With the change from the 20th century to the 21st century, it's time for us to move on to newer ideas. DVD technology is the new wave for our next step into the future. In the past we used videotape but no more. With the recent advent of new DVD capability, it's time we all switch over.

Everyone asks me: "Dude what's so great about DVD?" Well, here it is in a nut shell, for those of you who know nothing. DVD uses a format similar to your regular CDs in that it is a series of pits on a very thin medium in concentric circles on a disk. DVD has smaller grooves though, so it holds more info than a CD. A DVD can be double sided and double encoded or two layers on each side, yielding a total of four layers per disk. This extra encryption allows us have the movie in several languages on the same disk. If you ever watched one, you noticed that you can usually change the spoken language, me encarta DVD! Other uses for this high level of encryption are in the audio world. DVD so far is the only common media that can support DTS and Dolby digital 5.1. That means that anything you buy on tape will sound like @#%! There are other good points too, like the fact that even the highest fidelity magnetic tape (HiFi) can only hold 540 lines of horizontal resolution. Worse than that, an older tape only holds about 480. That is terrible, but a DVD is 720 horizontal lines. Okay so you thinking, I have seen DVDs, and I never noticed. Well, the reason is because your TV sucks too. Until now there never been a reason to make a TV with a higher definition than 540, but not anymore. This is the case for our new favorite TV that we have all seen on commercials, the gas plasma wide screen flat screen TVs that you can hang anywhere.

Leading the way is the heavily acclaimed PS2. With sales expected to reach new highs everyone who buys one will also be able to play DVDs. After Christmas 2000 expect DVD sales to skyrocket. Next up on the up and coming list is the less recent DVD-Rom. Now that DVD-Rom has been out a while, the cost has dropped. As we constantly have to replace out computers, it is slowly becoming standardized to have a DVD-Rom drive on every PC. Also, other new neat toys for the PC have helped build up the hype for DVD technology. You can get new video cards that output in S-video and to the TV. New sound cards output in AC3, Dolby digital 5.1, and even DTS (digital theater sound). My personal favorite new gadget is the 200 disk CD/DVD player. It holds all your stuff. Some people think that this is ridiculous, but it is the best solution to prevent scratches. Still the neatest thing to come out for the component freak is the DVD-RAM console. This nifty little gadget hooks up to your component system and lets you record to an internal RAM drive and then burn a DVD. You don't need a computer just a blank disk and a signal to copy. You can take a DVD you already have and store it the RAM drive then make a copy or copy old movies on tape or TV. That's really cool. Another cool toy they just came out with for the PC is a burnable DVD-ROM drive or DVD/R. They also are working on bringing us a re-writable DVD-ROM drive. That's really going to be awesome. With digital video cameras and DVD burners we can make our high definition movies on the computer. I wonder what the porn industry will try to do with this one.