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"D-VHS": Will it replace DVD?
1+1trouble writes "Wired News has an interesting article about D-VHS: 'JVC introduced the new D-VHS tape at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) along with a high definition television (HDTV) set that protects high definition content from being copied. Video on D-VHS tapes is uncompressed, so it's enormous. A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible...D-VHS can record and play back up to four hours of video in high definition mode -- up to 1,080 lines per screen width, or more than double the resolution of DVD...' The proposition comes in sync with the current haggle over copy-protection schemes. But, considering it's hefty price tag and DVD's head-start, it might just be relegated to the throngs of the laserdisc."
Not QUITE true, but close. A single flubbed bit in a digital data stream can be recovered from the checksums. A single unrecoverable bit (probably due to multiple sequential or close bits being messed up) will cause a dropout or glitch, but only for that section.
Regardless--Tape was never any more than the best of several bad alternatives for long term storage. It wasn't and isn't permanent by any stretch of the imagination--it decays! It rots! It falls apart! Going back to tape from a solid state format (i.e. DVD, CD, etc.) is a Bad Idea, and isn't likely to catch up now.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
As it stands now the cost of the machine and the cost of the tapes doom it's success, BUT remember that the Betamax was in EXACTLY the same price range when it came out (adjusted for inflation even higher!) and the cost slowly came down. If DVHS catches on history will repeat. All tv's will have to have the necessary interface, but this too can happen. Remember SVHS? It required that special svideo 4 pin din connector on the tv. Now you can't find a TV set with a 25" or larger tube that DOESN'T have that svideo input.
What JVC has done is to put a copy once feature in this recorder that would allow you to tape off the air, but NOT dub the tapes. I would hope for an analog output as well (perhaps at a low res) to allow for downstream consumer gadgets as well as backward compatibility. Also true videophiles will like the lack of compression which can distort the picture. Some still think that Laserdiscs look better than DVD because of the compression.
In short, I think this may fly. It remains to be determined if the standard will be picked up by enough tv makers and for the price to fall with volume production. But in this day vhs size tapes are so HUGH! That's the big step backwards.
Check pricewatch... The most expensive LCD projector on there is aboyut $7000...
We need a nice catch phrase for this sort of thinking... like security through obscurity (or whatnot)...
... copyright protection through anal retention?
howabout
*shrug*
E.
www.randomdrivel.com -- All that is NOT fit to link to
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
The main reason, as I understand it, that audio CD's still are only about 45 minutes is that the music industry is set up so that regardless of the number of songs you release on a CD (unless perhaps you are some major established group like the Rolling Stones or something) they only pay the song writing royalty equivelent of 10 songs. So to put a signifigantly larger number than that on a CD would hurt your, as the performer, profit. Thus is seems that 12 songs is the most often seen number, just slightly over that 10 song limit. If anyone else has better details about this, please do tell. I'm going off memory of a article I read in a guitar magazine about 5 years ago.
The point is, however, that the cirumstances are different here. On CD's yes it can be said to be a ploy to get people to convert as it cost the artists money to put those extras out. If the extras on DVDs are a ploy, I dont't think they will go away for similar reasons. It won't cost the performers anymore to put things on the disk.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I don't want HDTV, I do want a 16:9 screen.
Yes, before I worry about detail, I'd just like to see the whole scene composition as indended by the director. All too often I see things in films that don't make sence visually... like two actors, one standing on each side, looking at each other... but only one is visible... bah!
As far as I can tell, broadcasters pay for bandwidth, and they can cram as many or as few channels into that bandwidth as they choose. Watching British SkyDigital it's fairly easy to tell which channels are being broadcast at a high bitrate (PPV movies, BBC, Sky 1, etc) and which are being compressed to death (UK Living, Rapture, etc.).
Even on the high bitrate channels, you're likely to see some blockiness in certain tricky scenes (swirling mist / fog / smoke seems most vulnerable), but on the cheaper channels you'll see it quite clearly on easier subjects such as graduated-fill skies, moving backgrounds on in-car shots etc.
Things are confused a little by channels such as The Box (and its clones) where the video source is presumably a hard disk full of MPEGs, so the whole thing is going through MPEG compression/decompression at least twice - they probably compress those videos quite a lot to conserve disk space, then decompress them in real time before compressing them again for broadcast on a low bitrate channel.
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JVC already has a D-VHS recorder out that does compression....Hasn't anybody else actually checked out JVC's site, where the specs are up for the players currently on sale (at least in the UK)?
According to their blurb, the recorder (HM-DR10000EK) does "D-VHS 7-hour high quality recording (STD mode) and extended 21-hour recording (LS3 mode) using 420 min. cassette"
Looks like a pretty cool machine to me, considering how cool their existing analogue VCRs are.
Isn't this DVHS sounding just a little bit like DAT? I mean, DAT's have a good use, though it may be specific, but they are traditionally expensive and too much trouble when the same product can be achieved through good ol' fashioned digital CD copying, etc. DVHS will be too expensive and too specific in use to ever take the DVD market away from the public. Interesting idea though....
Okay, okay, I know I should at least *read* the article before I bash the fools that came up with this idea, but this is too easy!
When I read the part about the huge size being used as a deterrent to copying, I laughed out loud. So lemmie get this.. the plan is just to make it too huge to fit on a disk or tranfer over the net, huh? Yeah, bloat! As several other people have pointed out:
1. It shouldn't take enterprising young hackers long to break the encryption (if there is encryption). After this, it should be trivial to compress the big fat thing.
2. What with the size of hard disks growing exponentially, or at least really fast, it shouldn't be too long before it can fit on a hard disk uncompressed anyway.
3. The whole thing is moot as long as the cost of the device is prohibitive.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
NO you can't mail your TIVO to a friend, but the day is not too far off when you can record to your TIVO like device and save the resulting program to a removeable disk, e.g. DVD-RW, optical or dismountable hard drive.
Actually the cost of some hard drives less than about 10G is not hugely more than the cost of a video tape, and their size is smaller than the footprint of a standard video tape. With falling prices the era of tape will probably be over within 5 years.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Care to tell us the model and how much you paid for this privilege? I bet it was a wee bit expensive.
----------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
"They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity."
Yep, and look how much of an impact they've had on the HDTV market so far. Roughly nil. These people are an amateur/high-end offshoot of the exact market the poster mentioned--the pro market.
The question is will this format take over the mass market, and the answer is very accurately summed up by the 'Blockbuster factor' poster. No chance, no how, no way. How much taping does the _average_ consumer do on their VCR anymore anyways? The answer is almost none, which negates the biggest (only?) advantage of this format.
Home recording is no longer a market factor, except for camcorder owners.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Rader
In the UK you can easily pick up a 32" 16:9 set that does PAL, SECAM and NTSC, for under £600. They stock them in supermarkets -- pile 'em high brands like Bush and Wharfedale. Maybe £800 for something posh like a Sony WEGA.
I'm talking about the base models without fripperies like VGA input and surround sound (I advocate buying a seperate AV amp anyhow).
--
but mass acceptance of HDTV is as far off as mass acceptance of DVD recorders
So you mean that in 6 years everyone will only be able to buy DVD recorders? 2007 is, afterall, the last year that TV manufacturers can make non-HDTVs.
You probably did not understand my sarcasm there... Some press articles claim for Java to have failed on the propriaty thing. This is not *my* opinion, but you must admit, things are going well for Java since Sun loosened the license restrictions, before that Java struggled to become popular.
Bizar technology?
Granted, these "no record" bits might only be set on pay-per-view movies and the like, but i just bet many stations may not allow copying for many years. maybe then they will back down. This almost stinks like CPRM. they will certainly have a pay-per-play built in. Sure you can record the movie/show, but your automatically billed each time you watch it, or if you record it for a later viewing you are billied for missing it and recording. having that said it could also be setup that you may only view the recording once.
-Foxxz
because DVDs scan like CDs and let you jump to any point of the movie in an instant. D-VHS would be good for recording TV shows and alike, but not produced DVDs you can buy in a store.
--
Free Mac Mini
"
You use encryption to prevent copying, not enormous files! Put some good RSA encryption on a DVD and it would be much harder to crack.
"
You don't work for the RIAA / MPAA do you?
Sure encrypt the file as much as you like. However, if you are going to allow me to play it then you also have to give me a black box to decrypt it too which knows a decryption key.
Now you have to prevent me obtaining a decryption key / unencrypted stream from a box which contains a decryption key and the ability to generate unencrypted streams. The problem changes from
"How do I decrypt a syper well encrypted source"
to
"How do I convince my decrypter to give me an unencrypted stream" / "How do I find out what the algorithm and keys are from my decrypter"
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Psychos do not explode when the sunlight hits them, I don't care how fucked up they are.
Success of this scheme will depend on whether the mass of consumers is wants and is willing to pay for higher resolution TV. Evidence so far is no. HDTV is not selling well.
Well, I think the conclusion is more like no, not until there is more HDTV content and prices come down.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
JVC is too egotistical about this whole thing, thinking they can charge this much for the device and media, and thinking that they can force people into buying DVI HDTVs equiped with their decoder. This will bomb on the market and become a forgotten standard for home users. This will however be very useful for industry video production. I look forward to using it for this purpose.
I know you're talking about normal America, but have you seen a HDTV broadcast on an HDTV?
I don't like football, yet I watched half of a game! If they do come down in price, I find it reasonable for more normal people to realize that it is a step up...
Karnal
...I'm going to replace my DVDs with something that I have to rewind...!?
No thanks!
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
They say the tape stores uncompressed data, of which 30 mins would take up 75gb. If this is true, then the D-VHS deck needs to write about 40mb/second, and a 2h tape would hold 300gb.
