Home truths about DVD

It's a knack I have: upsetting people. Just ask any PR person - if it wasn't their corns I trod on, it was probably one of their clients.

It's quite likely that I have upset you as well, although you have only yourself to blame. They don't run that scarey picture of me for nothing, you know.

I don't mean to upset people. I don't sit in a darkened room trying to think up irritating things to say. They sort of just come out. So it happened with these DVD owners. I sort of said that DVD picture quality is very disappointing, the whole region thing sucks and, well, maybe people would be best advised to stay away from it for the time being.

It was a bit like accusing a Fairy Godfather of shoplifting. Up in arms doesn't do it justice. Up in smoke, more like.

Forget the occasional MPEG-2 encoding and the apparently strange way with aspect ratios: the big drawback of the DVD deal is region support. This is the manufacturers' way of preventing people from buying records outside their own area. The disks are made to play only in the region they are sold in and the players are set to that region too, so they only play those disks. Thus you can't play US (region 1) disks on a UK (region 2) player.

The 'DVDies' argue among themselves as to what region you should buy - apparently despite the lower quality of the US TV system, US region 1 disks often have a better transfer than UK region 2 disks, but not always.

In other words, we should import disks from the US. And then there is lots of discussion about how to modify DVD players to give multi-region support. Now, if an outsider dares to point out that all this suggests that the market isn't mature enough for the high street punter, people get very defensive.

Then it dawned on me. This was the marketing kicking in - and boy has there been a lot of marketing. You may think the computer press has been a touch excitable in its coverage, but just check out the coverage of DVD and wide-screen TVs in the home entertainment press. You'd think the manufacturers had started dishing out money.

But before we allow ourselves to become too smug, let us remember that there is a moral here for us in the computer industry. And that is, if you wind up the punters too much, they lose sight of reality and when reality finally arrives, it isn't the reality they want so the punters abandon all thoughts of forgiveness.

While it is great for the DVD market to have a lot of big-mouthed fools telling everybody else how marvellous DVD is, when people finally buy into it and realise that it has 'wet paint' signs all around it, the backlash will be big time.

If the DVD market doesn't deliver its technology and software promises soon, the punters will stop buying and may even congregate at the castle gates with sticks and stones.

Ring any bells for the computer market?

Chris Long is a freelance IT journalist.