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DVD Forum Creates Further Confusion in RW
lymax writes "In a recent PCExtremist article they attack the DVD Forum for its further splintering of the already fragmented DVD recordable specs. - Interesting article. " Finally something on the subject that isn't about DeCSS. I still look forward to being able to use DVD-RW as a storage device. . . for that matter, putting
Duckpins and
Hamster Havoc on a Collectors Edition DVD would be super 'leet ;)
You just gotta make a third one. C'mon, the other two were great!
'twould seem a calculated move: encryption is cracked, so the RIAA fakes some fracturing of the DVD market as a result. I also note most slashdotters failed to realize the quote in the interview with the RIAA head that they already have over 300 companies signed on that "reverse-engineering is bad".
is some sort of open hardware storage standard, NOT linked to movies/music/copyrighted-stuff. It seems that all of these problems and delays in high-capacity removable media are caused by copyright problems, as the entertainment monopolists try to keep their monopoly profits.
I suspect that if some bright, cluefull outfit with a big research budget (maybe IBM?) were to bring out a 10Gbyte removable-media drive which wasn't too high priced, it would really sell. Once folks start keeping their home movies on these, using whatever format is handy, they'll sell like hotcakes. Once the hardware is out there, I think its just a matter of time before someone in the entertainment industry breaks ranks and starts selling their content on the new media. It might be old stooges movies, at first, but once someone starts making money there, the rest of the industry would have to follow, just as they've had to sell CD's even after CD-R's and MP3's came along.
So, we need to let it be known to manufacturers that we want really BIG removable-media drives, and we need to work on some open-source standard ways to put video on them, so us folks at home can lead the way.
See what I've been reading.
The last thing we need is another "standard".
In any case, this had all better be over by the time I get my DVD drive in 6 months. (I wanna use it under Linux so bad...)
Oh well, this will suck. The same thing happened with CD-ROMs, except the media pushers weren't this scared before. Even then, it took us forever to get ATAPI...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The problem is that the present standard is all wrapped up in the copyright problems, and anything being pushed by the RIAA/MPAA folks will be just as bad. The reason I'm suggesting another standard is to get out from under their thumbs.
It would be really nice to have a drive that would hold gigabytes, and no nonsense about "its crippled and you'll go to jail if you fix it". I agree with you about too many standards, but I think we're already past the point of no return for the DVD. That article lists four major standards before this latest split, which seems (when I read between the lines) to be intended to keep us from making professional content. And that is what the DVD problems are all about: keeping the entertainment industry's stranglehold on distribution, as that felow Valenti argued so eloquently in the intervi ew earlier.
To ensure that prospective manufacturers aren't scared away by possible lawsuits, we should stay away from the movie industry's pet format. Think about the problems we're having getting cheap, portable MP3 players. They seem to come from fear of lawsuits, not just technical problems.
We wouldn't have to write new formats, unless we just weren't satisfied with the old. If we could just buy something like a Jazz disk that held 10 gigs for less than 20 bucks, we could use JPEG and MP3 or whatever to put stuff on it.
See what I've been reading.
OK, I must admit I breathed a sigh of relief when I followed the link and saw what "Hamster Havoc" was. For a second, I thought Rob had gone all Richard Gere on us ;-).
No sig.
The problem is that media companies and computer users have different requirements. Media companies need a disk that can be mass produced with stampers, like the current CD and DVD. Computer users need a disk that can be read/write on a sector level. The current CD-R is a clumsy hybrid of the two.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
any g4 owners that got the dvd-rom scene have any comments on it as a removable media?
(This is sorta off topic.)
If anything, the existing crop of DVD-ROM players show that the DVD consortium doesn't really understand computer peripherals and how to design them. Rather than choosing a 'closed' solution that would (in theory) be more difficult to crack, they cut corners and went for a software decryption/decoder approach, and then pushed the drives out into the market at very reasonable prices.