Either they're full of crap, or this machine's gonna be converted into the world's cheapest, largest, fastest tape backup system yet.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
>Digital TV
.)
>is now commonplace in Europe, but it is all broadcast in PAL
>resolution -- broadcasters want to pay for as little bandwidth as
>possible and some of the small-time channels have quite visible MPEG
>artefacts as a result
Just the small time channels? I get them on CBS, one of our big
3 broadcast networks. At first I thought it was my local cable
company, but CBS seems to be the only affected channel.
I tried their digital cable, but that *was* bad everywhere. The
analog signal was actually noticably better on several channels . . .
(most notably, CBS, in which people and body parts left visible
traces. Also, the movie channels froze every couple of minutes . .
It doesn't help that they only have coax coming into the house . . .
While I'm meandering, the particularly bad CBS on digital could
be from CBS digitizing, back to analog, then to digital again???
hawk
Doesn't mean it can't be compressed. I hardly think size will deter HD-VHS pirates.
The BestBuy stores here currently have a wide screen NTSC TV set up to show off DVDs and surround sound. I don't know if the set is for sale from Best Buy, but the fact that they have one means it can be purchased somewhere.
A quick hit at Google turned up another widescreen set - the Sony KP-W41MH11 - of course at $3400 you're better off buying an HDTV widescreen. It's probably that much because it supports PAL, SECAM and NTSC.
from the sounds of it, the new vhs is still a magnetic media, subject to degredation over time.
Maybe if my CDs and DVDs weren't so scratched up, I would respect them more.
-B
> A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30
> minutes of the video, according to company
> officials, making the trading of HD content
> over the Internet impossible...
So all one yahoo has to do is to kludge together a compressor from D-VHS to MPEG/AVI/MOV/ASX and we are right back to were we started.
Admittedly, the hardware requirements would be impressive to pull it off, but one decidated person is needed to pull it off. As well, by the time this kind of stuff becomes standard, I will own a 2GHz computer with 200 GB of storage anyways.
Nothing is impossible.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
>Hey, MDs are shiny and they come in pretty colors too!
Well, not at first. When they leave med school, most still have
hair. But as it recedes, the shininess starts to show through.
Still, there are only a few colors to choose from: white, pink,
brown, black, red, and yellow . . .
Besides, my quack is a DO . . .
Then when you actually *get* a sale, you have to point out that, in order to play the new HDTV tapes, you not only need a new HDTV set, but one that supports the encryption used on the tape as for copy protection reasons it will only be decoded in authorized sets - no software or PC decoders involved.
I am sure the rush to such a device will be overwhelming....
--
-=DaveHowe=-
"It was designed from the ground up as a professional format; only after video head and other technology improved did it become viable for home users."
Betamax was introduced as a (expensive) consumer format in 1975 or so. Did BetaCam exist before this? (U-Matic did, I know, but I always thought Beta was consumer first, pro later.)
D-VHS has been around for a few years now.
Dish Network offered a combination digital satellite receiver and D-VHS recorder.
Also: D-VHS records COMPRESSED data streams. You need a separate MPEG-2 decoder (in this case, the Echostar receiver portion) to properly view the stream.
This means that all the data included in the stream get recorded. You hit "Info" on your remote and you see the Info screen pop up with the ten-word synopsis, title, and some of the actors.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Actually I think that the target market is to put movies and such on them. Too expensive? yes. Would it be incredible to see? definitly.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
You can't tape over DVD you stupid.
Recordable DVD is already a reality, and is slowly on the way to becoming a standard in the home electronics market. It offers all the benefits of VHS recording with the added plus of digital quality.
As near as I can tell, the only real benefit D-VHS offers over DVD is the higher uncompressed quality. But this is overwhelmed by the minuses: the inability to skip from section to section instantly, the incompatability with home computers, and the fragility of the tape media.
There's just not enough advantages offered by D-VHS to make it replace VHS in the consumer market, unless it becomes a LOT cheaper than two grand and fast. Recordable DVD may have three conflicting standards, but it also has about a four-year head start in the market. If D-VHS can't beat DVD-R to the level of affordability, it won't stand a chance.
hah, no kidding. i found this whole thing very humourous. it's like they've said "hey, let's overengineer the hell out of these things so that it's better than a high-end computer workstation!" that's great guys, but in five years, when this format would actually get accepted, suddenly these "enormous" files aren't going to seem so big.
but hey, i'm all for it if it enables fair use: something DVDs really don't allow.
- j
I, for one, would love to see this. Once more decks come out it'll be great for those who want high-end video in a compact package without putting up with compression.
The question that everyone is asking is, "will it fly with consumers?" My answer to that is, "how many consumers have a DAT deck sitting around in their house/car?" It's the same concept, but in the audio world. 24 bit digital audio sampled at 48k, and spat onto tape. Better than CD "quality", so good in fact, that it's often used in the recording process for commercial music (as a redundancy mechanism, to deliver masters, etc). DAT has been around for years, and by now DAT players are not that expensive. The tape winding mechanisms are far superior to cassette tape, the analog outs are better than most CD players, there are digital outs, etc. So why isn't DAT *the goods* as far as consumers are concerned?
Besides, HDTV is immaterial. As a friend of mine often gripes, "until pixels are individually addressable in the TV format, TV is always going to suck compared to watching it on your laptop".
"It will be used by broadcasters though to store material"
Don't broadcasters already have 69 digital tape formats to choose from?
"VHS" says to me that it's a consumer format. Maybe you'll see adoption from people that do home/low-scale video editing on their firewire Macs, but I don't see the real pros using this. (For example, DigitalBetaCam has 95 Mbps and is backcompatible with their existing tapes.)
I think this is another DBA (Dead Before Arrival).
Excuse me?
I couldn't beleive the lack of compression was being viewed as a positive, so I went to the story itself, and sure enough, they're actually trying to sell themselves based on inefficiency. Get with it, people; the solution to copy protection problems isn't to make the thing so ungainly that people can't use it. Storage is going to catch up with whatever size files you're talking about anyway; remember when a gig was a LOT on a local BBS? (No, they don't remember, because they've got their heads up their *sses.)
Next up: the EXTREMELY big tape player, so you can't possibly put two of them next to each other to record from one to the other. Oh, and really short wires. Whew, thought of everything...
Don't forget director and cast commentary. That is the only reason I will actually buy a super overpriced DVD at all. I won't buy one without it, not only is it cool, but it is a sign that the main people who worked on the movie actually cared about it. (Think Fight Club -> 4 commentaries!)
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
o 3.5 hrs (28.2Mbps, HD mode)
o 7 hrs (14.1Mbps, STD mode)
o 14~49 hrs (7~2Mbps, LP mode)
--Nicholas
Interesting. I wonder how cheap this will get once and if it is widely adopted. A good interface may take care of the linear access problems.
I am looking for some sort of mass storage technology, though. Movies are great, etc, but I have two hard drives at 10 GB each, and we'll be pushing 100 GB in a matter of months. I still don't have a great backup system, but something like this may work, especially at $14.95 for a blank tape. It could be an interesting bridge between broadcast and the desktop as well, if the manufacturers wanted it to be.
However, you are right. An amatuer movie maker would expect to pay $2000 - $4000 for a complete digital system, including camera, editing hardware and software, and media. This may be too big of a cost for these semi-professionals, not to mention the home user. It may help user in the era of movie being made primarily in the digital realm, rather than the celluloid realm.
-"The JVC D-VHS deck, which should be available around May, will sell for approximately $2,000, while blank media will cost between $10 and $15."
Not only that, but you must factor in the cost of HDTV which is about another $2000. Now, in my make believe world, $4000 for a VCR and TV isn't so bad, but in the REAL world, $2000 for a HDTV may not be so bad, but for a VCR it's outrageous! Then if I paid $15 for all the blank tapes I own, there's another $2000 easy!
-"(HDTV) set that protects high definition content from being copied"
Now how long before it protects ANY copyrighted things from being copied. Then every channel will claim that all their shows are copyrighted and therefor cannot be copied since they are broadcast over the digital network. So, can't record from the TV and you can buy movies for cheaper than you can buy a blank tape, so what's the point?
I think it's just stupid to come out with something geared towards a specific market (HDTV owners) when that market is so small. Wouldn't that be bad business? Or is this another one of those, "We CAN do it, but WILL we do it?" In my opinion they probably ran across the idea/technology and make a press release to see if it would be feasible and to check out public opinion. Well here's mine, "Don't bother, it'll be another Divx Player, neat concept, but a flop."
In 3 or 4 years, I can see the digital TV market growing rapidly in which case something like this would be a better idea (not really a good idea mind you). Work out the bugs, get us 8hrs on a 4hr tape. Now, I remember 3 years ago when 1.2gig was standard in computers, now we have 24gig standard and we went from PII 266mhz to P4 1.5ghz. So, let's do the math. In 3 years we have 20 times the storage capacity standard, so in another 3 years we'll have 480gigs standard in our 8.4ghz machines. Now, if a 75gig drive will hold 30min we can have 190min of this uncompressed on our drives. But that of course doesn't take in account any other technological breakthroughs that might happen.
Companies these days really need to think a bit, "should we" needs to go along with "could we". (Jurassic Park Syndrome - We can, therefore we will... And make a stupid investment)
I see one viable use for this technology, digital video editing. They will have the money, HD capacity, and the need for something like this. But even for them, is it usable? Can you record that media onto a tape for distributing? How do you send a 1min commercial that is 2.5gig to get it run on TV?
Pretty much kills the video editing process used by most professionals.
For instance, I helped to develop the CueCat, the Sony Betamax, the Yugo, MS Bob and numerous other blue ribbon products.
All kidding aside, you can't scorn the Betamax. It was, and arguably still is, leaps and bounds ahead of VHS.
