DVD history lesson, please?

[AlecWest]

I guess I've led a sheltered life (grin). Until today, I'd never rented a 2-hour film on DVD where the film was split in half - the first part on one side, the second part on the other. The film was Stargate (1994). Sure enough, when I checked, it was a DVD5 DVD-ROM. Side one had the first half of the film and some special features. Side two had the second half of the film and previews of upcoming films.

In any case, I was wondering when Hollywood finally abandoned DVD5 except for the shortest releases with fewest added features?

Two trivia notes on the film from IMDB ... one with a question.

First, the actor who played Ra (Jaye Davidson) was apparently so upset at the costumes he had to wear that when the final filmed scene was "cut," he completely disrobed on the set and swore he'd never do another film. And, he hasn't done one since then.

Secondly, Roland Emmerich claimed the story came to him while he was still in film school in 1979. The truth? Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin stole the story from a student who submitted it to them ... but was rejected at the time. Ten years later, Stargate came out. The student took them to court and proved that the only differences between the story and the movie were slight name variations. And, the student even had a noted Egyptologist from Johns Hopkins University vouch for him.

Anyway, all IMDB would say is that there was an "out of court settlement" of the issue. I'm curious to know the name of this student/writer to see if he's done anything else. And I'm also curious, unless it's one of those hush-hush secret settlements with a gag order attached, what the student/writer got in the settlement (money, royalties, etc.). If anyone knows the answer, please enlighten me.

[lumis]

I don't know much about the film, but as far as the DVD10 you have there, I can give you a bit of info.

Back then (1994) video encoding isn't what it was now, so spanning a movie across 2 discs, was almost required for longer films.

And producing a DVD10 (or two DVD5's) was cheaper than a DVD9, it's always about the money.

Today, they would either put it on a DVD9 or they would just put it on a DVD5, because the encoding technology is a lot better.

[guns1inger]

They haven't abandoned it, by any means. A recently released chick-flick, Shall We Dance, has the movie squeezed into around 3.6 GB, and still has deleted scenes and a 30 minute behind the scenes EPK. Given the amount of compression, the image quality seemed to be quite good (I haven't watched the film, but after backing it up and seeing how small it was, I had to look).

Similarly, the US release of Mad Max was a flipper, with the movie and commentaries on side A, and the features on side B. The Australian release was a DVD 9 with DTS audio - the US didn't get this - and one less 'feature'. I have the US release because it features the awful US dub audio track from the original released, as well as the original Australian mono and remixed 5.1 AC3 audio. The local release doesn't have the US dub track.

[zzyzzx]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

History

In the early 1990s two high-density optical storage standards were being developed; one was the MultiMedia Compact Disc, backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density disc, supported by Toshiba, Time-Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson, and JVC. IBM's president, Lou Gerstner, acting as a matchmaker, led an effort to unite the two camps behind a single standard, anticipating a repeat of the costly format war between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s.

Philips and Sony abandoned their MultiMedia Compact Disc and fully agreed upon Toshiba's SuperDensity Disc with only one modification, namely EFMPlus. EFMPlus was chosen as it has a great resilience against disc damage such as scratches and fingerprints. EFMPlus, created by Kees Immink, who also designed EFM, is 6% less efficient than the Toshiba's code, which resulted in a capacity of 4.7 GB as opposed to the original 5 GB. The result was the DVD specification, finalized for the DVD movie player and DVD-ROM computer applications in December of 1995.[1] In May 1997, the DVD Consortium was replaced by the DVD Forum, which is open to all other companies.

"DVD", originally used as an initialism for "digital videodisk",[2] was decided to officially stand for "digital versatile disc" at the time of the 1995 specification finalization (due to non-video applications).[3] A newsgroup FAQ written by Jim Taylor (a prominent figure in the industry) claims that, in 1999, the DVD Forum changed the official name of the format to "DVD", and that the letters no longer stand for anything.[4] This claim is presented without any supporting evidence, however.


I findit interesting that nowhere on the DVD page is there a reference to VCD's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCD

While never gaining a foothold in the United States, Europe or Japan, commercial VCDs are very popular throughout Asia (except Japan) because of the low price of the players, their tolerance of high humidity (a notable problem for VCRs), and the lower-cost media. Ease of duplication and the negligible cost of the media gave rise to widespread unauthorized copying in these areas.

Available long before DVD-Video, digital VideoCD might have replaced analog VHS as the dominant home video format in United States by the mid-1990s. However, because VCDs have virtually no inherent copy prevention, the format was actively and successfully squashed in the US by the feature film industry. Subsequently, the US entertainment industry refused to support DVD-Video until it incorporated multiple layers of copy prevention, holding up DVD-Video's release to the general public for several years.

