DVD - Twenty Three years ago (Patreon Extra)

The Cantata 700 from 3M. I remember hearing James Brown's Papa's Got a Brand New Bag in Montreal's Place des Arts metro station in the 80s while waiting for the next train. Strictly instrumental, of course. Not bad. It even included the guitar lick before the horn blasts. A young Brit that I met in Ottawa in 1970, one Andrew Dawes, who was traveling around Canada, visited Montreal for a few days and when he returned he said that he had heard Bach organ music in a Montreal metro station. Those were the days.

I have a weird feeling I may have heard this broadcast back in the days when I was on the road, listening to Radio 4. I recall discussing it with the customer I was visiting out Banbury way somewhere

DVDs are to CDs as video cassettes are to audio cassettes (at that time). The improvement in audio quality that CD brought over audio cassettes was very impressive. The improvement in video quality of DVD over videotapes was even greater. I remember being absolutely blown away by a DVD of "Lost in Space" (the then 'new' film) although I already had bought a LaserDisc player (which was also much better than videotape). That the media (DVDs) were around half the price also shifted my perception! I never understood the "recordable" issue. I couldn't record onto CDs (I still used cassettes) so why would I expect to record onto DVDs when I still used videocassettes for that? The BIG drawback for me was the price of DVD players in Australia at that time, around $A1200. So I bought a DVD player in Singapore for around $A600 and was very happy with it for many years. (Blu-Ray is another issue altogether!)

It must have been irritating you didn't go go for the pioneer DVD and laserdisc machine seeing how DVDs disappeared and we all carry around our 12 inch analogue videos!

From what I recall there was quite a gap between the launch in the USA and the UK. We went to New York in 1999 and music shops were full of them with VHS tapes relegated to a dusty corner of the shop. In contrast the 1999 Argos catalogue doesn't have any DVD players. The Autumn 2000 Catalogue features one, a £250 Thomson. I guess the staggered release meant production prices had dropped by the time of the UK launch.

c.2000 I actually got a book about DVD from the local library so I could read up on the format. Wanted to be a knowledgable consumer and all. And then one of the weekend newspaper ad flyers had one for $99 (wayyyyy less than what I had expected to pay) and I just went and picked it up. The theory being, if it's crap, it was only $99. It worked fine and we had that for 4-5 years before buying another (for reasons I don't recall - didn't do dual-layer maybe?). With the pace of change and all the manufacturing concentrated now in China with prices collapsing, there is no sense at all in being an "early adopter".

In the U.K., the watershed moment was when Tesco started selling Wharfedale players for £179 instead of the £500 that every other vendor was selling them for. It was also easily region hacked so you could order movies from Jersey or the US - I remember I bought a region hacked Panasonic DVD player from a company in Lincolnshire, and then would import discs from play.com when they were an importer, regularly getting movies when they were still in the cinema in the U.K. I was also told of a trade demo where loads of movie industry guys were herded into a cinema with a decent digital projector and faroudja line doubler set up. They then started playing the movie ‘saving private Ryan’ - and then opened the small cabinet set up in front of the stage, which had a Tesco Wharfedale DVD player inside. They ejected the disc (US imported disc with DTS soundtrack) and it became clear the movie they were watching on the big screen was coming out of the DVD player in front of them.

Gosh, this is a blast from the past. All my tech friends were buying dvd players about 15 years ago, but I waited until (a) the price came down below AU$500 and (b) were region free. When I did buy, it was much cheaper than that, moreover nearly all the players later came with region-free unlock codes. My point: interesting to hear about the industry fears at the time.

I seem to remember that the codeword for DVD was “Taz” given that Time Warner was a member of one of the consortia of companies developing DVD.

I was extremely interested in the launch of DVD. In fact, I used to read some website every day that had news about DVD development and I started reading that about a year before the launch of DVD. I also remember all of the naysayers. I think most people were saying it would fail because it can't record. Which is funny because most people at the time were using their VCR just to play back videos from blockbuster and never used the record feature anyway. I knew DVD was going to be a winner, but had no idea it's lifespan would be cut short by the advent of HDTV and streaming video.

Yep.. is the right time to shoot a video on DVD players repair :-)

Gee... DVDs are "nostalgic." I MUST be old! (In my crochety voice) I remember this guy named Tom coming around with his little cylinders that he told us sounded like real live music. What a bust that was!

Oh, how we humans are always skeptical towards that newfangled technology coming to make ripples in the water and change our pleasantly sedated lives...! 😂😂😂

My first DVD player was an off-brand that I bought from Strathfields (a major Australian high-street car audio and electronics chain back in the day). It was about $150 cheaper than the cheapest equivalent name brands at the time, but it was multi-region out of the box. It also had progressive scan, infinite zoom and could get past Macrovision copy protection (helpful for making ... um, backups ... onto VHS). A few months after getting it, our house was broken into. The only thing stolen was that DVD player. As I recall, it took about four months to come to an agreement with the insurance company, as they wanted to replace it with a more expensive name brand player (either Philips or Sony IIRC) but I wasn't having it. Mainly because said brand name player was region locked and lacked all the other features I used on my old player. The insurance company eventually agreed to reimburse me if I went and bought the same machine again and submitted the paid invoice. Did that and all seemed fine. Meanwhile, the replacement DVD player lacked infinite zoom, progressive scan and also had Macrovision enabled. This is despite said player being the same make and model number, with the front panel and remote control being identical. At least it was still multi-region. I hope old mate's $20 worth of meth or whatever it was they bought with the sale proceeds of my good DVD player was worth it. Final observation: "The Matrix" was to DVD early adopters what "Brothers In Arms" was to CD early adopters.

