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Interactive spec on tap for high-end DVD players
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(08/17/01, 4:44 p.m.
EST)
The forum — comprising Hollywood studios, PC and consumer electronics
manufacturers, software technology developers and chip vendors — is
considering three software proposals that would expand the capabilities of
high-end DVD systems, EE Times has learned. It expects to hammer
out a standard by next summer, in time for OEMs to ship systems for the
Christmas 2002 selling season.
"The ultimate goal of DVD-Interactive is to provide additional
capability for users to do interactive operation with content on DVD disks
or at Web sites on the Internet," said Hisashi Yamada, the DVD Forum's
Working Group-1 chair. The forum also sees the spec helping content owners
re-spin their DVD-Interactive content not only for PC DVD-ROMs but also
for new network businesses, he added.
Several sources close to the DVD Forum told EE Times that the
three technologies being investigated for the emerging interactive format
include software from InterActual Inc. originally developed to provide ROM
features and Web connectivity for DVD titles; MPEG-4; and Java- and
HTML-based technologies promoted by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
Matsushita confirmed that the company is taking part in the industry
discussions at the forum. But Mitsunobu Furumoto, general manager of
Matsushita's DVD business promotion department, declined to comment
further.
InterActual has been working independently of the forum to bring its
technology down to consumer DVD players, said Todd Collart, president and
chief executive officer at the San Jose company, which has developed the
de facto software standard for viewing Internet-connected DVD titles on a
PC.
InterActual is working with unnamed consumer electronics OEMs to bring
its software to market in time for Christmas 2002, said Collart, who also
chairs the DVD Forum's Group 1-12. The ad hoc group was established last
December to investigate advanced interactivity and Internet connectivity.
Basic software technology components used in InterActual's solution are
HTML 3.2, JavaScript 1.1 and Macromedia's Flash 3.0. The major studios
already use the InterActual APIs to write interactive content directly
tied to DVD video playback.
Media services layer In migrating the technology to the consumer DVD player, InterActual is
adding TV-safe resolution and offering a DVD media services layer, about
20 kbytes in footprint, that sits between embedded browsers and a variety
of DVD-player chip sets.
The hardware abstraction layer should eliminate the need for custom
porting of InterActual software to every DVD chip set, said Collart. But
because consumer DVD players use diverging operating systems, embedded
browsers and chip sets, InterActual still needs to ensure that an embedded
browser is ported to a real-time operating system supported by a DVD
decoder chip set. In this way the browser can talk directly to the
graphics chip in the DVD player.
InterActual's solution is "not about a so-called iDVD — a DVD player
with a dial-up modem simply slapped on," said Greg Gewickey, a senior
member of the technical staff. "Because iDVD is typically designed to let
consumers browse Web pages that have nothing to do with DVD video, it will
send an absolutely wrong message to consumers."
In contrast, InterActual adds Internet connectivity to the player in
order to directly tie consumers' entertainment experience to DVD video
content. The InterActual scheme allows content developers to embed
interactive components right on a DVD disk as ROM data, or to make that
ROM data available online.
Internet connectivity is handy, because once the interactive components
are put up on the Web, they can be updated at any time. Further,
integrating the ROM data into a DVD disk could present issues of disk
access time, Gewickey explained. When a movie is recorded on a dual-layer
DVD disk and ROM data is added at the tail end of the second layer, it
would be difficult to access video and data simultaneously without
chopping video, he said. But if interactive ROM data is on the Web,
consumers can download that file into buffer memory inside a DVD player.
In contrast, MPEG-4's claim to fame is its object-based coding,
allowing content owners to embed all the interactive components —
dynamically linked to the video content — inside an MPEG stream. With
MPEG-4, "There is no need to spend a long time in downloading the whole
interactive code into your DVD player," said Ganesh Rajan, director of
advanced technology at iVast Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif., company that has
developed an MPEG-4-based streaming-media delivery platform.
MPEG-4 has other attributes — not the least of which is its status as
an industry standard — that make it an intriguing candidate. "Because
MPEG-4 is an object-based coding format, it would enhance many of the
interactive features that you find in DVDs today," said Elliot Broadwin,
iVast's chief executive officer. These include "navigating among movie
segments and accessing ancillary information, such as the director's
commentary, that bring added value to movies and other material released
on DVD." Broadwin, however, declined to discuss matters tied to the DVD
Forum's debate.
Some studios are also keen on MPEG-4. An engineering executive at a
major film studio, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, called MPEG-4
"a future for DVD menus and interactivity," and for interactive TV
broadcasting. The studio finds MPEG-4 attractive because "as a content
provider, the endless re-working of content for different middleware and
presentation engines is prohibitive," he said.
Depending on the selected technology, the new DVD-Interactive format
could have far-reaching implications for everyone involved in the DVD food
chain. DVD-player manufacturers must determine a new system architecture
for the advanced DVD player, while chip companies will have to make sure
their next-generation silicon meets the DVD-Interactive spec. Hollywood
studios, meanwhile, must figure out an effective way to author and encode
DVD interactive content.
Compared with PCs, most DVD players have very constrained system
resources. If the DVD Forum picks the InterActual technology, for example,
an enhanced player will need to support file systems, a beefier processor,
a larger buffer memory or hard-disk drive to cache and read ahead ROM
data, and a real-time kernel to support smooth operation between DVD
playback and Web connectivity, according to chief executive Collart. The
enhanced player will also need modem functions. Defining a spec that meets
the requirements of both studios and hardware vendors "is a tough
balancing act," he said.
If MPEG-4 is adopted, the timely availability of silicon could be an
issue. Only a handful of chip vendors have media processors or codecs
capable of decoding MPEG-4. Some industry players also point to a lack of
tools for building MPEG-4 content as a stumbling block.
Brutal price war Still, chip and system vendors may welcome the new format as a route
toward renewed profitability. Chinese OEMs have been churning out
mainstream DVD players at low cost, and the price war has been brutal on
Japanese OEMs in particular.
Michelle Abraham, senior analyst at Cahners' In-Stat, said a new
interactive format "could give DVD-player manufacturers much-needed
differentiation and profitability." She added, "This could help keep their
hardware float above $150."
Some in the industry speculated that the DVD Forum may end up
specifying the InterActual or Matsushita proposal as an interim step to
enhance the current line of DVD players, while keeping MPEG-4 as a
long-term goal.
Work on the interactive format inevitably involves the DVD Forum in
specifying an advanced player. That's a dicey issue, since the forum's
charter involves the disk format alone; hardware is left to the OEM
developers.
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