The very first version of Digital Digest, note the Asus V3400 reference

It is worth noting again that Digital Digest is really a collection of many different websites that I have developed over the last 10 years. The very first of these websites was a Geocities (and Tripod) hosted website called DVDigest. It was still relatively early days for the Internet, and the boom was underway. Free web hosting was all the rage, and Geocities and Tripod were amongst the leaders. You get something like 15 MB of space and some unspecified bandwidth limit, for hosting static HTML pages and images, which was plentiful back then. And when you do go over the bandwidth limit, you can always open another free account – to solve the problem of ever changing URLs, you used redirect services like cjb.net (so you would have something like dvdigest.cjb.net, which would direct to whichever free account that was still active back then). Now, this was a time of venture capitalists going crazy and IPOs popping up all over the place, so in comparison, DVDigest was pretty amateur. Even for the amateurs.

But it was noob time for most people back then, before the word “noob” was even invented. My interests back then, being the nerd that I am, was to go to newsgroups and help people with their DVD playback problems. I was one of the few that jumped on to the doomed VCD bandwagon (having purchased a hardware MPEG-1 decoder card at great cost), and my interests naturally flowed onto this new format called DVD. Playing DVDs on your PC back then is  like trying to play games at 2560×1600 resolution today. With 8xAA and 16x AF. In other words, stutter city was the name of the game. That is unless you had some sort of graphics card that could accelerate DVD playback (or a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder card). The graphics card I had back then was the  Asus V3400, part of Nvidia’s Riva TNT family. Despite the marketing, it did not have DVD acceleration and playback was, well, awful. Software based DVD decoders were still in their early days back then, and it took a great deal of tweaking before you could get acceptable framerates on an Intel Celeron 333a. The experience I gained from helping people play DVDs is what led me to write up a few webpages and open a site called DVDigest, which quickly became DVD Digest because people were a bit confused at the name (and they still are – “Digest” reads as in Reader’s Digest, and not as in “digest food”, BTW).

This went on, and more content was added. There were a few new things coming out back then that were quite exciting (for a nerd like me). Talks of doing the impossible and somehow copying the copy protected DVD to your hard-drive, that is if you had a hard-drive big enough. The very first “ripper”, if I can remember, was all about using PowerDVD’s screen capture facility and capturing everything frame by frame. People might as well have pointed a video camera at their TV for all the good that it did (no sound until further processing!) , but at least the process path was all digital. There as also this thing called DivX ; -) – which allowed you to make high quality videos (even better than VCD!) at maybe only a tenth of the space. It was an exciting time.

DeCSS: Who knew such a small program could cause so much trouble ...

It was still late 1999 when I was approached by a company, which shall remain nameless (and actually I can’t remember their name anyway), that offered to help me host my fledgling website, which had already grown too p0pular to be hosted on a 15 MB free webspace deal (shocking, I know). I was to get a part of the advertising money, and they would do all the hosting. They even kindly purchased the domain name dvd-digest.com (don’t bother hurrying over to whois the name, it’s owned by different people now, I think), which was perhaps not as kind as I had believed, naive as I was. All went pretty smoothly until the said company received legal documents which suggested that the rippers I was hosting was not entirely legal. The infamous DVD CCA vs DeCSS case had started. It doesn’t really matter now that the court eventually ruled in favour of the defendants, but I’m sure it was scary for the company that hosted DVD Digest (and owned the domain name to boot). And they took what was in their eyes not only the right action, but the only action, which was to “Shut It Down!”. I was on vacation and away from the Internet at that time (hard to believe that being away from the Internet is actually possible these days, I know) and I did not find out until a week or two after the fact. It wasn’t good news for DVD Digest.

So I had to start from scratch again in the fake new millennium (2000), this time with the domain name digital-digest.com, even though the site was still called DVD Digest back then. And start again I did. The year 2000 was a great one for DVD Digest, despite the soon bursting of the Internet bubble. It was then that I turned what was really a hobby into a business of sorts, and of course, the DVD industry made huge strides in those few years which was helpful for a website that relied on more and more people wondering why they’re only getting 15 FPS from the DVDs on their PCs.

The DVD Digest name continued to be used for many years, with Digital Digest eventually taking over as the official name of the website, but by then there were other sites part of the Digital Digest network called DivX Digest and DVD±R Digest, but that’s a story for part 2 and 3 of The History of Digital Digest.

To be continued in part 2 …

The new 2D, animated and 3D templates are nice, and should be enough for most common usages and can be customized effectively. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same old Nero Vision with the same old problems as before (read our DVD authoring tool roundup for the pros and cons).

Read the Nero Vision 5 DVD Authoring Guide.

It won’t create DVDs with beautiful menus and other fancy features, but things like multiple audio tracks and subtitles are not too difficult to add in. The output quality is quite good as well, although this largely depends on the quality of the source file. Give it a try and I think you’ll be impressed.