The advent of recordable CDs, inexpensive recorders, and compatible DVD players spurred VCD acceptance in the US in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, DVD burners and DVD-Video recorders were available by that time, and equipment and media costs for making DVD-Video fell rapidly. DVD-Video, with its longer run time and much higher quality, quickly overshadowed VCD.

With the advent of CD burners becoming standard on home PCs, plus the wide availability of low-cost MPEG-1 capture devices, VCD was the first digital video recording format that was widely available to consumers. However, many DVD players made before 2003-2004 could not read recordable (CD-R) media, and this limited the compatibility of VCD. Almost every modern stand-alone DVD-Video player can play VideoCDs burned on recordable media.

Many commercial Video CDs of blockbuster Hollywood, Bollywood and other Asian movies and television series are not widely available in the Western countries; however, they are available in certain ethnic communities and several commercial web sites (although quality and authenticity may sometimes be questionable). These VCDs are often produced and sold in Asian countries such as India, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. In many Asian countries, major Hollywood studios have licensed companies to officially produce and distribute the VCDs, such as MCA in India, ERA of Hong Kong or Sunny Video in Malaysia, Berjaya-HVN and InnoForm Media in both Malaysia and Singapore, as well as VIVA Video, Magnavision, and The Video to C in the Philippines. Legal Video CDs can often be found in established video stores and major book outlets in most Asian countries.

Due to relative small storage capacity, feature-length films sold on VCD are usually divided into two or three discs and television series may come in a box set package with multiple discs. In both cases, most films run at roughly 60 minutes per VCD, before viewers are prompted to change discs. In many Asian movies, subtitles are not removable on standard VCDs, unlike DVDs.

VCD is gradually being replaced by DVD, which offers most of the same advantages to Asian buyers as VCD, as well as a much better quality picture (higher resolution with less digital compression artifacts) and sound (often in Dolby Digital and/or DTS), due to its larger storage capacity.

VCD does however have a few points in its favor:

Like VHS and unlike DVD-Video, the VCD format has no region coding. Many VCD players are capable of compensating for the different frame rate and pixel count between NTSC and PAL TV systems, which means that discs can be played on any compatible machine worldwide.

Some titles available on VCD may not be available on DVD and/or VHS in the prospective buyer's region.

They are much cheaper than DVDs. The DVD of a film may cost anywhere from three to nine times as much as the VCD. On the other hand, VCDs do not come with the bonus features like that of DVDs, such as choice of language, (removable) subtitles, chapters, deleted scenes, theatrical and television previews, interviews, outtakes and production notes.

VCD is also a very popular format for karaoke in East Asia, where picture quality concern is not paramount.

These factors may ensure a steady market for VCDs for many years to come.

Also good reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Video_CD

I would add that there is a link to this site from the Web Encyclopedia in both the VCD and SVCD articles.

[Conquest10]

Those Wal-mart cartoon DVDs are mostly I think DVD5s (all the ones I've gotten are). The double sided discs have not been abandoned. The Law & Order: SVU set is on 4 dual-layer, dual-sided discs.

[adam]

DVD 10's, 14's, and 18's are still used all the time and many things are still released on DVD 5's but he's talking about actually spreading the movie itself across the front and back of a DVD 10, such that you have to stop in the middle of the movie to flip the disc. The slang term for one of these is a "flipper." I don't recall any release doing this for some years. The last one's I remember were A Time To Kill, Goodfellas, and BeetleJuice which were all released in 1997. Warner Bros had a terrible habbit for doing this. They used the same crappy template for all of their releases for those years. The background just had a big WB logo on it. All of these releases were horrible quality and all have SE versions now. I don't think there was any kind of industry standard switch away from this practice, because it was only a few studios that were ever doing it in the first place. It was done when DVD9 authoring was more expensive and I really think it was just a case of a handful of releases getting neglected to save some money.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

...The slang term for one of these is a "flipper." I don't recall any release doing this for some years. The last one's I remember were A Time To Kill, Goodfellas...

Goodfellas was the first 'flipper' I ever came across.
It's a long movie and it wasn't marked clearly on the disc.
I put in side 2 without realizing it and was thoroughly confused.
I'm glad this practice didn't last long.
Reminds me of LaserDiscs.

[guns1inger]

That's not to say that there aren't still split releases. I have Lawrence of Arabia Director's Cut, Once Upon A Time In America, Ben Hur and Sparticus (OK, I like my epics). All of these are two disc releases where both discs are DVD9 and the movie is split across both discs. Thankfully for three of these they were made in the era of the intermission, and have a clear point at which to split the film.

The first flipper I watched was Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. If I remember rightly, the break point wasn't very well placed either. Like a layer break in the middle of a scene instead during the fade to black.