Applications
Many different DVD authoring applications help create digital video discs. Many high-end authoring applications evolve in-house in companies such as Matsushita, Philips, Sony, and Toshiba. Such companies strictly forbid the sale of their systems outside each company: internal and DVD laboratories or movie studio partners use them to produce DVDs for customers.
Daikin, a large Japanese air conditioning and refrigeration contracting company, developed Scenarist, a high-end DVD authoring software package. (Daikin has partnered with Sonic Solutions for development and marketing in the U.S.) The software was translated to English and has since become the standard for DVD production in Hollywood amongst other places. Like the other high-end and very expensive systems, it conforms to the DVD specifications more closely than other software. In 2001, Sonic Solutions acquired the DVD authoring business, including ReelDVD and Scenarist, from Daikin and now sells Scenarist.
Sonic, a U.S. corporation, has a major share in the market for selling DVD-authoring tools. They previously manufactured computer based audio recording applications. They soon realized that at some point DVD recorders would become as widely available as CD recorders and that there was no affordable application for the home market or that DVD recorder makers could license as an OEM. At that time, all DVD authoring applications cost many thousands of dollars.
Sonic developed DVDit, an application that started selling below $500. It used only a small part of the whole DVD specification and it presented it in a form that didn't require any knowledge of internal DVD structure. Later, this form became the building block of many other simplified consumer DVD applications. OEM licensing allowed Sonic to very soon become a major player. Sonic is now part of Rovi Corporation.
For a short period of time around 2000, Spruce Technologies emerged as another major player in the market. They created DVD Maestro, a software and hardware system in the same price bracket as the Scenarist system but with a much more user friendly interface. While Scenarist could require months of learning and training, DVD Maestro could be used productively in a much shorter time. DVD Maestro implemented almost all of the DVD specifications like Scenarist, however unlike Scenarist it borrowed an abstraction layer from the consumer oriented applications such as ReelDVD or DVDit. Creating DVDs became a far easier task, yet it only sacrificed a bit of Scenarist's universality. When Spruce started selling SpruceUp, a watered-down consumer incarnation of their DVD Maestro far below the price of Sonic's DVDit, and very similar to Sonic's MyDVD, there was obvious competition between Sonic and Spruce. Both companies were trying to address the very same market, but the market was not big enough. A surprising resolution of this conflict came from Apple Computer, who bought Spruce Technologies for an undisclosed sum. Apple was at that time already marketing its own DVD authoring system after acquiring German software developer Astarte, but decided to go with Spruce for their next incarnation of DVD Studio Pro. This also required Spruce to stop selling and developing applications for PC.
Since then, many other companies — including Adobe Systems, Mediachance, and Ulead — have developed prosumer and home-authoring tools.
Various free and shareware utilities exist which allow end-users to modify existing DVDs. DVDAfterEdit reads and writes DLTs for manufacturing. Other applications include replacing copyright or corporate logos, and changing region coding and/or copy protection, for example. Rights-holders must grant permission to make such changes.
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