The DVD Forum is quietly working on an optional format for enhanced DVD-Video and DVD players that would deliver advanced interactivity for consumers while salvaging margins for OEMs hard hit by price wars. '.The forum — comprising Hollywood studios, PC and consumer electronics manufacturers, software technology developers and chip vendors — is considering three software proposals that would expand the capabilities of high-end DVD systems. It expects to hammer out a standard by next summer, in time for OEMs to ship systems for the Christmas 2002 selling season. 'The ultimate goal of DVD-Interactive is to provide additional capability for users to do interactive operation with content on DVD disks or at Web sites on the Internet,' said Hisashi Yamada, the DVD Forum's Working Group-1 chair. The forum also sees the spec helping content owners re-spin their DVD-Interactive content not only for PC DVD-ROMs but also for new network businesses, he added.

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Several sources close to the DVD Forum told that the three technologies being investigated for the emerging interactive format include software from InterActual Inc. Originally developed to provide ROM features and Web connectivity for DVD titles; MPEG-4; and Java- and HTML-based technologies promoted by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.

Matsushita confirmed that the company is taking part in the industry discussions at the forum. But Mitsunobu Furumoto, general manager of Matsushita's DVD business promotion department, declined to comment further.

InterActual has been working independently of the forum to bring its technology down to consumer DVD players, said Todd Collart, president and chief executive officer at the San Jose company, which has developed the de facto software standard for viewing Internet-connected DVD titles on a PC. InterActual is working with unnamed consumer electronics OEMs to bring its software to market in time for Christmas 2002, said Collart, who also chairs the DVD Forum's Group 1-12.

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The ad hoc group was established last December to investigate advanced interactivity and Internet connectivity. Basic software technology components used in InterActual's solution are HTML 3.2, JavaScript 1.1 and Macromedia's Flash 3.0. The major studios already use the InterActual APIs to write interactive content directly tied to DVD video playback. In migrating the technology to the consumer DVD player, InterActual is adding TV-safe resolution and offering a DVD media services layer, about 20 kbytes in footprint, that sits between embedded browsers and a variety of DVD-player chip sets.

The hardware abstraction layer should eliminate the need for custom porting of InterActual software to every DVD chip set, said Collart. But because consumer DVD players use diverging operating systems, embedded browsers and chip sets, InterActual still needs to ensure that an embedded browser is ported to a real-time operating system supported by a DVD decoder chip set. In this way the browser can talk directly to the graphics chip in the DVD player. InterActual's solution is 'not about a so-called iDVD — a DVD player with a dial-up modem simply slapped on,' said Greg Gewickey, a senior member of the technical staff. 'Because iDVD is typically designed to let consumers browse Web pages that have nothing to do with DVD video, it will send an absolutely wrong message to consumers.' In contrast, InterActual adds Internet connectivity to the player in order to directly tie consumers' entertainment experience to DVD video content. The InterActual scheme allows content developers to embed interactive components right on a DVD disk as ROM data, or to make that ROM data available online.

Internet connectivity is handy, because once the interactive components are put up on the Web, they can be updated at any time. Further, integrating the ROM data into a DVD disk could present issues of disk access time, Gewickey explained. When a movie is recorded on a dual-layer DVD disk and ROM data is added at the tail end of the second layer, it would be difficult to access video and data simultaneously without chopping video, he said. But if interactive ROM data is on the Web, consumers can download that file into buffer memory inside a DVD player. In contrast, MPEG-4's claim to fame is its object-based coding, allowing content owners to embed all the interactive components — dynamically linked to the video content — inside an MPEG stream.