For such an innocent-looking medium, DVD has a lot to answer for. It's also about to cost many multimedia producers their sanity, hair, and a ton of cash. Both discs were then played back on regular DVD players, using the DVD chapter-index facility to skip to the desired parts of the video. So far, so normal. But a skirmish soon broke out when Philips'optical storage CEO Hein van der Zeeuw took a swipe at DVD-RAM, another competing format supported by Hitachi, Toshiba, and Matsushita.
All companies have devices on the market.
DVD-RAM packs the CDs in a cartridge, and, as such, does not allow playback in existing DVD players or drives. Pioneer then decided to borrow it for consumer video recorders and PCs. DVD-RW is less accurate. Yet, whatever the personal grudges held by the DVD makers, it's designers who will suffer. Many are rapidly moving over to the Apple G4 733MHz that includes the Pioneer DVD-RW, and offers the first inexpensive way to master DVDs.