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At least In the EU its legal to stream pirated content.
http://www.digital-digest.com/...

Except that time and time again, game, app, and indie movie publishers are shown that piracy actually ends up helping their sales and the spread of their product.

http://www.digital-digest.com/news-63620-New-Study-Says-Music-Piracy-Does-Not-Hurt-Music-Sales-May-Even-Help.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/29/report-album-piracy-may-help-musicians-sell
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-may-boost-sales-111102/

Competitive? They don't even sell 1k a week in Japan.

And the Japanese market doesn't matter, because it's overshadowed by the USA and Europe.

Take a look at these November 2011 numbers for Japan:

PS3: 22,919
Wii: 11,782
Xbox 360: 1,531

3DS: 103,962

Yes, The Xbox moves less than 1k a week, but the best home consoles in the region barely move 5k units a week. That's not a very lucrative market. And yes, the portable numbers are much higher, but that still doesn't come close to the US market (roughly 333k 3DS units sold per-month since launch).

Now take a look at these US numbers for March 2012: (not the same month but they're both recent and off-peak so it's comparable).

Xbox 360: 371,000
PS3: 337,000
Wii: 175,000

See there difference there? For home consoles, Japan is a drop in the bucket. It's no wonder Microsoft completely ceded the market - until they have a portable there's no point in even trying.

However, again, it really doesn't matter at the end of the day, because the fact is PC game sales aren't doing well, and if you want to pretend otherwise fine, but it wont change that fact.

I didn't really make this clear at the beginning, although I've mentioned in in a reply to another poster on this thread: I don't disagree with you that PC sales are poor. My only disagreement was that you pulled some figures from your arse and presented them as fact. You're not the only one that does it. Far from it. But I find it strange that so many people accept the impending death of PC games as a solid fact without any solid evidence.

Just to be really clear: I'm not arguing that PC gaming is alive and healthy - just that no evidence (other than anecdote and opinion) has been presented to prove it. One thing that I do find interesting though is that the impended doom of the PC gaming industry was forecast at this point in the console life-cycle last time and it didn't come to pass. Over the life of that cycle I would expect industry focus to shift between consoles and PCs relative to which provides the best eye-candy as that point.

As far the NPD figures go, apologies as I thought I had put a link in the post but I clearly cocked that up. I can't find the page in my history and it was a serious pain in the ass to find the first time. Edit: middle of this page between the pie charts. Also, I should have pointed out the first time that this is the units sold for the top ten games on each platform, so it is not the total but I would not expect the total to be much higher given that the distribution of sales is almost winner-takes-all.

I can believe it.

I dont know if it's because the Asus is rescaling a 720p source to 600px, and thus causing some problems, but my U820 (1280x800, Atom Z530) handles the 720/24p Serenity trailer with the latest Intel GMA 500 reference driver, using WMP (but not MPC for some reason) under Windows 7 with no dropped frames. The GMA 500 drivers have been a real debacle, esp. under Linux, but even under Windows. I'm hoping as the platform shows up in more machines the driver situation improves even more.

Some caveats: It will *not* scale 1080 sources at any watachable rate. With my Pinnacle 801e ATSC source Windows Media Center dies, often making the graphics driver restart (survivable in Win 7) but sometimes it will blank the display until the power is cycled. I have also not tried 720p AVCHD files from my HMC150.

Its a good question with an answer already: PS2 the most played console of 2008.

Please note the PS2 still sold 410 thousand consoles in December of 2008. That's after already saturating the market with 43.6 million total sales.

At $100, you can't beat buying a PS2 as a gaming platform. In five years' time, Sony hopes the PS3 will be in the same position.

Are you dense. HD DVD DOES support region coding. Get over it. Region Coding has nothing to do with the technology but everything to do with the movie studios protecting their content. In other words - MOVIE STUDIOS WANT REGION CODING!

http://www.digital-digest.com/news-59982.html

So, how does this apply to computer software? Well, the original thought was that a license was required, because when you run and install software, it's copied to the disk (sometimes) and to ram (always). Copyright holders thought "Great! We can do whatever we want, and change the terms to whatever we want after purchase!" When you purchase a car, for example, they can't sell you the car and then say "you can only use Ford service on it", or "You can only use Chevy parts".

Regardless, copyright law (in the US, at least - YMMV) now specifically grants the right to make copies for installation, running, and archiving of purchased software. In other words, You don't need an EULA or license to use software you have already bought. The modern EULA pretends to be a "contract", yet it attempts to modify the terms of sale, post-sale, supposedly applies to minors, and supposed applies whether or not you've had a chance to read it beforehand.