Software decoding has done wonders for DVD's installed base (mostly in computers right now), but at the same time it's left the more savvy users scratching their heads. Here is a stream of data coming across the IDE bus, bouncing around the hardware and the OS, and eventually displaying on the computer monitor. The one huge problem is that the users weren't supposed access that data, and if that isn't a giant scratchable itch, I don't know what is.
I can't stop wondering why they didn't just take the approach of CD-ROM players, which have normal audio-out leads right on the back of the drive. 99% of music CD listening is done through these leads and the sound card's analog mixer device. In fact, until a couple years ago, it was impossible to access the digital audio stream with most CD-ROMs, and people who ripped CDs generally did a analog-digital conversion with their SoundBlaster, resulting in a very noticeable quality loss.
Likewise, the same approach could have been taken with DVDs -- normal data access through IDE/SCSI, and just leave a S-Video connector on the back of the drive (along with a CD-ROM style audio hookup) for movie viewing. All the decryption and macrovision crap could be done completely in hardware. Of course, you would need a video 'mixer' device of some sort, but cheap TV cards have been available for some time, and are supported on all platforms. Any 'Rip' would require a D->A->D conversion.
Now, I'm not trying to give the studios advice on how to copy protect their movies, only trying to point out how short sighted they are. Any consumer writeable DVD format that come out will probably be designed just like DVD-Video was -- as much as possible will be done in software to reduce costs, and then a bunch of ill-thought out copy protection features will be kludged on at the end. Of course, you know the story from there on -- someone will want to scratch that itch and crack the whole thing open again, and then we are back to where we are now with DVD.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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No Zen is good zen
Actually, it's not DVD vs. Beta (both of which were successful for a time) as it is the usual "Sony does something, so Panasonic does something different" thing. Sony introduced their "Memory Stick", so Panasonic introduced their "SD Module". Why? Because they wanted to have something that was NOT Sony. Sony introduced the Mini-disc, Philips introduced the DCC (remember that?). Sony is as guilty. In the consumer video market, the DV format is universal and wel like. But in the Pro market, Sony came out with DVCAM, Panasonic came out with DVC-PRO, both with limited downward compatibility. The laughable part? Neither format is actually better quality...both are the same level of compression as the consumer product!
This is about each Japanese manufacturer and Philips trying to push their own format and make a huge pile from being the winner and licencing their format to the losers. What we need is a format that they can all agree on and put the patents into a pool.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Well, if you look on the back of some CD-ROM drives made in years >=1994, you'll find, right beside the trusty AUDIO_OUT plug, an SPDIF plug. Until recently, SPDIF was the best way to transport digital music losslessly. There are some new schemes now for the hifi nuts... And you've got the "noticiable quality loss" part right--I've NEVER heard a CD-ROM with anything better than barely acceptable quality on the analog outs. Most are unusably bad. Everything from power supply noise to over-filtering the highs. Dont think about playing audio in realtime over the IDE cable, either (at least with any MICROS~1 OS) you'll hit "stop" in a hurry due to bursts of clicking (lost data? no error correction?). But then, how much can one expect from a CD player that costs under us$50?
The basic question is that the CD-audio player technology was developed *before* the CD-ROM reader technology, actually the CD-ROM are a clever hack based on audio gear.
An audio CD reader has basically the reading and error correctin mechanism that provides a serial stream of bytes representing the audio data and a syncronyzation system. The serial data is then feed into the DAC. There are also sub channel informations but these are another serial stream normally sent to the microcontroller of the player and used to set indexes and so on.
The CD-ROM hardware of the first readers was built over the audio gear, taking the digital stream and sending on the SCSI bus.
The audio stream is basically serial, not random access, like an analog record. To fit into the idea of computer how work a data devices they addess in the CD-ROM stream marks with begin and end of block and block number information.
On audio CD there aren't such blocks(because audio is a serial stream).
So is explained why older CD-ROM had great difficulty to read audio data, not finding the block marks they normally are loosing syncronysm after few frames.
