DVD Recording Finds Its Place--in the PC

It's hard to find a bright spot in the hardware market this year, as economic pressures have made both consumers and businesses think twice about purchasing a new PC, MP3 player, or handheld. But recordable DVD technology is one of the lone areas predicted to grow substantially over the coming months and years, if vendors don't shoot themselves in the foot along the way while fighting over standards.

Recent market research surveys suggest DVD recording technology is ready to catch fire with consumers. Businesses are also eyeing the technology as a possible solution to growing storage problems.

Bye, Bye VCR?

Home media content is the primary driver of recordable DVD adoption, says Wolfgang Schlichting, research manager for removable storage at IDC. Consumers are primarily interested in DVD technology to replace their VCRs. They prefer stand-alone DVD recorders to new PCs with DVD recording technology, or to external or internal PC-attached storage drives, Schlichting says.

"For the most part, people don't realize what they can do on their PC [to record DVDs]. But everybody has used a VCR, and many people have used a DVD player," Schlichting says.

Between 30 percent to 40 percent of U.S. households have DVD players, says Michelle Abraham, senior analyst at Instat/MDR. Research company Investec predicts DVD player sales will grow 61 percent from 31 million units sold last year to 50 million units sold by the end of this year.

Perfect for PCs

Hardware and software vendors, however, must teach consumers the benefits of using PCs for recording DVDs over stand-alone recorders, Schlichting says. They provide much more flexibility in terms of recording options, and are much cheaper if the user already owns a PC that can handle the demands of DVD drives, he says.

Stand-alone DVD recorders cost about $1000 now, while PC-attached drives sell for between $300 and $500, he says.

It's easy to install PC-attached drives that link up via USB or IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interconnects, or directly into a PC's motherboard, Abraham says. Most of these drives also come with prepackaged software.

Users should check the compatibility of their existing PCs with new DVD recordable drives before buying a PC-attached drive, Abraham says. An older PC may not be able to provide the fast processing speeds and large memory capacity needed for DVD recording.

"Most older computers don't have the horsepower to process the video images from a DVD," says Stephen Baker, director of research at NPD Techworld, a market research company. "We're not talking about moving little bits of data here, this is one app that requires some serious megahertz."

Prices vary for new computers with DVD recording technology. Hewlett-Packard announced two PCs at TECHXNY in June featuring DVD recordable drives and editing software starting at $1449 for an entire system. The company also added DVD recording drives to Compaq Presario machines in June. Sony unveiled in June four Vaio desktop PCs designed for DVD recording technology, at prices ranging from $1500 to $2500.

Evolution of the PC

Recordable DVD technology is one of the few developing technologies in the PC that has the potential to capture the average consumer's interest, analysts say.

"There hasn't been a whole lot in the evolution of the PC [lately] other than 3D gaming chips," Abraham says.

CD-rewritable technology has grown into a must-have feature for midrange PCs, but DVD recording technology has some way to go before it reaches that stage, Abraham says.

As interest in DVDs grows, so too will interest in PCs to run DVD recording and editing software, with fast processors and graphics chips, as well as slick monitors and advanced hard drives.

"DVD recordable technology in the home desktop PC is a very attractive feature," Schlichting says. High-end PCs sold today contain more processing power and memory than the average PC user needs for surfing the Internet or creating documents. But DVD recordable technology takes advantage of the extra power in components such as 2-GHz-plus Pentium 4 processors from Intel, he says.

Special Effects

In addition, for users who want to edit videos and add effects, PCs are a must.

"PCs tend to be a little more flexible in terms of what you can do. Different software products allow more options" than stand-alone DVD recorders, Baker says.

Part of the problem with the current DVD situation is the race among competing standards for recording technology. DVD-R for General, DVD-R for Authoring, and DVD+R are only able to record data once. DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM let users record over and over again, much like VCRs or cassette tapes. However, unlike their tape-driven predecessors, the sound and picture quality of DVDs does not decrease with each additional rewriting.

"There will be winners and losers [in the standards war] but it won't be like VHS and Beta," Schlichting says. The competing VCR technologies eventually collapsed into just VHS, leaving users who had invested in Beta technology high and dry, and unable to find blank videotapes or Beta versions of their favorite movies. This won't happen with DVD technologies, because there is interoperability between the recordable standards, he says.

Sorting Out the Standards

Right now, the number of standards that work with each other is constantly changing, which will continue as the technology evolves, Schlichting says. The DVD Forum and DVD+RW Alliance provide compatibility updates, a resource for potential buyers.

Users will determine the level of DVD compatibility through their checkbook, Abraham says. Drives with less interoperability will be cheaper, and buyers will decide just how much interoperability they need, she says.

But not everyone uses DVDs for video; they are ideal for storage as well.

DVDs can store up to 16GB of data, depending on the disc format and how many sides are used. Single-layer, single-side DVDs are the cheapest and most common, and can hold up to 4.7GB of data. By comparison, CDs offer a paltry 650MB of storage, or about ten minutes of video.

People who back up their PCs regularly will find DVD technology ideal for storage, Abraham says. Baker agrees, pointing out that you can put almost an entire PC's data on one or two DVDs, making it easy to get users in the regular habit of backing up their PCs.

Storage Space

But both consumers and businesses haven't realized the potential of DVD as a storage technology quite yet, Schlichting says. Enterprises still use CD-R technology for data storage. But he expects adoption of DVD technology will increase, especially as media costs drop.

Paradoxically, this could make the standards war over rewritable drives a moot point, according to Baker.

Once the blank discs are cheap enough, "people will just record once and keep using new discs to record data," he says.

Single-write recordable technology is more efficient, and as DVD hardware and software become more sophisticated, rewritable media will be used less, Schlichting says. But DVD rewritable technology still holds promise for users who want to add or remove small pieces of data from a DVD disc, he says.

Two standards will probably evolve over time, one for single-write recordable technology and one for rewritable technology, he says. The write-once drives will be used for video, while the rewritable ones will create storage media.

Recordable DVD technology is coming into its own, but it has a few hurdles to clear before it reaches mainstream adoption, Abraham says. "I think it's a bigger step [forward] than some of what we've seen over the past years, such as faster processors or graphics. This will convince some people to buy [right now], but not a lot," she says.