The Digital Bits:
Insider’s Guide To DVD (Special
Edition)
Book: B+
Home Video helped to end a big boom in books on film,
especially coffee table sized books, many of which are now classics and
collector’s items. However, starting
with VHS & Beta, a whole new genre of books surfaced. This consisted of guidebooks that either
told you about the content of the software, the technology or both. This became even more interesting when the
12” LaserDisc format and first home theater boom arrived in the 1990s. Unlike the videotaped predecessors, the
Laser books offered interesting and valuable information long after the
format’s demise. Now, with DVD
delivering the biggest home video boom yet, DVD books have supplanted all
predecessors and the best of them to date is easily from The Digital Bits
website. Their Insider’s Guide To
DVD (2004, available through Amazon or their website, www.thedigitalbits.com) is a very
well book that also has a great sense of humor and makes for a good read.
With information culminated from the long-running website
and the expert experience of co-authors Bill Hunt and Todd Doogan, the
432-paged volume leaves no stone unturned and starts with the most basic
information about the format and home video in general. It then works its way up to the latest
technology and developments it can when the book concludes. The main sections are:
1) Understanding
DVD
2) Building
A Home Theater Made Simple
3) Inside
The Alien Quadrilogy
4) The Best
Of DVD
5) The
Future Of DVD
6) Glossary
The first section goes back to the early days when not all
the studios were certain of the format or its capacity for success. To be blunt, there were some terrible DVDs
when the format began that made LaserDisc diehards hold on to that format for a
while. To this day, as of mid-2005,
there are still titles in the obsolete format that have not been issued
on DVD or in the special editions (particularly from Criterion for licensing
reasons beyond their control) that are not on or will ever be on DVD. The disaster of the pay-per-view DVD known
as DIVX, a format that though no one wanted widescreen films or extras, is
remembered as the mistake it was. The
12” LaserDisc actually outlasted DIVX for a while!
It is very thorough about what widescreen is, but forgot
to include 2.0 as monophonic in its Dolby configuration chart on page 36. DTS 96/24 was missed in its discussion on
the DTS format a two pages later, does not note PCM’s capacity to do Dolby Pro
Logic on films as it used to all the time in the 12” LaserDisc format and once
in a while on DVD (Criterion’s Do The Right Thing a great example), does
not distinguish enough between old CD jewel boxes and the new, improved Super
Jewel Box enough (now in 4 versions, pg. 54 - 55), and may be a tad too brief
on explaining THX. Besides those minor
complaints, that is a fine section.
The second section is very common sense and tells it like
it is about why you do not need to spend a fortune to have a good home
theater. We could add since the
publication of the book that with new HD 5” video formats on the way, don’t
spend too much on a DVD player, and especially consider a machine that does
both DVD-Audio and SACD, which both their site and ours still reports on,
reviews and supports.
The third section is a culmination of their coverage on
the production of the massive 9-DVD Alien Quadrilogy, which took us five
reviews to cover properly. This is
still one of the greatest film-on-DVD sets to date and is absolutely excellent
coverage of the best kind. I loved the
9-disc set like so many others (except for those complaints about the
packaging), so this is the strongest section because the greatest expert on
film and DVD can still learn plenty from it.
The fourth section is the thickest in the book, covering
the many ambitious and great DVD special editions in all genres. I am not always a fan of some of the titles
they chose, all the more because I want to briefly respond to their Bad
Movies… Great DVDs section. They
rightly list Mallrats, Planet Of The Apes (2001) and A.I. –
Artificial Intelligence, but grossly underrate The Cell (which
deserves better sound), Pearl Harbor (which was not that bad
despite its problems) and Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, which no one seems to
get should not be here. Many of their
favorites did not have DTS sound, The Samurai Trilogy from Criterion has
awful sound on all volumes, and a section on discontinued discs worth getting
is the only missed trick of the book.
The fifth section discusses new high definition video
formats HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, both due to still go against each other, the
in-decline D-VHS D-Theater format and ultra-high fidelity Super Audio CD and
DVD-Audio we noted. Those audio formats
did not catch on, but are still being produced, but audiophiles have pretty
much picked SACD between the two.
DVD-Audio still has some great titles that will not be coming to SACD
anytime soon and their observation that DVD-Audio was more interested in
showing off surrounds than playing back music properly is an apt one. However, we judge them on a disc-by-disc
basis, as both formats have enough turkeys to discuss. The same will happen with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray
and both their site and ours intend to cover that when they arrive.
The sixth section is a valuable glossary that is more up
to date than similar glossaries we have seen in previous such
publications. It may not be as
extensive as it should have been; such as explaining the difference between
di-pole, bi-pole and mono-pole speakers, but it is a solid basic section worth
having.
These kinds of books are always fun to begin with,
becoming more interesting as they get older and dated, but The Digital Bits:
Insider’s Guide To DVD will endure for a longer period of time because it
does not make the mistakes of previous, similar DVD and LaserDisc
publications. We recommend it as a
necessary reference volume that can save you much time and money in the long
run.
- Nicholas Sheffo