Remember, Sony failed only because their license fees for the technology were so expensive. The reason? The MPAA sued Sony over the VCR and how it would cut into movie royalties. Sony was therefore at a disadvantage, trying to finance both their lawsuit and a possible verdict against them with the royalties on Beta VCRs.
JVC came in with VHS in 1977, which was a cheapo rip-off of Beta that was just different enough to not infringe on any of Sony's patents. The MPAA lawsuit was won by Sony, but the battle for the shelf under peoples' TV sets was won by VHS.
Betamax is simply a 1/2" version of Sony's legendary 3/4" U-Matic format. U-Matic was designed as an industrial format for TV stations and the like. To this day, if you have a 3/4" U-Matic videocassette, I'd be surprised if there are many TV stations in the world that couldn't play it.
Factoid: "Beta" means "closer" in Japanese; Beta VCRs were so-named because the video tracks laid down by the rotating head assembly were closer than those of the bigger and older U-Matic predecessor.
U-Matic was eventually replaced by Betacam, which is a Betamax VCR mechanism that runs the tape a lot faster for better picture quality. Betacam and Betacam SP have been *the format* for TV stations, ENG cameras, editing, etc. Finally, the torch has now mostly been passed to the D-Betacam, a digital version of the venerable Betacam which shares its heritage with the home Betamax and the U-Matic before.
And, of course, before those, was the Sony AV-3600 and other open-reel 1/2" VTRs. (I'm the proud owner of a 1975 AV-3600. Razor-sharp picture, though the AV-3600 was a low-end black-and-white model.)
Most importantly, though, if you're upset by the impotent plastic noises that your $200-at-Fry's VCR makes, you can take a look at how Ed Cushman watches TV. Sadly, I don't think you can rent a Quadruplex videotape at Blockbuster. (As recently as 1988, when I was in high school and volunteering at a low-budget community TV station, we had a Quad. It was loads of fun.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My guess is that D-VHS won't take hold in the consumer arena. It's more fragile than DVD, less portable, and (it seems) less capable of extras like multiple audio tracks or subtitles. Where I think it will take hold, however, is quite possibly the last place the corporations want it: anime fansubbing.
Think about it. Currently, most fansubbers print their master tapes to S-VHS, because of the better quality. If D-VHS has even better quality than DVD but costs less (and this will certainly cost less than mastering to DVD), then it's an ideal format for making masters. From there, very high-quality copies can be made to VHS, making for better copies for the fans, and D-VHS copies can be made with no degradation for distributors.
Rather ironic, isn't it? The corporations are trying to stop fair-use copying, but in the process they're only making the job easier for fansubbers (which are only arguably legal anyway).
Note that I'm not trying to knock fansubbers. I have fansubs myself, and I support their cause. Even most corporations see them as a double-edged sword (though generally beneficial, which is why they are tolerated as long as they don't actually infringe on a corporation's turf). But still, this seems very ironic somehow.
----------
Dude, have you seen the prices on an HDTV?
:-)
I was at Best Buy yesterday, and for one large HDTV, I could buy several large regular TVs.
Hell, they knocked 33% off a floor model projection tv, and some guy was still trying to justify buying it. He was trying really hard though.
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Well, until someone rips the content with an efficient codec and ups it as SuperVCD or similar. Nice try, 10 years too late.
It's amazing and dangerous how often the computer community is underestimated, isn't it? You'd think that the big media producers would have learned after the MP3.
Ten years from now when gigabit ethernet represents a *slow* home Internet connection and fiber is the norm, and we're all sitting around with (...calculating based on Moore's Law...urk!) 96GHz AMD ThunderChickens, and this silly D-VHS is embraced by the consumer, it'll be interesting to see just how easily the uncompressed video *is* traded on the Internet.
Then again, you can't up video standards the way you can up processing power... Let's see, if it takes my PII-266 ten minutes to compress all of the 17-minute-long Donna Summers Macarthur Park Suite into a 256kbps MP3, how long will it take for the 96GHz ThunderChicken, even burdened down with Windows 2010 Amateur, to make a DivX?
As things are, making a DivX of a 320x240x15fps AVI file only takes about 2x the AVI's playing time.
Hollywood is naive. Or they've hopelessly forgotten the computers of 10 years ago. Or those of 10 years before that.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
well that would assume two tape drives. which of course is also possible. i agree. this could be good. we just have to figure out how to keep vapster from getting sued.
I was at the CES. There were lots of DVD recorders, including some for HD. Only JVC supports the D-VHS format. Writeable DVD is already available (though in 4 different formats DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW & DVD-RAM). Everyone was showing these.
HD DVD was a bit rarer. Pioneer had a prototype machine running DVR-Blue which used a blue laser to fit 22.x GB of storage on a disc, enough to hold ~2 hours of 1080 video. I don't which writeable technology will win out in the long run, but whatever it is, it is going to put the VCR to bed in the long run.
The more likely competition will be with DVR (Tivo/ReplayTV).
A Sony rep told me at one time that HDTV prices will be dropping dramatically for the next few years. This is due to the fact that the FCC is making all aired channels HDTV compliant in 2006. This means that we will all have to have HDTV or an analog converter for our TVs.
Just think what you`re missing out on.
*DVD artifacts (i can see them, even if you can`t)
*Behind the scenes exclusive info on those tricky camera angles and special effects in films such as Diva, La Haine, Naked, Blue Velvet etc.
*Proven cd-quality storage (all of mine are still perfect, even the ones i bought 10 years ago and lent people. No holes, jumps, jittering, disks that refuse to play etc)
*Hunting around for the correct region!
*Cheapness (why pay £7 to see a movie on a huge screen when you can pay £20 for a dvd)
*Inability to record anything.
*Looking for firmware upgrades when Gladiator (or whatever) doesnt work on your system.
DVD. Its really quite good.
Ye-ah. After all, no one would consider compressing the content or anything. Look at all those
I can't speak for the average consumer, of course, but I'm not going back to tape. I've spent a great deal of time and effort setting up my system to record programs on hard disks and to archive old tapes on CDs. I'm not going to lay down more cash for a medium as degradable as tape is.
This sounds very familiar to Digital Audio Tapes which came out soon after Audio CDs became very popular. Many people thought because of their ability to record audio with digital quality they would replace CDs. At that time CD burners weren't really available. However the cost of DAT and DAT players and the lack of other features like being able to jump from track to track easily really put them at a disadvantage. I think the D-VHS will probably experience the same problems.
I swear PowerPoint is going to be the downfall of higher education in western society.
More info on this video recorder : HM-DH3000 has an mpeg encoder built-in and can record 24 hours of standard vhs, 8 hours of digital regular video and 4 hours of digital hdtv
Tape media degrades more than optical media
over time. Tapes stretch, they're more susceptible
to magnetic fields and degradation...in other
words, they age poorly.
If this technology had come out about 10 years ago
it may have had a shot, but with what
consumers have now I doubt this is going to
have much impact on the marketplace.
What's next? The DVD-LP?
Where's the beef?
2.5 GB/min / 60 sec/min = 0.0416 GB / sec
which comes out to 41.66 MB / sec for the minimum transfer rate for the D-VHS to send uncompressed signal to the TV. I dont think any TV nowadays even gets the raw uncompressed video sent to it (maybe HDTV). Its more likely that the D-VHS unit will only send out a video signal in form of S video cable or something we can use on our abundent NTSC/PAL tvs...... that speed seems achievable with current hardware. Still, a tape drive as fast as my HD in linear mode seems interesting for data backup and retrieval..
Geez, I hope this flops. If it doesn't, I've got about 120 DVD's that I'll be boxing up in the basement with my 8-tracks. :-)
The article and the JVC spokesman say some things about compression that just don't make sense.
Uncompressed HD is approximately 1.5 Mbps. Tapes that record uncompressed HD are large (think 2" tape in a 12 or 15" diameter tape pack) and record 15 - 30 minutes. The recorders for these are made by Sony, and cost well upwards of $100K. The tapes cost upwards of $1000. Recording just the active picture (the part that shows up on your screen) takes around 450 GB/hour. People in HD post-production do this today.
The D-VHS deck I've seen records the ATSC-encoded digital broadcast signal, at 19.4 Mbps. This is way compressed, and works out to 8.7 GB/H. You use an ordinary (high-quality) VHS casette in the deck.
VHS has about the bandwidth of an NTSC broadcast video signal. The ATSC (HD) signal is designed to fit into the same broadcast spectrum as an NTSC signal. So lo and behold, it isn't too hard to get it to go onto the same piece of tape.
Given the errors in the basics, I wouldn't read too much into their description of the copy-protection scheme.
for about two weeks. It finally turned out that we could only get the second satellite with the "local" channels (which don't come in at all over broadcast) when the wind blew *hard* to the east, pushing a tree out of the way.
Nonetheless, the picture was *much* better than anything I'd seen before--but then again, I have a funky 700 line, almost 40" television . . .
JVC is actually making a good bet. The way the market is going it's obvious that firewire will be the only transport any HD digital recording device will use or be allowed to use. With firewire content producers will be able to flag programs that cannot be recorded at all. Hence, the end of comsumer time shifting. And since we have the DMCA, there isn't anything we can do about this. Any attempt to remove the "do not record" flag from the encrypted stream will be a violation.
Last year Panasonic released a non-firewire HD recording product. (PV-HD1000) It was very aburptly pulled from the market. Many people think the reason was based solely on presures from the MPAA. The Panasonic product would record anything you wanted.
If you were actually at the show JVC was boasting how they had support for HDCP from all the major movie companies. Fox even said they would use HDCP for OTA movies.