Newer CD are smarter and maybe can manage the sector syncronization before the ECC mechanism. The BMG not standard recording technique to prevent reading of their CD maybe garble the sector information before ECC, making more difficult for newer CD-ROM to remain in sync, and old CD-Audio players too, I think depend how ECC circutry manages errors on these units.
On DVD they started to a digital format and added video data as files.
Techically make a system like CD-Audio for CD video is more costly, because the data is compressed with a complex algorithm, requiring a powerful CPU, and not a simple DAC. But is feasible anyway (and useful, because you could see your favorite video on DVD even on a 486).
And MPEG compressed data has less self-correlation respect an uncompressed audio stream, making tools like cdda2wav less able do deal with loss of sync.
Mike
CD-ROMs were developed after CD Audio, but not much after, so they must have been aware of the computer applications through the design phase. Early multimedia specifications from Apple and others just played Red Book CD Audio through the analog jacks -- playing audio files from the CD was considered to complex or too slow.
(It's kinda like saying that writable DVD standards were developed after DVD-video -- technically true, but throughout the DVD development process everyone was fully aware of the computer applications. In fact, this standards war has in fact been brewing for years, and grew out of an earlier "Treaty of Versailles" that allowed a standard DVD format to ship in the first place.)
Anyway, thanks for the technical explanation. It just strikes me that the content/consumer electronic industry would be so stupid to produce something that looks like a computer drive, and acts like a computer drive, and then be amazed when the users want to use it like a computer drive. They should just stick to black boxes until they are ready to play the convergance game according to the existing rules.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Consider the ideal copy protection. The data on the DVD is strongly encrypted. The player has some protected hardware which is able to access the encrypted media, and decrypt it. It never sends out the bits in clear text, though.
The display device (monitor, or maybe just the video card) also has protected hardware. The player and display negotiate a key (using a zero-knowledge protocol) and the data between them is exchanged encrypted using this key.
This means you can only play the media on a certified player and using a certified display device. You'll never have access to the unencrypted bits; sniffing the trafic between player and display device gives you nothing.
You can physically replicate the media, right, but a certified home writer would insist on taking unencrypted movies and encrypting them before writing to the media. No way you could replicate movies this way, but you could burn your own DVD of the last ski trip.
Everyone could build a factory which replicates media, but there's no helping that. This is a whole separate issue - it is more international politics then technical difficulties.
This does not prevent anyone from providing other forms of media (e.g., a large hard disk) which are large enough to store the movies. But you'll never be able to play a copy of an encrypted movie of such media; the data is encrypted and only a certified player will decrypt it. And no such player will read from a hard disk.
The up side is that you'd be able to play such media on Linux or other open-source systems. It is just a matter of drivers, all the encryption is in hardware. The down side is that you'll never be able to make a backup copy. Seems a perfect tradeoff for an industry which want to sell more movies then players...
So why don't they do it? Besides the cost of something like a smart card in both the player and the display device, that is?
Imagine a would-be terrorist in Iraq, burning a DVD with a video message to his partner in the USA. He just has to hook up his computer with the Panasonic player to the internet, and have it talk with his partner's computer with the Diamond display card. Instant secure communication. And that's before considering him taking apart the players and using the smart cards directly...
This keeps the NSA awake at nights. Of course, the possibility that the same terrorist would use PGP instead doesn't cross their minds. Sigh.
Thanks to such far sightedness, we get both PGP to encrypt our E-mails and DVDs with encryption which one must break to play on Linux (which seems fair use under current law) - hence, in effect, no encryption at all. So we have secure E-mail and can make backup copies of our DVDs. The best of all possible worlds! (Given a favorable court ruling, that is).
One day they'll notice the HDTV spec requires broadcasting the movies in unencrypted digital format which puts DVDs to shame. Imagine a TiVo like system for HDTV... The fuss they make over DeCss would be mild by comparison. Why do you think they flatly refuse to define a standard for sending HDTV over cable?
I know, I'm giving the "bad guys" ideas, so I'd better stop now