The other guide I wrote is about AVI to WMV conversion, trying to make these files playable on the Xbox 360. I used the free Windows Media Encoder 9 software, which unlike DVD Flick, is not as straight forward or well designed. It will work well when the input file is “Microsoft approved” (ie. WMV files), but for anything else (like DivX/XviD), it can cause a lot of problems. The software itself is quite powerful, with support for a lot of different types of encodings, including streaming and VC-1, but you can just feel that it wasn’t really designed for use by your average/newbie user (which is no surprise then that the URL for the software on Microsoft’s website has changed to add “forpros” in the URL), unlike DVD Flick.

I like to organise them alphabetically, which means shuffling everything around whenever I buy some new DVDs. But the biggest problem is storage, or rather, finding places to store them.

As you can see from the picture above, I’ve had to maximize all the storage spaces, stacking the DVDs in different ways whenever possible. I can probably still store about 200 DVDs in this way, but after that, who knows what I’ll do.

This is the biggest problem with having a physical medium. If everything was digital, then it would take roughly 5024 GB (each disc being 8 GB, which is quite a high estimate), or ten 500 GB hard-drives (until 1 TB drives are more available). To be safe, I should have a RAID-5 setup to ensure I don’t lose data, so I would an extra disk. These hard-drives would still occupy less space than a stack of 20 DVDs, and assuming I’ve done the hard work to categorize and tag these digital entries, searching and playback become so much easier and quicker.

Maybe one day…

English is not my first language, so while watching DVD movies, I prefer to have the English subtitles on. Obviously, subtitles are essential for people with hearing difficulties.

This week’s pet peeve is DVDs that don’t have subtitles. Back in the old days, when buying a DVD player would mean a week’s wage, many region 1 DVDs would not have subtitles, and only closed captioning support. CC support is completely useless to people outside of region 1, as we don’t have CC decoders in our TVs. But this is perhaps understandable, since these DVDs were never intended for sale outside of the US and Canada.

However, I’ve noticed that even today, several high profile releases do not have subtitles. The most recent one I’ve encountered is the region 4 copy of Unleashed (released by Universal Pictures in region 4). This DVD has a DTS track, extra features, but no subtitles. The region 2 version has English subtitles for the hearing impaired, while the region 1 version has at least closed captioning support. While I would be able to live with having no subtitles once in a while, but what about people with hearing impairment? Are they not entitled to watch this movie?

Why do studios insist on releasing NTSC content in PAL regions? Is it because they are lazy? Cost savings? Or just because they don’t give a rat’s arse about people who actually pay their salaries (us, the customers)?

A lot of people still don’t have equipment that can play or display NTSC content, and is it really that hard to produce a new transfer for the PAL regions, especially when there are so many countries that uses PAL (Europe, UK, Australia). Notable NTSC releases in Australia includes The Goonies, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory (only the full-frame version is available as well) and my recently purchased copy of Dilbert: The Complete Series. Often, the NTSC warnings are not very visible nor helpful, since most people don’t even know the NTSC/PAL difference (nor should they be expected to know).

On a related note, if you have a Pioneer Plasma that has PureCinema mode, you should have an “Advanced” option which basically does 3:3 pulldown, playing back 24 FPS content at 72 Hz. 3:3 pulldown triples every frame to get the required 72 Hz refresh rate, and what you get is a slightly smoother picture compared to standard 2:3 pulldown (the “Standard” PureCinema mode) . I use this mode to play back all my NTSC DVDs. For my (3 year old) model, 3:3 pulldown only works when the input is interlaced, so I have my upscaling DVD player set to 1080i 60Hz mode when playing back NTSC discs, and then enable 3:3 pulldown – the improved smoothness of panning is immediately noticeable. PAL discs are at 25 FPS, so I set the DVD player to 720p (native resolution of the TV) @ 50 Hz.

Yes I would, if stealing a handbag meant that I wouldn’t be forced to watch this stupid trailer again

If the Internet has taught has anything is that people like the freedom of being able to get and use information without being limited to a particular process or method. The freedom, therefore, to choose what you want to watch and what you don’t want to watch is essential. Being forced to watch some stupid studio trailer (Universal Pictures, I’m looking at you) that you’ve seen about a million times, or being told that you are a terrorist because you made a copy of a movie for your mother, is just plain annoying. Sometimes you are forced to wait up to 5 minutes before you can get to the movie, and that’s just not good enough. Ripping DVDs to get rid of these UOPs (User Operation Prohibitions) seems to be the only method, except that it’s illegal in most countries.

Many studios don’t employ these heavy handed tactics to force you to watch things, and they need to be applauded for doing so. Others should hang their heads in shame.

I think it would be great (if not somewhat ironic) that legal DVD downloads be distributed using bittorrent technology. It really is the best and fastest way to distribute large files, and it saves money for the distributors.

Digital downloads would also make distribution of hard to find/out of print titles possible. It is often not worth it commercially for studios to release old and rare movies, but if they do it online, there is no production cost involved.

And once bandwidth becomes faster and cheaper, perhaps HD titles can be distributed in the same way.