The real this at issue is twofold. One, HDCP is totally dependant on Firewire interconnects and some decoder ring from Intel. No current HDTV display has said decoder, and very few displays have the ability to be upgraded. Two, your ability to record programs in HD and watch them at a later date never going to see the light of day.
does this seem odd to anyone else, they make a big deal about it being 'uncompressed' so it wont be as easy to trade over the net' but I have never seen the .vobs from dvd being traded or any raw format ( with the exception of vcd's) its always encoded by the person who rips it to mpeg, divx, svcd or what ever your choice of codec's is. I understand the problems posed by the chips only being in the hdtv's but what stops some one from removeing the chip and figuring out how to decode and then its just a repeat of the decss incedent. if hollywood wants to win this they need to get there shit together, till then I have no problem getting my movies for free:)
Assuming, of course, the studios' other bright idea--copy-protecting broadcast TV programs--doesn't also go through.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
And S-VHS came out waaaay before DVDs. Better resolution does not automatically gurantee a take over ov the market.
SVHS is just an incremental improvement over VHS, with almost a doubling of cost of both media and machines. It didn't look new and fancy or high-tech when it came out, so the "first-one-on-the-block" syndrome didn't sell them. Aside from the little "S" silkscreened to the front of the tape door, you'd never know it was a $600 VCR, not a $300 VCR.
Let's face it, VHS is only popular because the proles are cheap.
SVHS doubles the price of the VCR for a machine that still doesn't have the picture quality of a Beta VCR, which was only marginally more expensive for the same features at the time of the VHS/Beta wars.
So, I propose that if Beta was doomed to failure, SVHS doubly so. The only reason it's still around at all is because of a few purists who resent VHS but still need compatibility with it. (Much like I resent Windows, but I still need to know and use it.)
Look at Beta, CED Laserdiscs (aka needlevision),CED video discs were a joke... :) Imagine a record player that plays back video. The discs only lasted about 20 plays! LaserDisc was so much ahead of that, with better picture quality and (aside from handling) no media wear.
After CED died, someone gave me a Toshiba CED machine to play with. I never had any discs for it, but I'll tell you, the stylus was scary.
The Neo-Geo, The Commodore Plus4, The Atari Lynx, etc.Yeah, but you could go even further back than that. How about the 16-bit TI-99/4A computer - with the same TMS9900 CPU as a Patriot guided missile - losing the home computer war to the lowly VIC-20 with its nasty optional serial disk drive interface? (Although TI's marketing department never talked about what was under the hood and therefore made a mistake themselves, consumers should research before buying!)
Consumers are stupid.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You are dead on with your "Blockbuster factor". The problem in this particular case is that Blockbuster is already wasting expensive floor space to have DVD copies of movies they already have on VHS. Then you have more complicated buying and inventory to increase overhead. They do it because people want DVD quality movies and Viacom is a big part of The Man that wants everything to go the way of DVDs. There is no way they're going to waste even MORE shelf space with a third format.
-B
That only works if consumers don't have any way to watch the movies. If you want the consumers to be able to watch the movies, then you are going to have to sell them DVD players. And the DVD player is going to have the key. Thus, the consumer has the key, and the encryption accomplishes little.
Copy protected movies are impossible, because ultimately, there has to be a way for the user to watch the unencrypted plaintext.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
you do realize that video doesn't compress well (nearly zero as it turns out) with normal lossless compression. That's the whole point og mpeg -- it's a lossy compression scheme that can compress the nearly random (in the digital domain) bits of video.
Hmm. That explains why I haven't seen it then. Wonder why they did that? What a pain in the ass.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
2.) 2000 bucks for the thing? The mainstream market isn't going to pay for that.
3.) Just because the format is uncompressed doesn't mean it won't be used. All we have to do is come up with some compression scheme, think DIVX;). This does NOT pose a threat.
4.) It's tape, right? So it's not digital! No random access, none of those little extras that DVD has that are available right at your fingertips instantly.
5.) EVEN if this thing does by some miracle catch on, if it's analog, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to rig two of these suckers up together and just copy tape to tape. Kinda defeats the uncompression-is-protection thing.
6.) I can't see why the average Joe Consumer would be enamored enough to go back to tape with nice, shiny, digital, compact DVD already here and in full swing. What I can't see to an even higher degree is the average Joe Consumer spending 2 grand on it.
I think this is another DBA (Dead Before Arrival).
The story of the DAT is a little bit different.
When the first DAT recorder came out, the only copy protection system they had was a sample frequency lock (it was not possible to record directly from the digital input 44100hz sampled signals while it was ok with 48khz). It didn't seems to be enough for the music editors and most of them (included Polygram owned at the moment by Philips) did everything they can to prevent DAT recorders to hit the consumer market.
Finally they (the editors and the manufacturers) agreed on the final system which prevent making digital copy from a digital copy. But it had been years between the first DAT presentation and this agreement.
So when the DAT was finaly ready to hit the consumer market other products really cheaper like the DCC and the MD were ready to compete. I guess that's why most manufacturers stop making DAT recorders since they are more complex to do than the fixed heads DCC or the MD.
When did DVDs ever cost $2000? Even when they first came out, the high end ones cost about $1000.
I like how the article says that the "new macrovison" will prevent copying because only digital tvs will have the decoder and not PC's DVI ports or other D-VHS decks.
First off, how long tell some company buys a DTV, removes the decoder, figures out how to make another and starts sticking decoders in little external boxes you can plug between the decks?
Or, how long till someone writes code for the PC's to decode the data on the DVI port?
I don't think these companies get it...
VANBO
Minidisc comes in two flavors now; An audio/data minidisc with a capacity of 120MB, and a video minidisc with a capacity of 650MB. The video minidisc, as far as I know, is used for nothing other than Sony camcorders, though I would certainly like to see a scsi, ide, usb, and firewire-connectable (different versions are okay) removable media drive using them.
Minidisc is read (and written) magnetically; Writing can only occur when the disc is heated to the Curie point with a laser (the only thing low-power enough for use in a portable device capable of heating up the precise spot on the disc to the proper level.)
Memory stick only comes in capacities up to 256MB, and only up to 128MB anywhere that isn't Japan. I could only find a 64MB memory stick (doing a rapid search) available on Circuit Shitty's webpage; They want $159.99 for one stupid MagicGate Memory Stick in the 64MB range. You can actually buy a Sharp MDSR60S player/recorder from CC for $199.99! And finally, a 5-pack of 80 minute minidiscs (which must be slightly over 120MB, since a 74 minute MD is 120MB, IIRC) is $11.99. Cheap off-brand? Nope. It's Memorex (Apparently, it's not Live.) A Memorex 20 pack (74 minute) is $34.99. A ten-pack is $19.99, a 5-pack of 74 minute is $9.99.
Two bucks for a minidisc which holds about the same amount of music (given a reasonable level of quality) as a 64MB Memory Stick which costs $159.99... Well, I know which one I'd choose. The memory stick is 80 times more expensive, and not 80 times more convenient (though it IS dramatically more convenient, not THAT dramatically.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And the studios will listen. Look at how successful we were with our letter-writing campaign to get Princess Mononoke released with the original Japanese audio track intact.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
D-VHS records hi-resolution HDTV material. DVD plays back (at least for now) low-resolution movies on an ancient NTSC/PAL-standard TV-set.
So how can you compare them? You can't. DVD is a great way of distributing movies and probably recording also in the near future.
But when the HDTV really appears, people are going to suddenly realize that the low resolution of their DVDs doesn't make justice to their new hires TV-sets.
Then what? Movie companies are going to sell us their old movies once again in a better format (probably not D-VHS, though) at a somewhat higher price. Just like they did when the VHS->DVD transition took place.
Of course, we here in Europe don't have to "worry" about consequences of HDTV anytime soon. If ever.
Janne
Speaking of image compression, particularly of video, the beta of Microsoft Media Player is achieving some phenomenal results. They're managing to get what they call 'near-DVD' quality in 750kbps. I took a look and it has a few just-barely-noticeable pauses (which could be my computer and not the compression for all I know). The image quality is truely amazing. They're also getting some watchable video (quality isn't any worse than my EP VHS playback) in a 250kbps stream. Encoding with these would mean an hour of near-DVD would fit in 338 MB, and the VHS-quality would cram an hour into a third of that. I can see why Hollywood is petrified that people are going to start trading movies like MP3s. There are some demos here.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Like a friend of mine said, there's something inherently attractive to humans about the 6" disc format. People like the CD: It's shiny, it's round and it's flat. Who wants a boring, boxy VHS tape when you can have shiny, happy DVDs that double as art? :-)
Im Sorry but we do not need HDTV, Anyone that has to get a crisper image needs to get there eyes checked or a new TV.
GPF : The program Win.exe has caused an erorr in
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It seems obvious that the various studios who've signed on with JVC must be smoking some good stuff. Probably leftovers from the stash they were taking large tokes from when they decided that DIVX was the way to go. They're living in a dreamworld, and sooner or they'll get a rude awakening when the consumers bypass their little dream scheme in droves.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
How did Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario?
Gee, there are sure a lot of elite hacker babies here.
Rather than waiting for JVC to actually finish this thing so ya'll can engage in more alpha geek breastbeating, I have a modest proposal.
Hack the system not the product.
Contact JVC.
Be polite.
Ask them how many units they will sell, and how much of their profit is based on sales of blank tapes.
Tell them that you personally will not buy a system that places any restrictions on your ability to use it in any way you want. Then tell them you are not going to deprive copyright holders of compensation for their work, but that you will not be deprived of your fair use rights.
Remind them that (for example) the hardware companies are pulling out of SDMI because they recognize that restricting the ability of the consumer to use their product is actually harming their sales.
Ask them how many cameras capable of recording in this format they could sell if it could be easily edited on a PC based system.
And of course, how many more blank tapes for those cameras
Here are some contact points from JVC's website.