It does appear that the VP6 codec remains the EVD standard despite the unhappiness of On2.

And where did you get that information? AVS is the standard codec, AFAIK.

The intarweb, which is why I said "appears". Google for "EVD AVS VP6". Here's one site.

One message board poster said that EVD would be MPEG-2 only, which would be unfortunate. Another said that it would have 90 minutes of HD content (apparently lots of Chinese movies are 90 minutes long.)

This is an interesting possibility, but history leans toward no. VCDs became the de facto replacement for VHS in Asia even while DVD took off among people who wanted higher-quality formats. VCD never went anywhere in the U.S., however, despite the fact that there are a lot of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. with thriving Asian communities where retailers do trade in VCDs. The download community is accustomed to the VCD format, but not retail consumers.

Technologies like this just don't seem to cross-pollinate from Asian markets into Western markets. Presumably this has to do with the Western media companies' loathing and distrust for Asian technologies, given the Asian markets' traditional indifference toward Western intellectual property standards.

It seems likely that some format similar to EVD will emerge, however ... either that, or enough college kids with access to downloaded EVD images will drive some kind of market for DVD players that support the format (similar to how there is now a trickle of players appearing that support MPEG-4).

P.S. This seems like a pretty good FAQ on the various available formats, including EVD and FVD.

When I was getting a capture card just for composite video I simply gave up on finding one that didn't respect macrovision.

Too bad you didn't persevere a little longer. There's loads of tips to get rid of Macrovision. In particular, most(any?) card with a Brooktree8x8 chip can be made to ignore Macrovision with either the right software tools or with alternate drivers.

There are ways to change the region coding of DVD drives on PCs. I'm not sure if its possible for Macs.

Actually, Mini DVD's are CD-sized media that are formatted to hold video. It wouldn't be appropriate for a handheld device. You're probably thinking about cDVD's, sometimes called 3-inch DVD's. They hold somewhat less than a UMD (1.4GB vs. 1.8GB) but might have been considered, if piracy weren't an issue.

I guess it depends on who you ask, but yes, I was thinking of the 3" verion that holds 1.4GB.

1.4GB would have been fine as far as size is concerned, but, then again, SD cards would have been fine as far as flash memory is concerned. Sony like to go it's own way with this stuff. And just many large Memory Sticks and pre-recorded videos would have been sold if everyone could have inexpensively burned their on-the-go music and video's to inexpensive 3" DVDs?

Piracy was probably an issue, but a small one. Making money reselling 512MB Memory Sticks and HellBoy were probably more important. After all, wouldn't you still have piracy on an MS?

Slot loaders: you're probably right. I'd like to add though that the potential to get gunk in your drive is also pretty high when a full third of the back of your device pops open to insert a UMD.

TW

Next time you watch a movie, pay attention to pans across landscapes and such. Usually a DVD is sourced from 24FPS film, so it applies here too. You can usually easily see the jerkiness of the video when it pans. Then, watch some panning video from a home camcorder which usually records at 60 interlaced frames a second. The difference is immediately noticeable.

A home camcorder, as well as TV, is 60 fields per second, interlaced. That makes it 30 frames per second. Still more fps than film, but I'd take progressive, non-telecined 24 fps film source over interlaced video anyday. It's much easier to work with and doesn't have combing or blended frames/scenes.

Just sayin'.

There is a list of problematic discs here: http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?thr eadid=46190

These use a scheme called ARccOS from Sony. I don't know how similar it is to Macrovision's technology, but I am comfortable speculating that both will cause problems on a few DVD players and drive up disc return rates, and neither will be effective against piracy. I wouldn't be surprised if some folks will have to use a ripping program that circumvents the corruption du jour just to play it on their set top DVD players...

1. I don't want to be on a monthly payment plan ($17.99 or something) where I have to get 7 movies in that month in order to be paying less than renting the movies at the video store.

That's fine, use the video store like you said you do.

2. Netflix's commercials annoy me. Standing in line at a store? Who the fuck does that? I have never waited to rent a movie and honestly, putting them into the mail takes longer for me than does going to the video store that's less than two miles away.

Most people live closer to a mailbox (usually their own mailbox) than a video store.

3. Downloading movies is free. 66 cents each still costs more than downloading them.

You missed the key point... Netflix is legitimate and legal, but downloading (for free) almost never is. Plus depending on your internet connection speed and the server's download speed, it could take a lot of time or effort to download the movie. You could work an hour fixing someone's computer and charge $20 and rent 4x $5 movies, but I doubt you could find and download good quality versions of 4 movies in an hour. Plus if you're looking for unpopular movies, it would be very difficult to find them.

