FROM this week, well-heeled gadget fans will be able to buy a home-cinema
system that lets them watch the astonishingly high-quality pictures that till
now have stayed locked inside DVD movie discs. But Hollywood studio bosses are
worried. They see the new system as a pirate鈥檚 charter, and have been fighting
to keep the pristine digital signal out of consumers鈥� hands for fear that people
will make broadcast-quality copies.
DVDs store video as digital code, compressed to the MPEG-2 standard used for
digital TV. The data rate varies continually between 3 and 10 megabits per
second, depending on whether the system is coding moving detail or static
scenery.
Flat-panel plasma screens and digital video projectors work best if they are
fed a pure digital signal. Most have an input socket called a serial digital
interface (SDI). This is an interface used by broadcasters to carry video at
data rates up to the 270 megabits per second needed for uncompressed
studio-quality pictures. To prevent digital copying, DVD players and digital TV
receivers only have low-quality analogue video outputs, which has made it
impossible to connect them to the high-resolution screen鈥檚 SDI input.
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But now David Garrett, who was formerly an engineer with Britain鈥檚 Ministry
of Defence, has developed a custom microchip which takes MPEG-2 data from a DVD
or digital TV receiver and converts its into a high-quality
10-megabits-per-second video signal. Garrett鈥檚 company, Function Communications
of Chelsea, fits these chips and SDI sockets to off-the-shelf DVD players or
digital TV receivers, so that they can connect to the SDI input on a plasma
screen.
Up to 27 of Garrett鈥檚 modified DVD players can be combined, and their
10-megabit-per-second outputs interleaved to let a single SDI cable deliver a
menu of different movies鈥攖o hotel bedrooms, for instance. Garrett says he
has sold hundreds of modified terrestrial and satellite receivers to European
broadcasters, including the BBC, who use them to monitor and record
broadcasts.
Garrett鈥檚 DVD technology was first shown at a DVD conference in Dublin last
month. DVD players, made by Pioneer and Wharfedale, connected direct to the SDI
inputs of a Hitachi-Fujitsu plasma screen and an NEC digital projector with
1024-by-768-pixel resolution. MGM and Technicolor provided a DVD of the James
Bond movie The World is Not Enough. Bob Auger of Electric Switch, a DVD
production company, says: 鈥淭his is the first time DVD is being seen as it is
meant to be seen.鈥�
鈥淭he people from MGM couldn鈥檛 wait to get their discs in the player,鈥� says
Garrett. 鈥淲e were running the equipment 24 hours a day because so many producers
wanted to see what their discs looked like.鈥�
Garrett admits that his technology has been made possible by loopholes in
Hollywood鈥檚 contracts with DVD makers. 鈥淎ll the manufacturers of DVD players
have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is
no mention of SDI,鈥� he says. Firewire feeds high-quality video into
computers.
Function Communications is now putting together the ultimate home cinema kit.
For 拢10 000, customers will be able to buy a modified Pioneer DVD player
and a 107-centimetre (42-inch) plasma screen. Ironically, some of the most
enthusiastic buyers of such screens are super-rich Hollywood actors and rock
musicians, who now look likely to be pitched against the copyright-protecting
moguls of the entertainment industry who employ them.