Unfortunately marketingdroidsneedingclues@jvc.com is not one of them
Customer Relations 1-800-252-5722 (call on their nickel)
webmaster@jvc.com
media@jvc.com
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
neither's digital
Either could be. Digital Betacam has been around for years; D-VHS is apparently in the works.
they're fixed formatPhysically, yes. Electronically, no. SVHS, for example, will not play in a VHS VCR, though a VHS cassette will play in an SVHS VCR.
Lots of things use VCR mechanisms and tape for things other than TV pictures. I have a JVC SVHS machine right beside me that uses off-the-shelf SVHS cassettes to save PPI radar video. That's not even raster scanned!
Lemme tell you, those cassettes look really funny when you pop them into a regular SVHS VCR. :)
they're crappy CGA grade resolutionD-VHS wouldn't be. And Sony's got an HDTV version of Digital Betacam.
they're not random access, they're tape for yog's sake!Yup. That's right. The technology is mature, so at least you know that the video collection that you have in the archives at your TV station will probably still play 30 years from now. It'll be interesting to see how well optical discs stand the test of time, with all the comments about CD-R/RW lifespans, not to mention the ?possibly? urban legends about the aluminum coating inside CDs corroding in time through the edges of the disc.
What'll happen? Maybe something bad, maybe something good. I have videotape that is over 30 years old, and I'm not a TV station. It's important.
Tape isn't perfect. It's still a pain in the ass waiting for it to wind to the right place, but at least the media is mature.
The videotape that new parents take of their baby will still probably work 30 years from now. Hell, some 50 year old tape still works, and it was a lot more primitive then than it is now; it's likely that most of today's tape recordings, if stored properly, will still work in 2051. It's still unknown how well that CD/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RAM will survive the years...
Neither is interactive, not even freakin' hyperlinksNah. I wouldn't want Jerry Springer to be interactive, would you? If I wanted interactive, I'd sit down at my computer. If I wanted to just veg out after a long day, I'll turn on the TV, maybe pop a movie into the VCR. Or a DVD into the player. Ask me when the last time was that I checked out the Director's Comments or Play Hangman with the Letters in the Names of the Cast or some other crap like that... I know my DVD player supports them, but I've never used them.
(most of the above also go for current TV standards, NTSC/PAL/SECAM)I agree with you exclusively on the resolution of NTSC/PAL/SECAM. But TV has been such a successful innovation that I question whether any improvements besides faster/cheaper/better can actually take over?
Faster: No waiting though commercials, that's what the fast forward button is for.
Cheaper: Well? I remember when a color TV started at over $500. Now, I see them for under $100.
Better: Color, stereo, HDTV, Closed Captioning, wireless remote control, more channels.
Interactive alters the formula. Will it ever *really* take off? If it's incorporated into TV sets, will it go the way of the VCR timers where most people can't even figure out how to set the clock?
Having said *all that*, for most consumers, yeah, recordable DVDs are probably the way to go. It would be what I would get for my daily time-shifting and movie rental use. But it's not anywhere near so clear cut as you apparently feel.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If 75GB = 30 mins then 4 hours = 600GB. Thats a chunk of storage space. It may not have quick access times, but if D-VHS can be hacked to store data it could be a great backup solution.
We have the best government that money can buy.
I'm under the impression that much like laserdisc this will be a fad for the extremely rich and die out before anything really comes from it. I think DVD will be around for a while just because of the multiple hardware platforms that there are out there.
"The point is, however, that the cirumstances are different here. On CD's yes it can be said to be a ploy to get people to convert as it cost the artists money to put those extras out. If the extras on DVDs are a ploy, I dont't think they will go away for similar reasons. It won't cost the performers anymore to put things on the disk. "
It does cost the studios money to put those extras on. It adds time to the authoring and testing processes. For something like Titanic, that might just be a very small percentage of the total cost. I can't see that the studios will want to keep paying those costs once they don't need to provide an incentive for DVD. For the DVD-ROM extras that really push technology, I would imagine that the costs are even higher: there are so many versions of Windows, Internet Explorer and DVD Navigators/Decoders, testing and support will take a lot of time.
here is the US version of the D-VHS MPEG2 VCR (already for sale)
http://www.jvc.com/subprod.jsp?modelId=MODL022205
While it may allow us to do something we couldn't do before, it's also a step in preventing us from doing things that we could do before. For me, the tradeoff is definitely not worth the price.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
They cite the large uncompressed format as a deterrent against Internet copying. Are they completely naive?
People don't copy DVD data directly over the Internet. First it's ripped from DVD to disk. Then the raw data is compressed to MPEG4 and MP3, resulting in approximately 600megabytes of data.
At no point is the 9gigabytes or so of DVD data sent over the Internet.
So what does D-VHS buy you? People will get the raw data onto their hard disks even if they have to resort to framegrabbers. Then the compressed 600megabytes image is created just as before.
The D-VHS marketting department must have been really struggling for something good to say, if this is the best they can come up with.
Because I finally bought a player :(
My other sig is extremely clever...
My submissions are like Kenny.. they get killed, but come back somehow!
2001-01-08 21:47:37 JVC's Digital VHS - An answer to DVD piracy? (articles,news) (rejected)
Is it just me or does anyone else think it's really strange to take an MPEG signal (like the one sent to HDTVs) decompress it and THEN store it on tape? What happened to the digital VCRS (that were designed for DSS) that just took the ALREADY compressed data and stored it. HD-Digital VCRs don't need to be decoders, that hardware is already built in to the TV set. The vcr just has to be a big bit-bucket. Just take the signal as it comes in and drop it onto the tape. Then during play back, you read it from the tape and send it to the TV that decodes it as if it were coming off the air. Think of how many more sitcoms you could cram on that 4 hour tape if you didn't decompress the data first.
i love this sig. it's so entertaining to see responses from people who think they're being clever, when really they just missed the joke.
- j
Sony's new Wega TVs have a special 16:9 enhanced mode in which the screen is compressed vertically, giving a 16:9 display without the usual loss of resolution experienced when showing a 16:9 widescreen movie on a 4:3 television. You just lose a bit of screen size. With an anamorphic DVD the effect is great. These televisions also are relatively inexpensive compared with a HDTV set. The 29" which I just purchased was under $600, and 35" sets can be had for about $1200.
Of course nobody needs one. Nobody needs a small TV either, nor a big monitor, 1GHz CPU, 80GB HDD, fast car or hey, a nice hairdo.
But some of us enjoy watching movies in really high quality on really big screens with really big (yes) sound.
--
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
So they believe that because the format does not utilize compression, it cannot be compressed for transmission using some 3rd party compression?
TV, Color TV, VHS, compact discs, and many of the other modern improvements we use today could only wish to have been so "bogged down"!
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The thing that I don't understand is they we are supposed to be talking about uncompressed HDTV resolution video. Now by my calculations 1280*1080 pixels at 30fps is only 42MB/sec if you use can encode with 1 byte per pixel! Thus even their 'uncompressed' video must be compressed a little.
This leads me to think that it might be compressed more than they are saying on the actual tape, but uncompressed by the drive on playback. Even so 42MB/sec is one hell of a bandwidth requirement.
Mark..........
--
If the world were an oyster, it would be mine.......
Nobody I know has an HDTV set. They're all perfectly happy to play their DVDs on their current sets -- the benefits of no rewind, no degradation, better sound, space savings and so on are enough to sell DVD players.
Your conclusion is correct: DVD is going to win, but not in spite of itself as you seem to suggest. It's going to win because it is already in a solid position to become the de-facto video standard of the next decade or so. D-VHS not only requires HDTV, but requires (if I read correctly) a special type of HDTV which is even more expensive than the already expensive standard HDTV set.
D-VHS is simply too late, whether technically better or not.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Success of this scheme will depend on whether the mass of consumers is wants and is willing to pay for higher resolution TV. Evidence so far is no. HDTV is not selling well.
NTSC/PAL may well suck, but its enough to get the story across and that's what most people care for. The impact of special-effects and sweeping vistas is mostly related to image viewer angle, not image resolution. Big screen TVs (which are popular) take care of this.
On the question of tape versus disk, the big advantage of disk is random access. It's of little value in video entertainment which is mostly watched serially with very few jumps.
I remeber when CD players came out, every9one i knew that had one wanted to show me just how cool the damned discs looked, even before demonstrating the sound quality. I know several people who use junk CDs as decorations. oh, and my brother recently got a Sony DVD player. the feature that finally tipped the scales in favor of the Sony model was the cool blue LED indicator on the front, which was also the first feature he pointed out when showing off the unit. (huh huh, I said unit...) never underestimate the power of shiny things und blinkenlights.
.^
^.
( @ )
Soylent Foods, Inc.
They were marketed in europe (belgium at least) AFTER the CD was and as a consumer product. That's what I am going by... it failed of course.
Care to tell us the model and how much you paid for this privilege? I bet it was a wee bit expensive.
Pick up an old Sony VPH-1030 or similar, maybe a Zenith Aquastar. If you have a budget to blow and need VGA resolution, look into a Sony VPH-1270 or similiar.
All of these are three-tube machines, so they're not very portable. But the picture quality of them exceeds a lot of LCD projectors, assuming that your tubes are still good and you know how to set the convergence properly.
Don't look at one that used to be in a bar or was owned by an audio-visual rental company. Both are likely to have a lot of hours and probably even some mechanical damage. Look around for one that is being displaced by a boardroom renovation.
I once found a VPH-1041 that had come out of a boardroom. When it was installed in 1991, it was top of the line. Eventually, it was replaced with a later model that could handle SVGA. The story behind it was that one of the managers of the company wanted to take it home, so he fired it up with it pointing at a wall, and assumed it was broken. (It wasn't aligned; these need to be aligned every time they're moved.)
