The first thing you notice is the shape of the screen: wide and shallow, like at the movies. When it flickers into life, the quality of the images is stunning. Outlines are crystal-clear, with none of the "crawlies" we take for granted on television pictures; as for the colours, "glorious technicolour" wouldn't even begin to describe them. Skin tone which actually looks like skin: blue skies which positively glow. It's as if somebody had cleaned your telly with a magic cloth. Add in a crisp stereo soundtrack, and you may think you've reached audio-visual heaven.
But there's more. Click, and you have instant access to biographical information by the bucket-load, as well as interviews with artists, actors, conductors, directors; click again, and you can see how the special effects were created. Click a third time, and you can choose subtitles in Czech, Hungarian, Cantonese, Greek or Hebrew. Click once more, and you can skip straight to the favourite scene of your choice: in this case, Tom Cruise doing the "Show me the money!" thing in Jerry Maguire, over and over. Or if you hate that scene, you can simply programme the machine to leave it out: don't show me the money ever again, thanks very much.
Welcome to the future of home entertainment. It's called DVD, and it's not some recording industry pipe dream from the next millennium. It's on your doorstep: in fact, if you haven't already got a DVD player you're just not up there with the Celtic Tiger brat-pack, which is, by all accounts, plunging into this awesome new technology with the delight of a piglet stumbling across an unexpected puddle of mud. "The turnover in DVD players in Dublin is incredible," is how Simon, from the audio shop Richer Sounds, which has recently moved to Dublin's Dame Street, puts it. "I've been here a year - I'm from Australia - and I can't believe the level of interest there is. At least 30 per cent of the hi-fi buffs in Dublin have DVD already, and sales are going up all the time." But how has this happened? Wasn't everybody scared off by the recent glut of formats that failed, such as the cumbersome 12-inch laser disc, the digital compact cassette and "the enhanced CD"? Isn't everyone waiting until everyone else gets one? Apparently not. "I've seen a lot of formats come and go, but none has taken off as quickly as this," says Ady Constable, video buyer with Tower Records on Wicklow Street.
"Mini disc took five years, and still hasn't really made it to the mainstream. Even CD, which eventually killed vinyl off almost completely, started slowly. It's happening much quicker with DVD. "It began with film buffs, anoraks and collectors. You know what they're like: if something new comes out, they've got to have it. Then we got a player into the shop and people started noticing the quality. Now we have two to three new titles coming in every week. Over the next three years, it will take over completely," he says with absolute certainty, casting an eye over his shelf space and wondering where he's going to store his poor old videos when DVD blasts them off the shelves. Simon, from Richer Sounds, thinks the DVD revolution will happen even sooner. "Within a year," is his prediction. "I would say this year DVD will come out fighting. All the studios are into it; everybody's into it. DVD is here to stay." If it's here to stay, we should know what it is - so for the benefit of those who don't even know what it stands for (originally Digital Versatile Disc, now more commonly Digital Video Disc), here's a bit of low-level technical guff. A Digital Video Disc looks exactly like a CD (take heart from the memory that, once upon a time, you didn't know what that stood for, either): a silvery platter four-and-a quarter inches in diameter with a hole in the centre. Where a CD can store up to 680 million bytes of data, however, a DVD can cope comfortably with some 17 billion bytes, which translates into nine hours of studio quality audio-visual material or 30 hours of CD-quality audio.
How is it done? As with CD, data is recorded in a spiral trail of tiny pits which are read using a laser beam; on a DVD, however, the pits are smaller and the spiral tighter, and the data is recorded on as many as four layers, two on each side of the disc. To read these tightly-packed discs demands more complex, more accurate laser focusing mechanisms than those in the current generation of CD players - which brings us to the business of what, exactly, you need to become a member of the DVD generation. First of all, while a wide-screen TV is an advantage (my private viewing of Jerry Maguire took place on a to-die-for state-of-the-art Sony job at the offices of Columbia Tri-Star; next morning, oddly enough, a leaflet folded discreetly into my ESB bill offered a similar model on an interest-free loan at £1099) it's not a necessity. You will, however, need seriously good sound quality - which effectively means either a stereo TV or some means of hooking your system up to the hi-fi.
As for the hardware, DVD players have been getting cheaper but are still a great deal more expensive than VCR machines, even top-notch VCR machines. The cheapest DVD players stocked by Richer Sounds are models by Philips and Sony which retail at £399; the most expensive is a Pioneer at £1099. But if the quality is so stunning on all these things, what's the difference? Aha. Now you're into the zone - or, more accurately, the zones. "The more expensive models can be chipped to play American DVDs," explains Simon. It transpires that the Hollywood studios, concerned about their staggered international release schedules for new movies, came up with a batty plan which divided the DVD world into different zones, with discs set to play only in their designated zones. America is Zone 1; Europe, Japan and the Middle East are Zone 2. So if you thought of buying a DVD player and then ordering films on DVD format from the US - where they're released first and are cheaper to boot - via the Internet, well, don't say we told you, but it can be done.
The helter-skelter demand for DVD worldwide seems to have taken even the moguls by surprise. Warner and Sony got in way ahead of the pack and now claim to have the lion's share of the software market, Warner through distribution agreements with, respectively, MGM and Buena Vista, and Sony through a similar agreement with Universal and its own subsidiary, Columbia Tri-Star. "Columbia is now bringing out the back catalogue in addition to new releases," says Samantha Rhodes of Columbia Tri-Star's marketing department, as she zips through the extra goodies you get if you buy, say, Godzilla on DVD instead of on video: the director's cut, the theatrical trailer and a documentary on the making of the monster. "People love that kind of thing," she says of the latter. They certainly do: the monster caused a huge upsurge in the market when Godzilla was released on DVD in March, as did Armageddon and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: by mid-March estimated weekly DVD sales in the UK stood at 30,000 units, a whopping half a million pounds, and the projected figures just climb up and up. No wonder Disney and Fox have decided to get in on the act, Disney with the recent A Bug's Life and Fox with Titanic, which will be released on DVD in September.
What's in it for hi-fi enthusiasts? At the moment, little enough. Even Tower Records, which boasts an impressive selection of film titles from The Lion King to Legends of the Fall via Lethal Weapon 2, many of which are fetchingly subtitled in Russian, Turkish and Italian for the hearing impaired, has a limp bottom shelf which offers Riverdance, Celine Dion, Herbert Von Karajan conducting Dvorak's New World Symphony and several incarnations of The Three Tenors.
Opera fans, however, must already be slavering at the prospect of back catalogue releases: imagine being able to get a crystal-clear version of, say, Peter Sellars's "Trump Tower" production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in a format which allows them to skip to the moment Cherubino enters, dressed as an American footballer. Ballet fans have almost certainly been hooked already, thanks to the DVD release of Warner's spectacular Swan Lake. The final hurdle DVD must cross to achieve mainstream acceptance, of course, is the big breakthrough into the video rental market. Some video libraries, such as Laser in Dublin's George's Street, have been renting DVDs for some time, with modest but consistent success - but with the Xtra-vision chain set to row in with a major launch of DVD titles later this month, it looks like the future has well and truly arrived.
