Technology and Innovation

Have DVD recorders just got affordable? Well, almost, as Philips releases cheaper models to attract the masses

When Philips launched the UK’s first DVD recorder, the DVDR 1000 (73 65 5/5), we were cock-a-hoop.The only problem with this mighty piece of hardware was its £1,300 price tag. A little expensive for your average punter, even without considering the confusion surrounding the raging DVD format war. Weil, to address both these issues, Philips has launched two budget models, the DVDR 980 and 985. All right, so admittedly £800-£900 isn’t budget money, but, hey, it’s a start.These DVD+RW/DVD+R burners are running with the format F5 reckons will win out in the end,so you could do a lot worse than take the plunge. As you’d expect, you get the principal DVD recordable features (index navigation, recording on the next available disc space), but the DVDR 985 also offers iLink connection so you can record home movies from your camcorder. Both models are available now

PANASONIC DVD-R32EBS DVD PLAYER

The company’s new entry-level DVD comes with a slew of features designed to make the most of your movie-watching, including a 27MHz/10-bit video digital to analogue converter (DAC) and a 4:3 Zoom function which practically eliminates the black bars you get on top and bottom of the screen on square shaped TVs. The sound side of the equation hasn’t been neglected either with twin laser pickups and a 192kHz/24-bit audio DAC promising improved sound quality from your DVDs and CDs. Plus the DVD-R32EBS can handle MP3-encoded discs. As an added bonus for hardcore movie fans, Panasonic has also thrown in a Dialogue Enhancer that boosts sound signals from the centre channel speaker in an AV setup so you can more easily understand what your favourite actors are actually talking about.

If your TV viewing is dominated by DVD movies and digital broadcasts, a widescreen TV is a must-have, its proportions ideal for letterbox visuals. While 24- and 28-inch screens are cheaper, 32-inchers undoubtedly mark the point between just having a great TV and creating a home cinema.

Now that Matsushita, parent company to Panasonic, has effectively called time on its Technic brand (the company hasn’t launched any new products with the name for two years), the company is refocussing its AV effort with a range of new products bearing the Panasonic monicker.
Heading up its 2002 home cinema assault is the incredibly stylish SC-DT300 Micro DVD Audio Home Cinema System. Offered complete with a full mirror finish fascia, the DT300 boasts built-in Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro-Logic and DTS decoders while the supplied sub/sat speaker system handles the 50W per channel output from the built-in amp.

According to the companies involved, the format had been agreed to avoid the debacle we’re seeing with recordable DVD formats. Sadly nothing’s as simple as it seems, and when you scratch beneath the surface you discover not everyone buys into the format. Complicating matters further, the DVD Forum (which oversees the recordable DVD format) is also looking into developing red laser for the next-generation replacement for DVD – not blue laser.

You can burn any type of file to DVD or CD for file transfer or back-up. but it most likely won’t play on a set-top player. VCDs are considered below-VHS quality and never really caught on in the States; with the low cost of blank DVD media, they most likely never will. Another consideration is bit rate. Though video bit rate on a DVD can be set as high as 9.8Mbps (without audio), pushing it above 8.5 might be asking for trouble with some players.

We’re not going to spend too much time here, as many of you already know how to encode for these technologies. (To find more specific articles, type “DVD authoring” in Vldeomakers Web search field.) Keep this in mind’, for a DVD to play in a set-top DVD player, the disc must be encoded in MPEG-2 (or DivX if your player will accept it).

The right-hand side of the screen includes a palette of supplied templates, images for backgrounds, buttons and frames. You can also import your own layered menus as PSD files and define the menu areas with DVDit Pro HD’s Highlight Tool. An attributes area (think “inspector” or “properties” if you’re used to tools from other software publishers) shows you practically all of the important details about a particular asset, and allows you to control pretty much everything, including menu linking, button routing and end of play behavior. If you have text selected, this is where you choose fonts, sizes, justification, attributes, etc. The very bottom of the DVDit Pro HD window provides a bit budget tool that allows you to see how much room you’d have if you burned your project to several DVD flavors (single-layer, dual-layer, authoring, RAM or mini) or to a Blu-ray Disc. There’s also a checkbox for OpenDVD, which adds additional data to the burned disc that allows it to be edited further on another computer running a Sonic/Roxio disc authoring tool.