Since I used to work for an audio-visual company and was even trained on these things by Sony of Canada, I knew it was a good deal and was able to pick up the "broken" video projector for $100. I set it up in my living room, aligned and re-shimmed the lenses for the wall, reversed the deflection (it had been set up for rear-projection), and then did the convergence. It was low hours and would light up my wall from floor to ceiling almost as bright as a movie theater. Eventually, I sold it to a friend of mine for $1200, including installation at his house.
Quick trick: If you're pointing a video projector at your wall and are looking for a little bit more brightness, get some brush-on clearcoat paint. Go to an abrasives supply company and get some fine (about 0.050") glass bead sandblasting media. Mix that with the clearcoat, and roller it onto your wall. It gives the wall almost the same texture as a proper reflective projection screen.
If you know where to look, you don't really need to spend much.
As for the conversation about resolution, yeah, NTSC's 525 scanning lines really start to look far apart when they're spread out across the 10' height of your living room wall.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Just compress to MPEG-2 as you capture it then DivX it, modern processors can do realtime MPEG-2 compression and most people have enough hard drive space to hold a MPEG-2 video temporarily until they can DivX it and burn it to CD.
-Rewinding
-Bigger physically (goodbye DVD shelf, hello cassette bookcase)
-Magnetic tape (now there's something that doesent degrade over time
-More expensive to manufacture
-It has to break into a format saturated market
-It's an uncompressed format, but that doesen't stop me from transferring it to a more compressed format (ANY digital media can be duplicated, this is reality after all)
-No "Special Features" like chapter lists, menus, extras (well, they could be at the beginning or end, and we all love fast forewarding through Georgie Lucas' little preamble on Star Wars don't we)
I'm sure there are a host more (dis)advantages to having digital tapes, but these ones stand out for me right now.
"Screw everything! I'm going back to BetaMax!"
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
People like shiny things. That's why DVDs and CDs took off, while MDs have struggled and tapes (both VHS and audio) have all but disappeared for mainstream consumer use. Unless your media is shiny, don't expect it to succeed.
We've had a Panasonic D-VHS recorder in my office (in Los Angeles) for at least that long. It uses MPEG2 compression, similar to DVD-video and has IEEE 1394 ports, in addition to analog connectors. I doubt that JVC's model is "uncompressed," though it is possible that they have a higher bit-rate these days. Here's a July 1999 release about Panasonic selling D-VHS tapes for their deck:
http://www.users.freenetname.co.uk/~mcfc/100031.ht m
A Japanese deck from last year (in Japanese):
http://www.elint.co.jp/pana/new/0011/nvdh1/index.h tml
If these tapes are cheap and can be used for data, they might just find a market.
I can't see them taking off for video, though. Analogue VHS is good enough for temporary recordings and recordable DVD isn't looking to be too far away from being affordable.
That doesn't matter too much...
It's still digital. A 'weak' 0 is still a 0, and a 'weak' 1 is still a 1. But a blanked out area will probably cause pops-n-gaps... and let's not even talk about how screwed up it'll get if the tape gets eaten by the read heads.
VHS is obsolete. They need to get over it.
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
They would have to be crazy not to nerf this for home use and target it at professional and prosumer videography use.
Now this is a comment I agree with. A 600GB tape drive for $2000 is nothing to laugh at(unless you market it to store uncompressed HDTV for the home market). It sure doesn't make much sense to use it for home video, but I could really use it to back up my home network! I can't think of the last time I've completely backed up the network of computers sitting at home. I mean a few files here and there are saved to CDR, but in the event of a major disk crash I still have to reinstall a ton of software to get the particular box up and running. Check out the prices your average Quantum DLT, IBM Magstar, or 9840 go for before you laugh off the possibilities of D-VHS.
Unfortunately (or not), D-VHS will become popular because of the familiarity of the VHS standard.
Even though the two formats are barely related, the average consumer will relate to that instantly, "...er, so it's like VHS but with a D, digital then?", whereas many consumers still say "DVD, thats mini laserdisc innit?"
The Master Of Muppets,
CAPTAIN: TAKE OFF EVERY "SIG"!!
ok, maybe that's 2 words
Folks,
I really doubt that Digital VHS will replace DVD.
There are two reasons for this:
1. The combination of continiuing price drops on hard drives and new video compression techniques based on MPEG-4 technology will make is possible to have within 24 months TiVo/ReplayTV/UltimateTV units that record 1080i HDTV signals with almost NO loss of picture quality up to 25-30 hours at a time.
2. A new technique developed a few years ago allows for variable-depth "pits" on optical discs. This could result in DVD-like discs that store over 70 GB per disc, more than enough to have 1080i HDTV movies stored on a single disc.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
You use encryption to prevent copying, not enormous files! Put some good RSA encryption on a DVD and it would be much harder to crack.
The link in the post erroneously points to CES International, a company that provides B2B ORM solutions. The correct CES URL.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
All I Want is Widescreen Movies [...] At home. Widescreen displays are hugely priced here.
... and I assume this is the reason why so many "widescreen edition" DVDs are still produced in non-anamorphic widescreen. This is unforgiveable. NTSC has few enough lines already, and letterboxing on the media wastes them even further.
Newer 4:3 TVs can do 16:9 pictures (squeezing all the lines into less of the screen) and even the lowliest DVD player can do its own letterboxing if need be, so there is *no* reason for studios to keep releasing these shoddy non-anamorphic goods.
--
"Everybody Loves Raymond"? What's that, ESR's autobiography?
This version is slightly different, the key differences are that this isn't compressed, that version was. That version was only for Mpeg2, This is HDTV. also, this has protection similar to CSS, and a Macrovision veriant while the other didn't with the exception of needing a dish network receiver. Also, If I wasnt mistaken, it would only record two hours of video, while this version will do 4.
> OT, but why didn't you prune the tree?
:)
:)
Uh, this is west-central Pennsylvania. It's not my tree
It's not even on my street--it's in the lot behind the house across
from me, and it's 75-100 feet tall . . . and the ground is 30-50 feet
higher than me
I sunk a 12' 4x4 at the edge of my lot, mounted the dish at the
top, and *still* couldn't clear it. I tried out my attic, but couldn't
get a clear site from there, either. Next summer, when the tree is full
again, I'll let their professional installation folks try . . .
*I'm* not going to try to mount it on the chimney with a sloped roof . . .
>Getting back on topic, the problems you were having wern't your
>satellite system's fault. At the microwave frequancies used, the
>leaves on your tree where acting like miniture reflectors, scattering
>and disrupting the signal. Mircowave systems need a clear
>line-of-sight between the transmitting and recieving stations.
Oh, I don't blame them. But barring that tree being struck
by lightning, I'm not going to get a clear line of site at
30 degrees off the horizon . . .
"A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..."
Ahhmmm... HDTV over the air broadcasts MAX out at 19.2Mbit/sec.. or 2.4MByte/sec.
That works out to 8.6 Hours of recording time for a 75GByte hard disk. They must have some really dumb company officials, or are lying thru their teeth!! I.E. Don't buy their products.
B.T.W. HDTV uses Mpeg-2 encoding, switch to Mpeg-4 you get four times more recording time.
...but I personally feel that the disc format is a force to be reckoned with. D-VHS might hold a lot more in terms of video, but for ease of use I think the DVD would still win. Going back to tape you'd deal with rewinding and fast-forwarding to find your favorite scenes, and I didn't see anything mentioned about special features on those tapes. I for one like the extras on DVDs, and I don't think people are going to give that up.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The COBOL Warrior
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The COBOL Warrior
"COBOL's Not dead, it's just underground"
The story is no more accurate on the technical matters than
the typical press releases about DVD.
D-VHS has been around for a couple years. It stores a digital
data stream on an S-VHS tape. Whether the data is compressed
is irrelevant. The four hours of HD video per tape is for the
MPEG-2 compressed stream.
D-VHS was pulled from the market about a year ago, pending
completion of a copy-protection system similar in spirit to
CSS. The reason for pulling it was not that the old decks
would copy anything, but rather that they would not be able to
play future pre-recorded tapes, since they lack the decryption
system.
The talk about uncompressed data probably refers to picking up
the decoded stream on the way to the display unit.
10GB drives are about 70 UK pounds, but I suspect you'll pay $70 in the US, which coincidentally is about 30x2.49 :-) !!
I was using some poetic license, but AFAIK noone buys a 10GB drive nowadays, so the bottom should fall out of the prices any time now, as it has done with smaller drives, where you have to go to a secondhand store to find them....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..
.AVI file.
Wow, these guys are pretty pessimistic on the evolution of technology... 300GB hard disks are a couple of years away at best, and their "impossible to crack" encryption scheme is a cozy but totally unsupported assertion. There's no reason to think this scheme won't eventually be cracked, at which point it won't be all that hard to DivX the content of a tape into a smaller, easily-transmitted
Beyond that, this is a stupid step backwards, and one that clearly puts the interests of consumers dead last. DVD, with all its warts, allows you to play videos on laptops, PCs, and small, easily-portable players; tapes are much more vulnerable to damage and the players are much bulkier and break down more often.
Nice try, but this isn't going to fly in the consumer arena.
SuperVHS has about the quality of a DVD, but it didnt take off. Don't expect this to either.
-
- What's big today will not seem all that big 10, or even 5, years from now. This argument seems self-dating.
- Anything uncompressed can be stored compressed. How small will the files get once they are compressed?
I am sure more reasons will occur to me the more I think about it.These device also have built in copy protection, JVC claims, but if the built in copy protection is so great why present these additional flakey arguments.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I really don't think that the primary reasons people buy DVDs are image and sound (especially since most probably don't have the equipment to really enjoy it). People buy DVDs because of the fact that you don't have rewind anything, you don't have to fast forward to find a scene, it starts instanteneously, it fits on a small media (looks like CD) and all those cool features. That's what people associate with the word "digital": compact, shiny and convienient.
