per gigabyte is about one-eight that of DVD-RAM or DVD+RW)
• Ubiquitous availability of inexpensive, high-performance drives and media.
• Discs are compatible with virtually all computers, CD-based MP3 players, audio CD players, video CD players and most DVD players.

CD-R/RW Cons

• 650MB capacity
• Some confusion remains over disk formats such as UFS (UDF), Mt. Rainier, etc.

What's Ahead

The other wild card is the emergence of so-called "Blu-ray" high-capacity writers, such as the 23GB-per-side model previewed by Sony in March 2003. These drives are currently expensive, but then again, so were DVD-R writers and CD recorders when they first appeared. It's probably a safe bet that consumers will quickly want to move to a format capable of storing an entire movie on a single disc as soon as the price-point drops to favorable level. Until then, we'd name the "multi format" drives from Sony, TDK, LG Electronics and others as the best hedge in this standards war.

For Further Reading

• Geek.com: competing DVD-writeable standards.
• ZDNet: Which DVD format will win?
• TomsHardware.com: At Comdex 2001 in Las Vegas, Vivistar announced its own line of internal and external DVD-R drives with "the first software that we have seen that supports multisession writing on DVD-R media" and drives priced at "$100 to $200 [US] less than the drives that are shipping now."
• News.com: Sony hedges bets with DVD formats.
• PlaybackTime: It's official: Microsoft goes DVD+RW (which means you will, too) [Feb. 25, 2003]