And since everything will be delivered digitally, why not allow customizations? For example, I could choose a different style of main menu, which language and subtitle tracks I want to be included in the download, and also which extra features to have (discounts available for choosing the movie only version perhaps). Exclusive material not found on the physical DVD version might also be made available, to be downloaded for an additional fee. The possibilities are endless, and I really shouldn’t be doing the studio’s work for them by coming up with these ideas (will sell ideas for money!!).

People who have been using media centers are well aware of the ease in which digital content can be played back without having the physical (optical) media. Everything is organized and easy to access, and searching is much easier. No discs means less clutter, and the loading time is greatly reduced.

Kaleidescape – The ultimate system (if not a bit too rich for my wallet)

Up until now, many people have been doing the “illegal” thing and copying their own DVDs to media centers. Kaleidescape, for example, is a commercial solution for keeping your DVDs in a digital library, and they even went as far as winning (at least for now, before appeals) a lawsuit bought against them by the DVD Copy Control Association.

Is it really too hard for the studios to start allowing legal DVD quality downloads? The price, the risk of piracy, the technical problem have all be quoted as reasons for not having legal DVD downloads.

I theorize that if DVD quality downloads are available for $10 per movie (with sub-DVD quality versions at $5), then I think you will see a huge decrease in the amount of movies being pirated (plus make a tidy profit at the same time). Why pirate an illegal inferior XviD version (possibly fake, and loaded with virus/trojan executables) when you can grab the legal version with better quality and faster downloading for only $5?

DivX would be perfect for distributing legal movies in sub-DVD quality

These downloads should be also be DRM free – DRM hardly works anyway in stopping copying, but it does work quite well in making life miserable for customers by limiting interoperability. The reason why people use DivX/XviD is the wide spread support for it in hardware, and legal downloads should offer the same advantages. Free software should also be included to make it easy to burn these files to DVDs, and for these burned DVDs to be as compatible as real DVDs you buy in the shops. This will help media companies who also have investment in hardware playback devices, as improve interoperability means more playback devices being sold and used.

The biggest technical challenge is bandwidth. Most people (at least here in Australia) are on a 10 to 30 GB per month limit – this only equals 6 DVD downloads (or 3 DVD downloads if they include extra features or are overly long), and it will probably take the average user (on 1.5 Mbps download speeds) 7 or 8 hours to download a single DVD. But you could argue that if people are already downloading tons of illegal stuff, then they aren’t all that concerned about the technical limitations or have found ways around it. Certainly offering lower quality (DivX/XviD) legal downloads would solve the problem for many people.

Studios should also work together with ISPs to offer downloads that won’t eat into your monthly allowance, perhaps even investing in their own high speed network designed for DVD downloads – this in itself is worth the $10 you pay for each DVD download in my opinion.

Episodes of Lost are already available to download on iTunes, but is not at DVD quality and is DRM protected to make DVD burning difficult if not impossible (within legal limits)

With TV shows on DVDs being quite popular, there could also be a model where you download each episode as it is aired in DVD quality. Let’s say that a typical TV season consisting of 20 episodes costs $40 for the DVD box set, then if you market each downloadable episode at $2.00 (the price at which some TV episodes are already available to download), many people will be tempted to download them. In fact, many are already downloading episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives for the same price through iTunes, even though it’s not at DVD quality and is loaded with DRM goodness. At the end of the season, you should then be able to run a software and turn these downloaded episodes into a proper DVD set (complete with menus, but no extras). An offer of a discount on the DVD box set (with extras) could then be offered, and I think most people will buy that as well. The possibilities are endless, and the profits for studios and TV networks will increase.

So why aren’t studios doing this? Perhaps they are still holding on to the old concepts of media distribution, and tape/discs do offer more control in terms of who is viewing your content. Perhaps they are also afraid of opening this digital pandora’s box, afraid that a single downloaded copy will be distributed to millions of people with no profits to them. I don’t think these are huge concerns, and in the words of Michael Eisner^*, former CEO of Disney:

Wise words indeed. Let’s hope the studios are listening.

^* Thanks to Doom9.net and 2600 for the quote

First in the firing line is two disc DVD editions. No, I don’t hate these, but rather, I hate the completely random way in which the 2 discs are organised within the DVD sleeve – should disc 1 (the main movie) sit on top in the swing tray (see picture below), or should it sit on the bottom in the more traditional position?

Some studios like to put the discs in numerical order, disc 1 on top, disc 2 on the bottom. Some prefer to have the main movie on the bottom, and have the extras disc swing around and be more prone to damage. Some studios just don’t care and randomly chooses a location. And many studios don’t even bother to number the discs anyways, just to make it all a bit more interesting.

Personally, I prefer having the main movie disc at the bottom and not in the swing tray. This way, the main movie disc won’t move around during transport (but to be fair, discs placed in the swing tray is unlikely to be damaged in any case). On average, I have to “correct” this problem on 80% of the 2-disc edition DVDs that I buy. It’s not that annoying, but I’ve always wondered how studios decide which disc goes where. Maybe they even have an executive in charge of making this decision!

You can vote for your method of 2-disc management down below.

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