It seems that movie companies need to reinvent the "Interactive movie" idea every decade or so Good stuff! Thanks for sharing!

I remember the advent of DVD quite well, and remember my computer having one of the first Pioneer DVD recorders when one-time record-able DVDs were about $25 each. One thing to note there was that in 1997, the largest harddrive on the market was about 15GB with many computers still shipping with 1GB disks. So the 4.7GB capacity of DVDs seemed surreal and many people were thinking about using DVDs as primary storage devices. I think this also lead to the hesitation to associate DVDs with video, as there was still a lot of hype around them being used for interactive multimedia type functions; in fact, even Blu-ray tried to push that drivel with the "promise" of Java technology being a first-class supported tech in Blu-ray.

Thanks for sharing! Not quite "21st century's dominant format" as suggested. We're already 20 years in and DVDs are on the way out.

It's very interesting that she refers to records as "vinyl". I thought that this was a fairly new phenomenon, but I guess it's older than I thought.

I find the industry concern about DVD piracy at the time to be a bit odd (it would seem to be much easier for people to make illegal VHS copies of films). But then again, it does sound a whole lot like the attitudes of the music industry when DAT/MD/etc. were coming onto the market. I guess media industries just won't accept any new format without some trepedation.

Incredible! Life gets in the way of one seeing the incredible changes going on around! I was a youngish Dad with 4 young children in 1999 and I loved the new tech but had no time to notice the changes. Love Techmoan, natch, and this illustrates why.

Here in the U.S., my first DVD player was an add-on to my PC. The first DVD I bought was Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life.” This was in 1999 or 2000. At the time, it joined our Pioneer CLD-3070 Laserdisc Player. Both used S-Video and Toslink. We let the DVD use the one and only Toslink port on the amplifier, because it had this newfangled “Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound.” The laserdisc player only had stereo and that allowed it to do “Dolby Pro-Logic.” Video was fed into a Pioneer 25” TV with S-Video jacks. (It was a NEC rebranded as Pioneer.) Fun note... when we finally upgraded to Blu-ray, the first movie I bought was “A Bug’s Life,” just for nostalgia purposes! The movie I’ve purchased and re-purchased more than any other: various versions of “Blade Runner.”

Haha Disney refusing to release titles on DVD

Not really related, but I think I have the largest collection of HD-DVD's on the east coast of the US at, around, 140 titles... probably 60 of which still work and haven't started rotting away yet.

For all of the people confusing CD's and DVD history, I remember it quite well, buying my first CD player in Japan (Technics SL-P10), in late 1983, because they were unavailable in USA, unless you were someone very special, like a music industry executive! - When I got back to the states in December 1983, from everyone's reaction, you would have thought I was a visitor from another planet, with these strange music discs with Japanese writing on them, playing Led Zeppelin and Michael Jackson with a clarity and clean sound free of pops and clicks that no one had ever heard before!

Movies on a disc?

I don’t recall precisely when I bought my first DVD-player, but I do remember that I had bought a collection of DVD’s before actually buying the player. Just so I had something to watch when I got it. I am pretty sure though, that it was a HK/PRC machine with a region mod-chip. I think I got it with the mod-chip, not so much because I had some region 1 DVD’s but more “just in case”.

We bought our original Sony DVD player in 1999 for around €400 from what I recall and €50 extra to install a multi-region mod chip. We initially thought it was broken as it started playing like a badly worn VHS tape. It turned out Macrovision was the culprit as it passed through the VCR as back then everything was daisy chained by scart leads (here in Ireland). That DVD player could not play CD-Rs (said No Disc), but was able to play CD-RWs. It also struggled with recordable DVDs. When it finally died a few years ago, we replaced it with another DVD player from a car boot sale. My parents decided against a Blu-ray player as they don't see the point in paying extra just to have high definition picture and are happy enough with standard definition. They grew up with black & white and were one of the first also with a rather chunky VCR back in the early 80s.

Thanks! 👍😊

The sound is okay. Now, about that angles thing. The viewer would be able to choose angles. Did it ever happen?

Was it really not till 1997 when DVDs came? Amazing ... though apparently I didn't buy one till 1999 so ok then (mind, didn't buy my first CD player until 1987)

I kept waiting for the poor audio quality of the recording, but it never happened, everything was crystal clear!

I predict that with the amazing amount of random tape you listen to found on ebay, etc. that one day you will find a lost Beatles album or something and make millions! - The odds are very good.

I bought the family a DVD player for Christmas 19 or so years ago with the sole purpose of buying movies with commentary tracks/DVD extras. My brother got the Matrix, my dad got Blade Runner and it was a whole DAY of watching the DVD extras. Best commentary tracks of all time on any DVD I ever had was Futurama: they're all hysterical!

I still remember that in the beginning, it was expensive, and nobody was interested. I think the first impact (in the Netherlands at least) came when the system became affordable and also the adoption by the computer industry leading to it becoming a cheap and easy format paved the way. I bought my first DVD player probably around 2002/2003, probably for about €200, because I needed a CD player, and I thought: why don't just by a single machine that can handle all of it?

My first DVD player was a PlayStation2 :) anyone remember the dual sided DVDs? When I picked up a few laserdiscs in the past few years I got a sense of deja vu having to flip them over

My first DVD player was a Creative Labs drive and decoder card in my computer. Worked pretty well. Would be a few years later that I got my first HDTV TV and noted what early DVDs weren't anamorphic!

I wonder if Disney or Fox ever put out any movies on DVD, and if they made any money on them.

The angry tone of this report is hilarious. The reporter can go ahead and watch their movies on 8mm from now on. However I did NOT know that DVD stood for ‘digital VERSATILE disc’, I even had to fact check that because I was about to poke fun in my comment. Great archeology mission, Mat!