The DVD Compatibility chart was noticed by MacCentral reader Eric Young a number of weeks ago. In it, 30 consumer DVD players are listed with their level of compatibility to DVDs users can create using the Apple SuperDrive. Of the 30 listed, eight are listed as “not compatible” with one categorized as marginally compatible.
The brands tested included Sony, Toshiba, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, Aiwa, RCA, Kenwood, Denon, JVC and Panasonic — brands that make up more than 70 percent of the DVD player market, according to Home Theater magazine.
The eight players listed as not compatible are primarily older models that do not include specific, built-in instructions to take advantage of certain software routines multimedia DVDs often use, according to Jonus Richards, a former consumer electronics designer with TEAC America Inc., now an industry design consultant living in Farmers Branch, Texas.
“These older DVD players don’t have the programming functionality built in to play the more sophisticated DVDs that are being sold today that do more than just play a movie or one programmed video,” Richards told MacCentral. “The more complex the DVD is terms of user choice to do more than one task, the more tougher it will get for these older players to play certain DVDs.”
Richards said the chances are high that the list posted by Apple was supplied by Pioneer based on testing it had done on certain consumer drives using DVDs created with its DVD-R drive and not testing by Apple.
Richard said he did not know what percentage of existing DVD players in homes today are made up of the nine questionable players, but he guessed the market share would be “much less than ten percent.” He thought that as DVD players become more popular and cheaper, the older un-compatible players with SuperDrive would not be in consumer living rooms. “Even if they are, newer players will be so cheap and better that consumers won’t think twice about buying a new model,” Richards said.
The SuperDrive will be part of the 733MHz Power Mac G4 desktop system, expected to be available around the end of March. The configuration will include iDVD software to create multimedia DVD disks. A more sophisticated $999 DVD Studio Pro version is currently available for development of DVDs on other Macintosh systems.