Unlocking DVD-Video interactive capability

Despite the phenomenal success of DVD, there is a closely guarded secret in the industry that I’d like to share with you. You could be forgiven for thinking that the DVD player that has pride of place beneath your TV is nothing more than a glorified video player. But you’d be wrong, says STUART GREEN.

In September 1994 seven international entertainment companies and content providers – Columbia Pictures, Disney, MCA/Universal, Paramount, Viacom and Warner Brothers – formed the Hollywood Digital Video Disc Advisory Group and called upon the consumer electronics industry to develop a single worldwide standard for the new generation of digital video on optical media.

The Group set out some specific requirements for the new format, which included support of multiple versions of a programme on one disc, as well as the ability to accommodate three to five languages. The rest is history.

What we know and love as DVD-Video was the response to those requirements, complete with its support for menus, nine camera angles, eight audio channels and 32 subtitle streams.

The truth is that the standard features built in to DVD-Video afford the possibility to create rich and engaging interactive content.

When you stop and think about it, what we regard as an ‘interactive experience’ amounts to not much more than presenting choices to the user on screen and allowing multiple outcomes based on the selections made. That same basic premise applies to PC multimedia, website navigation and interactive TV alike. It also applies to DVD-Video.

Believe it or not, a DVD player can deliver much more than just feature films and TV programmes – so called ‘lean back’ content. With its interactive capabilities, a wide range of multimedia content – ‘sit forward’ programming – can be supported, including adventure games, puzzles, quizzes, educational material, training, marketing and promotional content and product catalogues.

So what’s the problem? If all this is possible why aren’t publishers and DVD producers doing it already? To answer that question you have to look a little deeper and understand how the DVD industry works.

The fact is that from its very conception DVD-Video was developed by video professionals for video professionals. For many, DVD is just a glorified version of VHS – delivered on optical disc rather than tape, with much higher quality video and audio playback – but, when all’s said and done, it is just another format for delivery of linear video. The opportunity afforded by the random-access nature of optical disc is generally capitalised only insofar as linear programmes are usually playable via chapter points.

Of course, virtually all DVDs sold today are feature films and TV productions – linear content for which this described treatment is entirely appropriate and adequate. But what about interactive content such as games, puzzles and catalogues?

For all its great strengths, DVD-Video does have one key limitation when it comes to authoring content. Like VHS, DVD-Video is a playback format. That is to say, anything that you may want to present on your DVD disc to a user has to be created in advance and placed on the disc during the authoring process. This is in stark contrast with, say, a PC or a game console, where a title can create new graphics on the fly in response to the choices made by the user.

Take a simple quiz game, for example. A software developer creating a quiz game for PC would write code that picks questions at random from a list, then renders the corresponding text onto the screen by overlaying on a background image or animation. In this way the quiz game mechanic itself is independent of the actual questions – the developer can substitute a new list of questions, or change the number of questions in the list without having to change any code.

But life is very different on DVD. To create a similar quiz game on DVD-Video requires a graphic designer to produce a video sequence for each individual question in advance, and a DVD author to stitch these all together within a DVD authoring tool. So, a quiz with 1,000 questions becomes a nightmare project on DVD. Life gets even harder when more functionality is required, such as support for lifelines and score keeping.

It’s hardly surprising then that interactive applications of DVD-Video have been slow to take off, since the cost of producing them is usually prohibitive. But notice that the problem is not so much in any limitations of the format, but rather in the tools and methods employed for the production of DVD discs.

There are many DVD authoring products available on the market today – some for professionals and others for consumers; some costing a small fortune and others bundled with DVD rewriters. What they all have in common is a production methodology that has been designed for creating linear video programmes. If you are putting Hollywood movies or holiday memories on discs these tools are perfect, but for creating interactive content they just don’t cut it.

Whenever the navigation design starts to become complicated, and the experience requires large numbers of individual images, video segments and audio clips, conventional authoring is inefficient, costly and unreliable. Even something as conceptually simple as a photo gallery containing a few hundred images can take weeks to produce, author and test.

At ZOOtech we recognised this problem back in 2001 and started to work on a new methodology called DVD-Extra, developed specifically for creating interactive content on DVD.

The first product based on this methodology called DVD-Extra Studio is soon to be released and overcomes many of the problems and limitations described above.

In fact, multimedia content can be created for DVD-Video using DVD-Extra Studio in much the same way as it would be authored for CD-ROM. Consequently, sophisticated interactive discs can be produced easily, efficiently and reliably. Significant cost savings can be made even for the kinds of functionality already produced for DVD-Video – a photo gallery can be defined very simply without being specific to the images it contains, produced in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

This is good news for the industry if only because it opens up many new markets and applications that have not been viable previously. During the development of DVD-Extra Studio we had the good fortune to work closely with a significant number of developers and publishers of multimedia and DVD-Video titles across many different market segments.

In the film and video market, better interactive bonus features can now be created more easily and efficiently than before, enabling greater added value on feature film releases. But, more significantly, a new genre of title is viable for the first time – Interactive DVD.

Playable on set top DVD players using nothing more than the remote control, Interactive DVD titles offer excellent scope for family entertainment.

The first titles in this new genre were published by Universal Video in November 2003 – versions of the hit TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? for UK and France, as well as a football trivia game Interactive Championship Challenge – all produced using DVD-Extra Studio.

This new approach to production profoundly changes the economies of DVD title creation. Importantly, we can expect new entrants to the industry coming from multimedia, games and education, able to apply current skills to a new medium. These developers can often add a new perspective on applications for DVD-Video, being untarnished and unconstrained by its linear heritage.

Having worked with developers in both camps, we have come to realise that the natural tendency of DVD authors is to be conservative about the art of the possible, with “that can’t be done on DVD” being a common response. In contrast, multimedia developers tend to assume that anything is possible until proven otherwise.

In reality, the great practitioners of interactive DVD will be those who can combine the pragmatic mindset of DVD authors with the unbounded creativity of multimedia developers.



Dr Stuart Green is Chief Technical Officer at ZOOtech Limited, the UK-based developer of the revolutionary DVD-Video interactive software technology DVD-Extra. Stuart received his PhD from the University of Bristol in 1989.
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