4. They come in a format that is all ready to be played on your computer (if you so desire) instead of having to wait to convert the 4GB to that format yourself.

Your computer can't play DVD's? Why not? If you have a DVD drive to rip them, then you have a DVD drive to play them. (and yes Linux machines can too).

article on H.264
http://www.guidetohometheater.com/news/062804apple /

According to a few articles, Microsoft is endorsing HD-DVD for the adoption of WMV9 codec

here
here
here
here
then again, Paul Thurrot is to Microsoft as Rush Limbaugh to The Republicans

YIKES!!!!

-------

DVDs don't "have" Macrovision. Macrovision is done by the player or the TV out chip, dependant on whether the DVD has a Macrovision "activation code." Reference.

Actually DVDShrink can do both.

DiVX ;-) was first "project mayo" (codename) - mayo because its difficult to make, and pretty much hit or miss - divx was first a hacked mpeg-4 codec (m$ .asp actually - really ment for streaming high quality video over broadband, hacked to work offline and "standalone"), and contained "hot" code. so divx 3.11, the version that really first took off, was illegal. the codec really exploded with the file sharing boom namely morpheus and kazaa. next release , they got rid of the stolen code, and all was good, the codec had even better quality and many of the audio syncing problems had been taken care of. by this point i had ~150 gb of video at ~300 hrs.

then, with the next release (5.x), and even more popularity, divx went commercial, and at first, i was upset, but they were pretty good about it, they had 3 versions, the one with no ads, but "play only", one with adware + encoding, and then the full $30USD one that let you do everything without ads. i thought, well these guys deserve some money for all the work that went into this great codec.

xvid was one of the spinoffs from projectmayo, and has become my favorite codec since i started using it. it seems to have the best "feel" to it, and is really really really good for animated films (to be fair, divx and the rest are really really good at animated films too, most codecs do, easy lines for the encoder to pick up and even out between frames). there are two main developers for xvid (its open so there are different builds) kopei, and nic. they both have their pros and cons, but you would be hard pressed to find them "in real life."

most of this info can be gathered from the mentioned sites, with a little digging. if im wrong about any of this, meh. its pretty right on, though. some great resources for these codecs are the forementioned www.doom9.org is really one of the best collections of encoding how-tos and other doodads. should be required reading for any video DIY noobs. another great resource is www.divx-digest.com you can get all kinds of codecs and players there, try em all, its the best way to learn (divx-digest is a sister site to www.digital-digest.com) like i said, i really dig xvid, and divx's commercial ventures are really starting to pan out (featured in a couple of computer games/video games (lord of the rings pc maybe?), hopefully soon will be built in to dvd players- think 2+ movies in hi-res on one dvd!). please please please dont use wmv. i cant play wmv, as many non M$ people cant, and they take more cpu to decode (looks pretty and is easy though).

before divx was known as divx, there was another company that released a project by the same name, where you would rent this cd/dvd disc thing and buy it to unlock it and watch it whenever you wanted, neat idea, poor execution, i only knew one persone that used it. they came in these little cardboard jewel cases. (before dvd players were all over, you had to get one that could play this divx )

batteries not included, bad grammar and spelling included. see side label for details

If he doesn't add official support for DVD-9 drives, you can pretty easily change the target size in 3.1.x's preferences to give you a DVD-9 sized disc. Then just burn it with whatever software comes with the drive, or whatever it is you want to use. (The newer versions of DVDShrink work directly with Nero, if I recall, to automatically burn your ripped disc after it re-encodes, so once Nero supports DVD-9 DVDShrink will burn them as well).

Check here for info on how to run DVDShrink using Wine.

1) Load browser
2) Navigate to www.google.com
3) Type "Play DVD from hard disk" in pretty little box
4) Hit Enter
5) Click first link

Or just click here

Is this really a problem for Slashdot? If I think about half of the shit I've submitted that got rejected, it's enough to make me not submit anything again. Sure, my submissions didn't have cool buzzwords like "video on demand", "terrabyte", and I don't own a plasma display, but they were articles whose answer wasn't the first darn response on a Google search. Subscribers ... Are you getting what you paid for?

VCDEasy burning software

Medal of Honour: Allied Assult Spearhead Multiplayer Demo

There's lots of others..

Pretty, much.

