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Bringing it All Back Home:
Apex Brings YesDVD to Set-Top DVD Recorders
By Stephen F. Nathans
01.08.04
At the Consumer Electronics Show on January 8, YesVideo announced that Apex Digital will include YesVideo's automated video-to-DVD conversion and authoring software, YesDVD, with a new line of consumer DVD recorders scheduled to ship in spring 2004. As home DVD creation has made most of its inroads via desktop technology of late, the YesVideo announcement suggests an alternate path that could expand the market for DVD media and recording technology in new and potentially more lucrative areas.
DVD authoring is easier and more accessible to consumers than it's ever been, with cheap PCs and cheaper recorders and software able to achieve amazing feats of digital derring-do, with 99 percent of the complexity concealed. But for some of us even 99 and a half won't do-we want the fruits of personal DVD creation without the labor. Nothing wrong with that. Many of us have reason enough to sing the DIY blues without adding new verses. What's more, even as the desktop DVD creation market expands ever further into consumer territory, there's reason to believe that the personal DVD recording market is potentially far bigger than desktop DVD authoring will ever be. Or at least there's a market there that's ill-served even by the simplest, most straightforward authoring tools, even those like Sonic MyDVD with demonstrated home-front appeal.
"Most home video is watched on the two-inch screens of camcorders passed around a dining room table," says YesVideo vice president of sales and marketing Bob Wilson. "Consumers tell us they don't like to hook up the camcorder to the TV." Which probably means fishing for the FireWire port on the business end of a PC is probably out of the question.
According to YesVideo, there are a half a million analog video tapes out there that are destined to metamorphosize into DVDs; they're just waiting for the right cocoon. YesVideo believes they've had the answer for quite some time. They've made a sizeable dent in the worldwide VHS-to-DVD backlog, claiming 250,000 A/D morphs to date via their YesDVD conversion service, partnered with in-store Kodak and Fuji photo labs in Wal-Marts, Walgreens, and Best Buys throughout the U.S., with additional outlets in Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the UK.
YesVideo provides automatic chapter and menu creation and thumbnails for each chapter supplied on a "personalized" disc package. YesDVD breaks up the video into up to 54 content-based scene changes. "We find the first clear image," Wilson says, "create a thumbnail, and put it on the cover.
Consumers tell us that being ablt to get to a scene quickly eliminates most of the need for editing." All the users have to do to hold up their end of the bargain is bring their VHS (or VHS-C, S-VHS, BetaMax, MiniDV, D-8, Hi-8, or 8mm) tape to a BestBuy mini-lab, and receive same-day service for $20-24 depending on the parameters of the project, or drop it in a "prepaid mail-in video transfer kit" picked up at locations not offering same-day in-store service and receive their DVD with a three-week turnaround. YesVideo spares users the hardware and software investment of desktop DVD creation, and offers something unavailable in consumer DIY DVD authoring: hardware encoding, like that used in professional DVD authoring. YesDVD also provides "three sixty-second highlight videos" with songs of their choosing, licenses paid. "We're entering the tornado phase of our YesDVD development," Wilson says.
YesDVD also works with film, slides, and photo prints, with pricing scaled based on volume ($49.95 for 250 feet of film or 300 slides; 1600 feet of film will fit on one DVD, while slides DVDs max out at 300). The service has business clients too-their YesLaw service caters to the legal professions, digitizing videotaped depositions and the like; they also "work with 2000 wedding videographers," according to YesVideo vice president of sales and marketing Bob Wilson. Pro YesVideo clients include the Detroit Pistons, who have converted all taped games to YesDVD; legal clients include Litigation-Tech LLC of Santa Clara, California.
"As demand increases," Wilson says, "we're looking at half a billion hours of video. If we're going to transfer all that video, we're going to need to distribute production-ideally, to people's homes." Enter LSI Logic and Apex Technologies' new YesDVD-enabled set-top DVD recorder line.
YesVideo has worked with LSI Logic to develop the YesDVD-enabled chips, and Apex is first among several recorder manufacturers to incorporate the chip into their high-end home-recorder designs. With these recorders users will be able to create YesDVD discs entirely using their remote controls, including transfer/conversion, chapter detection, thumbnail and menu creation, music video production, and customized DVD cover creation (the cover resides on a ROM portion of the YesDVD that is invisible to DVD players but can be opened when the disc is placed in a PC-DVD-ROM drive and printed from the user's computer). Users simply press "Edit>YesDVD" on their remote controls after recording to produce a YesDVD; because the DVD is created initially in DVD-VR (like all DVDs produced on set-top recorders), parameters are set on-the-fly, which makes after-the-fact YesDVD menu creation possible. The final discs will be written to DVD-Video specs, which makes playback compatibility more or less guaranteed.
Recorder pricing will be scaled based on the level of YesDVD inclusion. Some recorders will ship with a 3-use trial version of the YesDVD firmware. After the third trial disc is produced, users will be prompted to call a YesDVD 800 number or visit www.yesdvd.com to get an activation code (via a credit card transaction) using a unique ID number that comes with the drive. Higher-end recorders, according to Wilson, will ship will full, unlimited YesDVD activation. In such configurations, YesVideo and LSI receive a royalty on each recorder sold. Wilson says Philips will be announcing YesDVD-enabled recorders at CES, or shortly thereafter, as well. Return to News Coverage list
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