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Years ago I was one of the first in line to buy an expensive and hot new technology: a CD burner. I justified the $700 cost by convincing myself that my backup tape drive was too slow with too little capacity. Mostly, I wanted to play with a cool new toy and make audio CDs.

I would have done better if I had bought lottery tickets with the money. From day one, the drive made one coaster for every good disk –– everything had to be just right, and there could be no other activity on the computer while burning. And it took forever.

After a few months (and within the warranty period), it stopped working altogether. I sent it back to the manufacturer (let's just call them Reek-uh-oh) to be repaired, only to have another unit returned that didn't work either. I learned my lesson: never buy the first generation of any technology. A common-sense corollary is to buy only when there is a compelling reason.

Fast forward to the present. I now have 15 hours' worth of home movies on digital tape sitting on the shelf. Most of it has been watched exactly once because we must use the camera (our only digital tape transport) to view them, and we don't want to wear it out. Also, tape lacks DVD's ability to jump directly to a point in the video, and lacks its super-fast scanning ability.

I would love to be able to enjoy our home movies easily, and I've been watching the development of DVD burners. “Watching” because of the lessons learned above. The plus/minus wars (DVD+R/RW vs. DVD-R/RW) seem to have played out, and the second generation of +R/RW drives are getting generally good reviews. Reliable-name drives are now available as low as $250, and recordable disks can be had for as little as $2 apiece. But, apparently DVD authoring software leaves something to be desired. The essential problem is the software out there takes an old-wave, technology-driven view of things. “Capture.” “Scene Detection.” “Non-linear editing.” “Authoring.” “Burning.” Do you know anyone with a burning need (pun intended) to “author” a DVD? In order to easily make a useable DVD, you need at least three types of software.

Looking at 15 hours of tape, what I really need is the one magic button. I want to be able to plug in my digital video camera (with my tape inside), put a blank DVD in the drive, and press the button. And when I come back in an hour or so, have a truly useable DVD, containing an index page (or pages) with a thumbnail link to every scene –– even if there were 60 scenes on the tape.

To review, the key requirements for this consumer are support of the +R/RW format; one-button, unattended operation; automatic scene detection and partitioning; and an index page with thumbnails. (Actually, a highly desirable second button would be a one-button copy function.) There are some vendors that come close to this. For instance, some manufacturers of stand-alone, set-top DVD recorders will do all of the above except automatic scene detection. But my final requirement is that I want to be able to do this on my PC (not in the living room). One reason is that I don't want to shell out a thousand bucks on a stand-alone unit just to archive home movies, and PC drives are much cheaper. Another is that, on occasion, I will want to do something fancy with one of those other software programs, and you're much less limited on a PC.

So it strikes me as funny when market watchers wonder why DVD burners haven't taken off yet, and why they still appeal primarily to early adopters and video enthusiasts. To me, the answer is a question that couldn't be simpler: where is the killer application that compels me to buy?

Greg Gonzalez
Greg.Gonzalez@attbi.com

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