One thing is sure for home users: tapes are passé. Digital camcorders are the exception here, as affordable and practical alternatives in compact formats such as 8cm DVDs are few and far between. In this area, then, digital cassettes remain the norm.

The one fixed variable in the living room is the DVD. It is affordable and the picture quality is good. Since last summer, recording devices and DVD burners for the PC have also sunk to attractive price levels, so that this medium can now be labeled universal without qualification (hence "digital versatile disc").

MPEG-4, meanwhile, has emerged as a serious contender to the widely used MPEG-2 standard, as it requires far lower bit rates to produce DVD-like quality. That means that 90 minutes of video material can fit on just two CDs. The drawback: playback eats up more decoder power.

Unfortunately, the big producers for Hi-Fi systems slept through the switch to MPEG-4 almost to a man, so that these days smaller manufacturers and "no names" share the market for MPEG-4 capable DVD players.

Besides being able to handle the two video formats, support for MP3 audio (from CD or DVD) is only to be expected. A DVD player should also be able to deal with all available media types: CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW.

The Future: Everything On Demand

The trend is definitely towards a permanently available music and video archive, playable at the push of a button. A fair number of users already have their MP3 music archives at their fingertips on their computer or on a network server so that they can hear any track they want on at any network workstation whenever they want.

This sort of video archive is currently only possible with MPEG-4 data, as space demands for DVD videos in MPEG-2 quality for larger video libraries are still high enough to rain down extra costs and effort on the heads of users.

We set out to get the lowdown on a mixed batch of living room user devices (which we define as being small in size, low in noise and insignificant sources of heat) to test their suitability for video and/or audio on demand.