I am not even close to being an authority on this so I am sure someone can explain this better than me, but...

The VCD and SVCD formats are time based. They encode the audio and video similar to an audio CD. Ever see an audio CD with more than 80 minutes of record time? Not unless it has mp3s on it. Try making a single standards compliant VCD or SVCD more than about an hour or so. Good luck

DivX is not time based, but is instead size based. You can fit at a fairly respectable quality a two hour movie on a single CD in DivX format. You would have to switch CDs otherwise.

About a year and a half ago I downloaded the codecs and stuff to see what all of this "ripping" stuff was about. I copied the .VOB files (using SmartRipper) to my hard drive. Essentially (oversimplification time here) the .VOB file is an MPEG-2 stream with indexes so you can skip to that favorite chapter in the movie. The thing was about 6GB for The Matrix on my hard drive.

After conversion (which took forever because I was such a newbie at the time) the movie fit on a CD-ROM. You lose resolution and quality in the conversion, but you at least have it.

If I had a video camera I would convert my movies to DIVX because of the size savings. You can make them retain high quality, but you lose diskspace fast. Finding the balance that is just right for you (and your movie) takes time.

If you want the lowdown on how to convert I suggest going over to Digital Digest and looking at Nicky Pages' Digital Solutions for a comprehensive overview of the process.

I am not even close to being an authority on this so I am sure someone can explain this better than me, but...

The VCD and SVCD formats are time based. They encode the audio and video similar to an audio CD. Ever see an audio CD with more than 80 minutes of record time? Not unless it has mp3s on it. Try making a single standards compliant VCD or SVCD more than about an hour or so. Good luck

DivX is not time based, but is instead size based. You can fit at a fairly respectable quality a two hour movie on a single CD in DivX format. You would have to switch CDs otherwise.

About a year and a half ago I downloaded the codecs and stuff to see what all of this "ripping" stuff was about. I copied the .VOB files (using SmartRipper) to my hard drive. Essentially (oversimplification time here) the .VOB file is an MPEG-2 stream with indexes so you can skip to that favorite chapter in the movie. The thing was about 6GB for The Matrix on my hard drive.

After conversion (which took forever because I was such a newbie at the time) the movie fit on a CD-ROM. You lose resolution and quality in the conversion, but you at least have it.

If I had a video camera I would convert my movies to DIVX because of the size savings. You can make them retain high quality, but you lose diskspace fast. Finding the balance that is just right for you (and your movie) takes time.

If you want the lowdown on how to convert I suggest going over to Digital Digest and looking at Nicky Pages' Digital Solutions for a comprehensive overview of the process.

It still can, you just need to use a special version of it.

Region codes are enforced both by the drive firmware and the player software. You'll still need a region-free DVD drive. They're hard to find, but still out there. See here.

None of the techniques set out on this webpage will help you if the problem was caused by bad source material, or bad encoding, but they're worth a try.

Nicky's Pages' Digital Solutions

Or you can go to DVD Digest's region free guide and see if there is hacked firmware available for it.

Look at what has happened to DeCSS?
It has been forced underground which has effectively killed it.

You must know nothing of the Divx scene. Countless titles have been ripped and are out there if you can find them. (And it's only hard to find them because they're big, not because they're illegal.) DVD ripping software is advancing at an incredible pace; already there are DeCSS counterparts that are faster, easier and more compliant than DeCSS ever was. I don't see people in a hurry to mirror VOBDec or put it on t-shirts. DeCSS is, in fact, more popular than it would be without these lawsuits.

Why is that? Because DVD ripping is equated with piracy. DVD ripping software is equated with free speech; and by challenging DeCSS, the MPAA has pissed off a lot of people who wouldn't normally touch the stuff.

--

Works like a ripper, but it isn't - because it actually derives the key from the encrypted VOB itself using a cryptographic attack. VobDec can even decrypt a VOB that has been copied encrypted to the hard drive

you can get it here

besides that id like to mention that people should be way more exsited about this. people don't seem to relize that in about 2 years the MPAA is going to totally freak out because napster-forvideo will have every freaking movie and video for download.

that and your 2.5ghz computer can record a whole movie to a tiny 700megs on your 2.5 terrabyte drive.

think about it!

-Jon

oh ya, Tom didn't mention that DiVX is the actually Microsoft MPEG v4, just cracked to remove the copyright stuff. how they got hold of it, i can't tell you. also Microsoft and Real seem to have slightly better codecs now, Microsoft Video V7 (why 7? ,marketing) and Real 8, both are REALLY freaking amazing. even better then standard MPEG4, which as someone pointed out is bassicly Quicktime, which uses the sorenson codec. Not that Quicktime isn't da shit, it is.

so why are MPAA only going after decss?