To illustrate my point: DAT tapes. A digital signal stored on casettes tapes. It had the same sound quality as CDs (if not better) but you still had to rewind and fast forward to find a song! This standard went absolutely nowhere! I don't know of a single consumer electronic store that actually sell these things - if they even exist anymore.
This DVHS will have the exact same outcome. Bad idea on a bad medium. It's a stillborn.
I missed that about the read/write speed (and 50GByte tape capacity). It does sound like they were just blowing smoke about not compressing the data, etc.
"What purpose does it serve to partially decompress and then store?" Your player doesn't need as much CPU power. Really dumb reason, but we're talking about executives here. 8-)
So the final claim is that it won't be copied over the internet because the files are too damned big. 28.2Mbps is about 13GByte/hour. Another way to look at it, it's 6 X T1. I think it is going to be a few years before many people who have to pay for their own bandwidth will be downloading things like that just for fun. But it will happen, because fiber could carry tens of thousands of streams like that.
that's actually a pretty intriguing idea, but upon further consideration, the reliability factor probably leaves it at nothing more than intriguing.
helical scan media (which I assume D-VHS retains) is not particularly known for reliability, although AIT boosters would argue the point; personally, my experience has been with Exabyte 8mm (far below enterprise reliability) and DLT (quite good stuff), so maybe I've got two extremes of a more varied picture.
in the long run, though, I suspect that D-VHS would not be suitable for data (where every bit counts), while for video (where dropping a bit here and there can be easily compensated for [see also: video streaming]), it is a reasonable solution.
*urp!*
Also, observe DVD's acceptance in both the pc and the home video markets - that's hard to do with a sequential access medium.
See you, space cowboy...
75GB HD holds 30 minutes... D-VHS holds 4 hours... so this is a 600GB Tape capable of writing end-to-end in 4 hours? I'd be willing to pay consumer video device prices to back up my home 'enterprise' ;)
Ok my karma is maxed out. When do I become Enlightened?
No way am I going back to big, bulky, ugly serially-accessed videotapes. DVD is "load and play." Interactive menus, features, it's a multimedia production, not just a damn movie. Resolution isn't as important as content to me. DVD is here to stay. This thing will go NOWHERE in the consumer market.
--
#19845
Yes, I've seen HDTV from digital source. My photographers mind boggles at the improved details. You can see individual hair and pores. It _is_ very nice.
Yet you don't watch TV to admire the resolution. You watch it for the story and/or the imagery. Most often you forget about the resolution or lack thereof. How often have you watched TV through interference? Your mind fills in much of the missing resolution anyways.
Most everyone replying is assuming that JVC is positioning this as a consumer product. It is designed to be a pro-sumer/industrial product and it WILL have great benefit in the infrastructures of those companies who rely on tape technologies today (low end broadcasters, cable delivery, etc)
Having said that..
D-VHS is not uncompressed. Sonys HDCAM and Panasonic D9HD are 7:1 or greater compression and this is on professional tape formats. Uncompressed HD is like 120+MB/s so not only is it silly to think that D-VHS is uncompressed (and damn near ultra 160 speed) because none of the source formats for HD production tapes are uncompressed. (why store uncompressed when all other storage and transmission systems are compressed)..
D-VHS is breakable because the content can only come from one or two sources.
Off-air transmission means that the data can be grabbed from the satellite feed prior to it being fed to the D-VHS deck (and therefore is accessible to pirates).
Canned material from production studios (ala HDTV commercially available films/etc) which will be be mass duplicated somewhere. If there is a duplication mechanism in place, there will be piracy. Just look at all the knock-off VHS tapes you can buy in asia that probably came off the same lines as the real tapes.
D-VHS seems to be really a new, improved version of S-VHS (apart from the obvious technological differences - I'm talking purely in regards to its placement in the consumer marketplace) and we all saw where that went : Nowhere. Despite having a much greater resolution and quality of signal no one was willing to pony up the extra for the player and the media which was far more expensive.
Mass consumers only ever buy anything because it has convenience features. While lip service is paid to quality, the reality is that quality means very little to the majority of people. If people were willing to stick with the inconveniences of VHS they would LITERALLY stick with VHS : DVHS offers nothing that the average consumer wants apart from recording, and even then some of the settop boxes are far more convenient and are filling that marketplace. DVD on the other hand offers lots of extras, a cute menuing system, and most importantly instant access.
Expect to start hearing a lot more whispering about DVD-2 as it is definitely in the planning stages right now. DVD-2 will primarily represent a very large increase in capacity, hence resolution. Of course they would never market it as just that as it'd never sell, but instead DVD-2 players with DVD-1 capabilities will just flood the market to the point where the new content is viable.
A new Macrovision copy protection system prevents the duplication of tapes by copying from one digital deck to another. The content is encrypted with a High Definition Copy Protection (HDCP) system JVC developed that is similar in function to the Content Scrambling System (CSS) on a DVD.
The HDCP system can't be broken, however, because only high definition sets will have the HDCP decoder, according to Dan McCarron, national product specialist in JVC's color TV division.
So: it will only play on systems with the special decoder, which will be prewired to limit the ability to copy. Say goodbye to deck-to-deck editing like I did on VHS compliation tapes back in the day.
No thanks. I'm not buying crippleware, hardware or software, no matter how cool it seems otherwise.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I don't give it much of a chance of lasting, but neither will DVD. First of all, their contention that the size of a file will keep it from being traded over the internet is ludricus. Bandwidth and storage will keep getting bigger and cheaper exponentially. It has since the days of 300 baud modems and BBS file sharing. Also, people are lazy. They're tired of moving their fat butts off the sofa to the video store. In the very near future, people will download that flick, have $2.99 added to their DirecTv bill, and get some Hagen Das before it starts. Actually carrying movies or music in your hands is dying. D-VHS is just life support.
All I can say is "DivX to the rescue."
DVD's are huge, too. DVD's take a long time to rip and encode, too. But there are people around who will take care of these issues, compress it into a CD-sized DivX movie, and offer it for download online.
Try ripping a DVD some time. It's a pain in the ass. Then go to one of the DVD/DivX release sites and see how many are released all the time. And it will only get easier.
--
I think the comments against the increased resolution of HDTV are somewhat misguided. By the reasoning, we should still be watching only silent, B&W movies. All that matters is communicating the story, right?
:)
For that matter, all that's really needed is a tribal storyteller -- somewhat that can paint a word-picture for us, and that's all we need.
With new technology comes new uses. With motion pictures came more detailed visual sequences. With sound came voice acting once only found on the stage, and greater use of musical scoring. With color came stunning landscapes and use of color as a cinematic tool (e.g. green computer world and blue real world in the "The Matrix").
Certainly, right now, High-Defintion Jay Leno is of little use; I don't need to see his chin in greater detail
But, as Jay joked some years ago, about Twisted Sister's first CD release, 'Is there some musical nuance we've been missing, that we can now hear on the CD?'
People will figure out how to use the increased resolution of HDTV in interesting and worthwhile ways.
Of course, the whole pooh-poohing is a bit disingenuous, since it's coming from people who are undoubtedly writing the post on a 17" monitor, at >= 1024x768 resolution. If they meant what they said, they'd be running a 14" monitor at 320x200 for all their computing needs.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
2. DVDs never cost 2000 ;) And even when they first came out, if you got a DVD, it would have many benefits over the medium at the tape, standard VHS. This new medium calls for 2000 dollar players that don't show any real benefit over the DVD format besides the recording ability. I'm sure you can come up with more, but any other benefits you can think of probably won't surpass the benefits that DVD had over VHS.
3. Yes, Disney puts those ads in that you can't skip over, but that's a nitpick detail. I'm talking about when YOU'RE ACTUALLY WATCHING THE MOVIE. If I have a DVD and I want to go to the middle, three clicks and I'm there instantly, or I'm pretty close to it (divided into chapters). With any form of tape I have to wait for the thing to wind, every once in a while hitting "play" to see if I'm close. While I'm doing this I'm wearing the tape down; it's physical media.
4. Like you said, DVD Market 2.0 ;). I may agree with the bookmarks thing, but if you're implying that you'd rather have absolutely no reference at all while FFing or REWing away, then by all means, get this thing.
5. DeCSS, Divx;). What else needs to be said? It's already been done.
6. DVD Market 2.0. Once again, DVD players were not 2 grand when they came back, and I don't think anyone is going to consider getting DVD burners until they're around 500 dollars.
I rest.
- D-VHS holds 4 hrs of digital video
- 30 min == 75 GB
Does this mean we have a 300GB backup system?Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
$40 with a 40 second no-skip read ahead. It just went on a 30-hr road trip and only skipped on badly scratched CDs. The tech has reached a point where paying for a name brand only fuels their advertising.
--
+&x
Their goal: prevent the masses from duplicating their proprietary (everything is proprietary when first released) video streams by encrypting the uncompressed data. JoeSchmoeTheVideoPirate's goal: duplicate the video. Simple as that. That goal is easily attainable even with internal decryption hardware. At some point in the process, the video will become decrypted, and most likely will become analog at some point to be displayed a/an CRT(s) in the HDTV unit. The conclusion, with the help of a screwdriver or two, a soldering iron, an oscilloscope and a logic probe, it would be very possible to find that decrypted stream within the HDTV reciever. Once you have the stream you can do anything you want with it. JVC is in no position to prevent piracy. Hardware based encryption schemes will be broken, no question about it. The industry positioning and system of royalties and expensive distribution will have to change and cause the "benefits" of piracy to the consumer base to be eliminated.
