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Stardate 20011220.2158 (On Screen): This fluff piece tries to portray DVD burners as the "next big thing" for home computers. (Note the extremely prominent mention of the Macintosh.) I don't believe it. There are a number of reasons why, but the biggest is the love-hate relationship that the equipment makers have with their customers. For example, the much-ballyhooed DVD-R drive that Apple has been selling is deliberately crippled. You can create your own DVDs with it, but you cannot master a standard DVD or use the drive to make your own copy of a DVD. (That's why all the advertising from Apple tended to emphasize creation of home movies, as does this particular fluff piece.) But if people get these, part of what they're going to want them for is to do with video what they're doing with audio now with CD-R drives: to make their own collections of video from prerecorded sources.

Another reason is that the march of technology is making the DVD itself obsolete in many ways. Oh, I don't think that they're going to go away, but they're not going to dominate for quite a while. For example, for purposes of making compilations of home movies, a CD actually serves nearly as well now that MPEG-4 has been released. It is so much better at compression of video that it is now possible to fit an entire movie onto a single CD. The only drawback is that it has to be played on a real computer; it can't be played back on a DVD player connected to a TV. But in this day and age is that really all that important for purposes of making home movies? Stacked against that is the fact that CD-R drives are cheaper and more readily available, and CD-R blanks cost less than 5% of what DVD-R blanks cost.

So far from taking off in the immediate future, I expect DVD-R to continue to be a niche market, growing slowly. It will only take off when DVD-R drives and blanks are released at a price comparable to CD-R, and which do not include copy protection mechanisms. And that will happen when hell freezes over, if the MPAA has anything to say about it. (discuss)

Update: Michael writes to tell me that most DVD players can play properly encoded video CDs, which can be mastered on a PC and burned with a CD-R drive. In that case, there doesn't seem to be anything that a DVD-R drive can do that a CD-R player can't do as well for less money.