DVD authoring

DVD authoring describes the process of creating a DVD video that can be played on a DVD player. DVD authoring software must conform to the specifications set by the DVD Forum group in 1995. The specifications are complicated due to the number of companies that were involved in creating them.

To develop a DVD application (software or hardware), one must first licence the particular book of DVD specifications from DVD Format/Logo Licensing Corporation, a Japanese corporation. The different DVD formats have different books; each book runs to many hundreds of pages and costs approximately $5000. After obtaining this licence, the developer is required to become a licensee which requires additional fee. Without becoming a licensee, the book can be used only for reference, not for actual creation of DVD applications.

The DVD specifications were apparently written in Japanese and then translated to English using prose that often rivals the complexity of legal documents. To this day, many companies interpret various parts of the specifications in different ways. This is the reason DVD players from different manufacturers do not always conform to the same rules – each developer understands the specifications in a slightly different way.

History

There are many DVD authoring applications available to help create DVD-Video discs. Many high-end authoring applications are written in-house by companies such as Matsushita, Philips, or Toshiba. These are strictly not for sale outside each company and are used internally by the company DVD laboratories to produce DVDs for customers.

One particular high-end DVD authoring software package is Scenarist, available for sale from the very beginning by Daikin, a large Japanese air conditioning and refrigeration contracting company. This software was translated to English and has since become the standard in DVD production in Hollywood amongst other places. Like the other high-end and very expensive systems, it complies to the DVD specifications more closely than other software. The software was later acquired by Sonic Solutions.

Sonic, a U.S. corporation, is also a major player in selling DVD authoring tools. They previously manufactured computer based audio recording applications. They soon realized that at some point DVD recorders would become as widely available as CD recorders and that there was no affordable application for the home market or that DVD recorder makers could license as an OEM. At that time, all DVD authoring applications cost many thousands of dollars.

Sonic developed DVD-it, an application that started selling below $500. It used only a small part of the whole DVD specification and it presented it in a form that didn't require any knowledge of internal DVD structure. This form become later the building block of many other simplified consumer DVD applications. The OEM licensing allowed Sonic to very soon become the major player, buying out all other DVD authoring applications including Scenarist and ReelDVD.

For a short period of time around 2000, Spruce Technologies was becoming another major player in the market. They created DVD Maestro, a software and hardware system in the same price bracket as the Scenarist system but with a much more user friendly interface. While Scenarist could require months of learning and training, DVD Maestro could be used productively in a much shorter time. DVD Maestro implemented almost all of the DVD specifications like Scenarist, however unlike Scenarist it borrowed an abstraction layer from the consumer oriented applications such as ReelDVD or DVD-it. Creating DVDs became a far easier task, yet it only sacrificed a bit of Scenarist's universality. When Spruce started selling a watered-down consumer incarnation of their DVD Maestro far below the price of Sonic's DVD-it, there was obvious competition between Sonic and Spruce. Both companies were trying to address the very same market, but the market was not big enough. A surprising resolution of this conflict came from the Apple, who bought Spruce Technologies for an undisclosed sum. Apple was at that time already marketing their own DVD authoring system based on German DVD authoring software, but boldly decided to go with Spruce for their next incarnation of DVD Studio PRO. This also required Spruce to stop selling and developing applications for PC.

Since then, many other companies have developed medium and home range authoring tools, including Adobe, Mediachance and Ulead.

Authoring Applications

Top-end

• Sonic Scenarist
• Sonic DVD Creator

Studio Professional

• Apple DVD Studio PRO (MAC)
• DVD Maestro (no longer available)
• Sonic DVD Producer
• DVD Lab Pro

Corporate Professional

• Adobe Encore
• Mediachance DVD-lab PRO
• Ulead DVD Workshop 2
• DVD-it with AC3
• Sony DVD Architect (Part of Sony Vegas)
• Pinnacle DVD Impression
• Roxio VideoPack

Home

• Tmpgenc DVD Author
• Sonic MyDVD
• Mediachance DVD-lab
• SpruceIt (no longer available)
• Dazzle DVD Complete (no longer available)
• Pinnacle DVD Expression
• Arcsoft Showbiz DVD
• Magix Movies on CD-DVD
• Ulead DVD Movie Factory