To begin:
I'll summarize some of the research updates that have preceded this report and revise certain information. Information in this document supercedes all previous updates. This is with the mind to provide background necessary to understand the issues here presented and no more. Next will be a discussion of various key issues resolved or left open in this research. A roughly chronological format will incorporate much of the rational my recommendations are based on. Then we examine the developer project overview that was used as a sort of preliminary RFP and research tool as it may be as close as I'll get to a project spec. boldface indicates recommendations that appear inline. My final recommendations will be summarized in conclusion.
The battle is over hardware and programming. Set top DVD players are limited use computers and have the theoretical ability to do whatever computers do. In practice, they are much too limited to come close computer functionality in hardware and software terms. On the hardware side they don't have the RAM, HD or processor architecture to handle the demand of computer applications. They also don't have an operating system capable of doing much more than looking for a specific type of folder and parsing it's contents.
The playing field:
DVD has become the fastest adopted media platform ever. It's sure that DVD will replace CDROM and VHS, it's only a matter of time. This consideration alone makes a DVD product logical for Free Media LLC.
I refer to:
- DVD to describe the whole technology.
- DVD-V as a product intended to present AV content, as the set-top implementation and as a movie disk played in computer by DVD-V player software.
- DVDROM as a storage medium
- DVD disk or "the disk" as the physical media object
- Web-enabled DVD as any DVD disk that has ANY net related content, makes brower calls, etc.