[MW Forums]

iDVD got little attention in Apple's recent iLife overhaul. DVD Studio Pro got even less when the company updated Final Cut Studio. Is Apple turning away from the DVD format? more

[MacTel]

The DVD isn't like the floppy where if you exclude it then it will just die off. I believe Apple is a little premature. Until broadband is accessible to everyone everywhere the DVD will remain in one form (HD DVD) or another (Blu ray).

[hexor]

Are they that lacking in employees that they can't continue to improve on the DVD software at the same time pursue other media authoring projects?

[Frumius]

YouTube!? Are you crazy? Watch some tiny, low quality piece of crap when I can put it on a DVD and see a full-size nice version on TV? I can also include lots of other content and make a very nice presentation with the DVD. That is not happening online. I want to sit on the couch and watch high quality. I want to give a DVD as a gift that they can have and hold, not point to some low quality online baloney. Geeeze! I thought Apple was about quality. This is a cop out.
I think they are dropping disc-based media a leeetle early.

[cseeman]

YouTube encode quality STINKS and for most folks is limited to 10 minutes.
We are also a few years off from where anyone can watch an HD quality H.264 encode on their computers. It will certainly be some time before enough Windows users can view H.264 as many do not have QT 7 and Flash's announced ability to play H.264 is still months away from non beta release and then some time to develop market penetration.
While some of my clients ask for various web compressed video, ALL of them ask for DVDs!
How about some REAL numbers on what perecentage of the population owns DVD players compared to the precentage that have Broadband fast enough to view H.264 HD and have QT 7 installed.
Do year really think there'd be the R&D and market battle between HD DVD and Blu Ray if those "forces" felt H.264 (or VC-1) HD distribution over the Intenet would usurp those products in short order?

[AlanCE]

I've put together half a dozen slide shows and movies for relatives in 2007. Here's the breakdown of what format they wanted me to use to deliver the results:
DVD: 6
Online distribution in any form: 0
Some demographics:
All of these people have broadband connections, all of these people have relatively new computers, all of these people have digital cameras and/or video cameras. None of these people are technology idiots.
I don't begrudge apple taking aim at the online distribution model, but it is far from replacing DVDs for many years to come. Additional focus in authoring for online distribution is smart, but reduced focus on DVD authoring tools at this time is a big mistake.

[mdawson]

Apple is definitely premature in their coming death of the optical disc stance. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be catering to the 25 and under, settle for mediocrity crowd that is the epitome of the American consumer mindset of convenience over quality. The professional and consumer video market have been on a never ending quest for increased quality, but in the age of Web 2.0, people are accepting that which is of (much) lower quality than what we already had because it is quick and easy. The same has already occurred with the explosion of (low quality) MP3 audio and the continued lack of support for the superior, and open, AAC format beyond iTunes/iPod despite the popularity of the latter.
I find myself recalling Dumbledores line from Goblet of Fire, about making a choice between what is right and what is easy.

[hayesk]

My mom and grandparents don't have high speed internet or a computer that can decode H.264 at any size, yet they both have $40 DVD players from Zellers, and want to see photos and videos of their grandchildren. I don't expect that situation to change.
That said, I expect iDVD to continue to be maintained and don't necessarily need lots of updates, and they should get off their butt in making DVD Studio a Pro product that is useful. Blue-ray and more surround audio support would be beneficial.

[Jamus]

Not to mention I don't like the idea of posting pictures of kids online for all the pervs to find. I much prefer the idea of sending a "low tech" DVD to a relatives home rather than putting on the web.
What is going to happen to that oh so wonderful .Mac video site if you decide not to pay for it any longer? Shut down that is what. But the dvd can still sit on a shelf and I do not have to pay Apple to watch it (not yet anyway).

[Inkling]

Quote:

---

iDVD got little attention in Apple's recent iLife overhaul.

---

Dumb. Really, really dumb. Millions of people have DVD players, including people who will never buy a computer. Very few have DVD-quality broadband. Apple employees may sit on a gigabit Ethernet just yards away from their servers, but the rest of the world is living with broadband service that at best isn't even close to fast enough to stream DVD quality video. Upload speed from home computers isn't fast enough for even low-quality video and placed on someone else's servers, users are captive to how loaded those servers are. Forget showing those vacation films anytime in the evening. It'll stutter and stop every few seconds. And unlike floppies, that isn't going to change anytime soon. The growth of downloadable movies is going to keep broadband saturated for years to come.
Amazon quit selling PDF ebooks to hype a proprietary third-rate ebook format they bought-- a policy that seems to be failing badly. I suspect Apple is doing some similar. They're not improving how Macs burn DVDs in the hope that will drive people to use their own third-rate product, .Mac.
It isn't going to work. Market share and even a market monopoly can't do much for the sales of over-priced, low-quality products like .Mac. They'll just increase the sales of third-party products that do burn DVDs well and weaken their claim that Macs have everything you need right in the box.
.Mac is Apple's dumbest idea. They should leave web-serving to those who do it well and make Mac features work well with any ISP not just .Mac.

[tomtom]

Recent comments from Vincent Serf say much about this?

[lymond]

Seems to me that iDVD works pretty well as it stands and doesn't need major changes at this time: just some optimizations to improve performance and work to reduce the outstanding bug count.
It would be foolish for Apple to devote intensive resources to iDVD until the smoke clears over HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. If and when it does, and when Apple starts to ship machines with some sort of hi-def DVD burner, THAT'S when a major revision of iDVD is called for.

[knightshield]

Apple isn't saying that they don't want to be in the DVD market - but are saying that they want to extend their reach into new ones. I just recently put a DVD together in iDVD for a family reunion. The program worked as best as it possibly could. I would hate for Apple to turn iDVD into a bloated piece of software (a la Microsoft Word). The program works fine now, and the small tweaks can deal with the left-over issues.
As for DVD Studio Pro, I think that Apple is still taking a wait-and-see attitude. The software itself doesn't need much work to make it churn out HD DVD or Blu-Ray. The question is what professionals are going to want in the coming years for these future DVDs. No sense investing a bunch of time and resources on a product whose future is currently hazy.

[booga]

It would be one thing if they'd perfected a DVD authoring app and then opted not to change it just for change's sake. That would be admirable. What they did was REMOVE functionality for generating DVDs from iMovie. Without chapter markers or as close a tie-in to iDVD, it's harder to make DVDs. And DVDs are a major market-- perhaps the only reason Apple hadn't heard much about them is because they had been doing pretty well addressing that market-- until iLife '08. I haven't taken the plunge with '08 yet after reading the reviews (DVDs are important to me), and it may end up being the first iLife I skip.