The original version of DeCSS doesn't even work on the new DVDs. Why is this case still going?

http://www.digital-di gest.com/dvd/downloads/ripping_soft.html

This is not meant as a troll, but seriously... if the code in question doesn't do what it's supposed to anymore, why is the government still pursuing it?

I find that DVD Digest offers some great tutorials and programs. It isn't that tough, especially with FlaskMPEG. I however prefer to use other codecs other than DivX.
Sorry to say however, its only for Wintel.

It's already happened. There are underground sites on the net where you can download DivX encoded .avi files 600MB-1.2GB in size, which on a system with good MPEG hardware decoding are comparable to DVD, and far superior to VHS, even on a large ( 36" I've seen and it looks and sounds great ) home theatre system. If you want to see how good the DivX codec really is, here is a comparison of two frames from a Dolby trailer. The site also has step by step instructions on how to backup a DVD to a DivX file on a hard disk, with all the available tools supplied.

When I say comparable to DVD, I should qualify that a bit. It is obviously inferior, in both picture and audio. But the miracle of MPEG compression is that is gives the most detail to the parts you're paying attention to. There is compression noise but only in low motion, low detail backgrounds. There are also sometimes audio synching errors.

This is an excellent resource for more information about the DivX codec as well as MPEG-4 compression in general. Now, if only FlasK could be ported to Linux...we'd be made in the shade.

Bah. ASP is crap. Have you seen any DivX encoded AVI movies? ~600 MB, 2 hours of video, approaching DVD quality (up to 720 x 480, 30 frames/second)

Here is a good link.

Digital Digest has this bit about creating DivX files from dvd even. You can get all the necessary software for windows from the site too, including the stuff you use to downmix from 5.1 to 2 channels of audio and so on.

This seems to be the prevailing blindspot on Slashdot. I consider that position dishonest. First let me say that I think consumers have every right to copy their data, and I am very PRO-DECSS.

DeCSS is very powerful for copying DVD's. Namely it allows them to be copied to the hard drive, and using freely available software, converted to an MPEG-1 (MPG) file which can be burned on one or two CD's. This can also be done in standard VCD format. The image quality is about VHS.

There is also a new conversion using MPEG-4 for video and MPEG-3 for audio which produces an AVI of almost double the quality (resolution) of the above method with smaller output. It rivals the original.

As CDR's are 50 to 100 cents a pop, you can copy a DVD pretty easily and cheaply. Of course you can use a VCR to copy it without DeCSS providing you get around macrovision protection. But everyone likes having their AV material in computer format.

When DVD burners become more mainstream, we can just burn the decrypted VOB files directly to a fresh DVD disc. As I understand it, you can't do this without DeCSS because the area of the disc where the key is stored is pre-burned in the media with zeros. I don't know if a homemade copy will play in non-computer DVD players but it will on computers. I prefer watching DVD's on the computer anyway as the screen is flat and crisp.

So IMO dragging this "DECSS is an innocent player-only app" sign is garbage. Why not stand up and say "YES, I want to copy my DVD's. So?" Consumers have had that right for a long time - to copy software, music, and videos for their own purposes. I also agree that it is a player issue, but not exclusively.

Personally, I feel consumers should be free to share their data too. (In fact they are free, unless they choose to obey rules set forth by others.) I think selling the data is lame, but if people are stupid enough to pay for what they can get free, that's their problem. As for the artists, I guess they need to find a new model which reflects reality. Maybe their days of million dollar houses and limosines are over (for their managers too). Is acting really harder work than the average person does every day? But really I think there will always be multitudes who buy the line the purchase the inflated copies. Piracy has never stopped the studios from making huge profits, because a lot of people actually do believe in playing by their rules. Fair enough. But I realize everyone doesn't share that opinion. Regardless, DeCSS is Good (tm) for Legitimate (tm) purposes.

Good and Legitimate are established trademarks of The Establishment, Inc.

True. DeCSS breaks a copy protection scheme (CSS). Why are Slashdotters so naive about this? Are you merely trying to convince ignorant people or yourselves?

Thanks to decss, I can now rip a DVD, reduce the resolution, and burn it onto one or two CD's. When DeCSS came out I went out and bought a DVD drive, while everyone was screaming "Boycott DVD now". Why? Because now its an open standard so I'll support it.

Just the facts.