The Benefits of DVD : A guide to DVD hardware and DVD software   By : Date: 05th july 2000

Conclusion

At the moment DVD drives may be on the more expensive side. However the manner in which DVD's are catching up on the market it won't be long before it reaches the critical mass stage. At the moment DVD drives may be a additional component that you have to add on to your computer, but it won't be long before DVD drives become a standard requirement in new PC's. When CD ROM's first came into the market it was the same issue, so I don't see why not DVD's. DVD's so far have solved many braw backs that existed in CD ROM's and the benefits you get out of it outweigh CD ROM's by far. Though their performance may not be very impressive at the moment, the way things are heading it won't be long before they perform far better than CD ROM's. Remember that having a DVD drive won't limit the capabilities of your PC, rather it will add on some more features to it. For now DVD drives are mainly focused on movies and games. However it won't be long before an extensive range of software solutions comes in to the market as well. Further more we could expect most new games that come in DVD format to have great deal of movie clips which are of really great quality, and considering that 17GB can be packed into just one DVD the boundaries seem limitless, and we could expect software manufactures to take advantage of this soon. Only time can say what really is in store to come, but one thing's for sure it's going to dramatically change the way we use our PC's today.

The future potential for DVD's is really big. Today it might be one luxury item that everyone wants to add on to their PC's but soon it'll be something similar to a CD ROM, though in a wider sense. Imagine being able to pack in 17GB of data into a DVD, what kind of a detail level we could expect on future games. They'll be so realistic and most probably to the extent of which having real life characters included in them. Imagine playing Aliens Vs Predator just like in the movie, now that would be really cool wouldn't it. Further we could expect more interactivity between game play, which would be something we really could get used to. One might think that existing processor may not be enough for these games to run smoothly, well guess again, as I mentioned before the next generation of MPEG2 decoder boards are yet to come. These boards will integrate all the functions such as MPEG-2 decoding, Dolby Digital decoding and many more. So I guess that would fit the problem just fine. Now all we got do is sit back and let time take its course. Recently Microsoft has announced that they'll be providing system-level support for both DVD drives and decoder cards and also including software for DVD navigation. Now that Microsoft has put in a hand into the DVD market as well we could expect very interesting stuff to appear in the market soon. So as an ending note all we have to say is that get the right hardware and you'll never regret getting your hands on a DVD drive.

Table of Contents

Introduction	How to enjoy DVD
DVD Software & DVD Hardware	So is it all worth it....
Installation & Specifications	Conclusion