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By Daniel Greenberg
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, August 22, 1997

As if sitting on the fence about getting a DVD (Digital Video, or Versatile, Disc, depending on who you ask) player for your TV wasn't enough fun, now there's a small but growing selection of DVD players for your computer too. We took a look at one, Hi-Val's DVD-ROM kit; this one stands out by playing DVD movies on your TV — from your computer, without any wires.

This gadget offers a DVD-ROM drive, an MPEG-2 video card and a pair of wireless transmitters that can broadcast DVD movies via radio waves to your television. You'll need at least a Pentium 133 with a free PCI card slot.

Installation is relatively straightforward, but it's not for anybody squeamish about tinkering with their PC's guts, since you have to plug in two internal components. Once you're past that, the video and audio the kit produces are breathtaking, easily the best multimedia you can get on a computer. It plays DVD movies in a window or full screen (in 640-by-480 resolution, enough to max out a 14-inch monitor), and offers the usual DVD tricks: widescreen, letterbox or pan-and-scan playback; jump-by-chapters; multiple-language soundtracks and subtitles; and password-locked parental controls (unsupported by DVD movies so far).

I was skeptical about the "RF-Link Wavecom" wireless transmitter, but it worked like a champ, beaming crystal-clear video and thunderous audio to a TV across the house and behind walls and closed doors. But the Wavecom only lets you control playback from the PC, so hitting "pause" requires a jog around the house. The Hi-Val comes with one DVD movie that won't sell out at Blockbuster (the documentary Africa: The Serengeti) and a six-pack of DVD-ROM software of varying quality. Origin's Wing Commander IV makes sense, taking up only one DVDisc instead of six CD-ROMs, and Activision's Spycraft and Muppet Treasure Island are decent titles too. But Hi-Val also bundles cutout-bin bait like 1995's The Daedalus Encounter and the even older Silent Steel, both retrofitted with DVD video, and the shovelware Encyclopedia Electronica.

And this is the problem with DVD on the computer: There's no software to turn this technology into a must-buy. It's not that companies aren't making DVD-ROMs; they are — but most are just remastered CD-ROMs, and they're all only available bundled with DVD hardware anyway. These and upcoming DVD-ROMs cover familiar territory: games (Command and Conquer), edutainment (The Genius of Edison), how-to (Home Depot's Home Improvement 1-2-3), databases (PhoneDisc) and the truly pointless category of "video screen savers" (Star Trek, of course). That is, the DVD-ROM industry is just like the CD-ROM industry of four years ago.

If this product doesn't hook you, future DVD drives will feature write-once recording, giving you access to nearly four gigabytes of fast storage, but these drives are not expected until next year. Then you'll see double-layer and double-sided DVD-ROMs, and the upgrade madness will go on and on.

Win, $849 ($649 without RF-Link Wavecom), 714/953-3000 or http://www.hival.com/dvd.htm