I usually would agree with you, however, you are forgetting that the networks and the MPAA is going to tell you what you CAN record and what you CAN'T record. I think that recording in HD is all well and good, but if you can't record a show that you want to (besides all the commercials of course), then why would you care to record at all?
That is why people are criticizing from the perspective that you mention. It is the overwhelming consideration in this argument IMO. So while it is so easy for you to just "set aside the whole 'copy protection'" issue, This is a very large factor for others, and they can't look past it.
Just because 75 gigs will only hold 30 minutes doesn't mean it won't be distributed. Besides, that's probably the uncompressed figure. What size would it be when you run it through an mpeg4 encoder? The Mandrake distro is a gig for everything, and people download that.
Truth is, it'll be a couple years at least before this technology gets into the hands of the average consumer, and movies start getting distributed in that format. Besides, it can always be scaled down to 1/4 its resolution, or lower.
On the software side, perhaps the most controversial news is the big stand Blockbuster is taking to push the studios into adopting rental pricing. Can you say "vested interests?" Will the studios listen? You can bet we'll be covering this one in the days ahead! Stay tuned. -- From DVDFile.com
You can bet Lucas will do that when he releases Star Wars on DVD so he can get the most money.
------
James Hromadka
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
This is the correct link to the CES:
http://www.cesweb.org/
Is that (from my reading of the article at least, I may be wrong) they require HDTVs. HDTV isn't out in Europe, and isn't likely to be any time soon (we'll just stick to our lovely 100hz PAL Widescreen Anamorphic Digital TVs thanks :)).
Despite what many in North America may believe, the US doesn't rule the world.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
D-VHS has been avaiable for years. I remember the first unit I ever saw, it was ~5 years ago at a hi-fi shop that had just started carrying the first DVD players. That was standard definition D-VHS, and this new one is HD, but the fact it, D-VHS has already been a misreable failure. Nobody (not even hi-fi zealots) where willing to pay for the things. The retailed for about 3 grand, and offerred nothing substantially better than DVD, except they were recordable. To my knowledge, the only people who ever bought these things are the guys who do hardware reviews for Home Theater (or any of it's competitors), to use as test beds for new TVs and projectors. Mose companies that produces one of these things abondoned them soon afterward to focus on DVD, and frankly, they aren't gogin to go back and revisit a failed technology just because one company has altered it to store a HD signal. The other major problem with these things it that they're only real use is to records HD programming for playback, and since there is virtually no HD programming available, there's not much use for recorder. Be sure yto thank your local cable company for that.
Does this mean only JVC sells this stuff? As ever, the industry needs standards, for competition.One of the 'official' reasons for Java to have 'failed' is that Sun wanted a industry standard propriaty language. Fail Fail Fail! Did not work sorry. Won't work for any recordable media either.
Suppose only JVC sells this stuff: no competition and probably too expensive
Suppose others sell this stuff: Take over the technique, and service it into new products, like a PC HDTV video player (and recordables ofcourse). Lets buy two of these machines and start copying. I know stories of drugsdealers who switched to selling illegal CD-ROMS when internet wasn't much popular yet, this will happen for this new video technology if more conveniant ways for piracy is not found or possible. The internet will then only be used as a broker - you search, we supply.
nah...
Bizar technology?
How says it has to be captured before it is compressed? You'd think that someone with, say, a dual G4 could do that with no problem - compress it real time, so that a 75GB HD is never needed during the process.
Then again, why are we complaining? Maybe JVC is just trying to appease the industry idiots while keeping the informed happy?
Hell, look at how expensive Apple computers are NOW, and people are still buying those.
Now really, how exciting is it that you'll be able to record in high definition? First of all, you can only record things which are not set protected; That means no pay-per-view, no skinimax or showtime. You will probably be able to record almost anything off speedvision, but that's a niche market.
In order for the early adopters to buy this thing, they have to be able to record things that actually show off the technology. Early adopters are, almost without exception, wankers who just want to impress themselves or others. Even I can speak from experience here; I remember running the 1.3 kernels...
But let's face it, all of the really impressive content is going to be protected, so you can't record it. That doesn't do you much good.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes >of the video, according to company >officials, making the trading of HD content over >the Internet impossible... Nothing will prevent to capture, compress and convert to divx. If they want to stop the trading of movies on internet, they better cut down the price of dvd... I can't believe that in some countries they sell DVD for 2 or 3 times the price of VHS... Also the quality of some DVD is really low, crappy aspect ratio, e.g Starship troopers in on two side, you have to swap the side in the middle of the movie like with those old laserdisc toasters and vcd.
They have a Simpsons home sex video? Yucch! Sorry, couldn't resist.
Eventually, I sold it to a friend of mine for $1200, including installation at his house.
A good salesman always refers to his customers as friends. After all, they're my friends because they give me money.
That's not to imply that I'm a good salesman, of course. I'm not especially, despite having read a few books on sales. I hate selling stuff, but I get the job done.
It's the same way that you never ask a customer to sign a contract. A customer is a friend, signing is something your mother told you never to do, and a contract is a scary pile of legalese. You instead get your friend to autograph an agreement, because this conjures up pleasant of happy people making him feel important. (Other bad words in sales include "policy" and, well, "sales".)
More importantly, with the emissions that the projector was still putting out - in other words, the CRTs (which are expensive and a lot of work to replace) were *very* healthy - that projector was an easy $2500 in the classified ads in the local newspaper. (You know, where people still advertise and sell $700 Pentium 75s.)
Real not-ripping-anyone-off value of it was about $2,000.
He did okay. I did okay. It was a mutually beneficial agreement. We're both happy.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity.
Sure, but not all technology is destined to trickle down in price to the point where `everyone' will want it; Laserdisc certainly didn't. I don't know what sort of factors would affect this mass consumer take-off.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
HDTV over the air is broadcast highly compressed. This deck tape deck apparently is storing it uncompressed, or much less drastically compressed. The company officials are assuming you won't run Mpeg-2 (or higher) compression yourself. A year or two ago, that was almost a valid assumption, since compression on a PC without special hardware was much slower than real-time (a day or so to compress a two hour movie). But I'd expect that an Mpeg-2 routine compiled especially for the Pentium-4 1.5GHz would run faster than real time right now, and by the time they get this thing into production at consumer prices...
The other question is, whether Mpeg compression noticeably detracts from the image quality. It's not a lossless compression like zip files, but rather it throws away some fine detail, then compresses what's left. The algorithm's authors claim that what's thrown away couldn't be seen either -- maybe so, but I've heard similar claims made where I could sure tell the difference! And HDTV ought to be considerably more of a challenge because you can see so much more detail.
Per the article, 0.5 hrs of video is 75G, and the tape will hold 4 hrs, therefor the raw capacity of the tape is 600G.
...actually, management/marketing (@ JVC) might already understand that it's a futile effort, but hype it anyway because the pro-MPAA people are too stupid to fully understand the mechanism, and doing so keeps the lawyers at bay.
.sig line, I'll put it here
<smirk> Hopefully, they'll come out with a computer data drive version of this device... so I can archive all my pirated DVDs. </smirk>
(Actually, there's a company already with a VHS data drive. I think it's Exabyte, and I think it's far short of 600G per tape.)
As for their copy protection... when will they get it through their head!
--
When I get a whitty
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Pop a 300 gig video tape in a camera and my GOD!
The only thing that scares me though, is this being adopted by the pr0n industry. Isn't there enough of that crap out there already? Do we really need amateurs being able to shoot 300 gigs worth of pr0n?
D-VHS blank media is going to sell for $10-15 a tape. I know I'd buy a camera that would use this!
Hell, look at how expensive Apple computers are NOW, and people are still buying those.
Now really, how exciting is it that you'll be able to record in high definition? First of all, you can only record things which are not set protected; That means no pay-per-view, no skinimax or showtime. You will probably be able to record almost anything off speedvision, but that's a niche market.
In order for the early adopters to buy this thing, they have to be able to record things that actually show off the technology. Early adopters are, almost without exception, wankers who just want to impress themselves or others. Even I can speak from experience here; I remember running the 1.3 kernels...
But let's face it, all of the really impressive content is going to be protected, so you can't record it. That doesn't do you much good.
What you're missing here is that the ability to record things in high definition is cheapened dramatically by the fact that you won't be able to record anything you want. If they really want to provide some sort of copy protection, they should make gear that melds the show and the commercials together permanently and won't let you fast forward; Then the broadcasters (or equivalent) could charge more for ad space, and pay more for shows, which would reflect the fact that you could only make good money off of the show once.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm wondering how long it will be before some company comes out with a "home video archiving" system based on MPEG-4 and CD-RW media. Basically a fast embedded PC with a CD-RW drive and a 4GB HD or so. You could store more than 2h of TV quality video and have a player/recorder in one unit. The whole thing could probably come in at a $500 price point or so. I think they could start a de-facto standard because of the availability of the technology and particularly the cheapness of the media alone. With the proper software you could buffer an existing CD-x (CD-R or CD-RW) to the HD, rearrange scenes, mix in some new stuff from the TV (or TiVo), then shoot the whole thing back to CD-x. With a decently-fast burner of 8x or so that would take less than 10 minutes. Given a well thought-out interface the whole thing could be made dead easy to use.
Actually, DAT tapes do still exist. Pretty much solely in recording. At any rate, the DAT format existed before CDs did - CDs didn't kill DAT. The RIAA did, by insisting on surcharges on blank media to prevent copying (sound familiar, anyone?)and surcharges on recorders. To make up for piracy.
End result? If I want to record my own music that I compose on a DAT, I pay money to make up for the (non-existent) "piracy this format will promote."
RIAA, MPAA? I'm forming the KEIAA - Kill Entertainment Industry Associations Association.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
1. Its naturally read only, so Hollywood would push it with a vengeance.
2. After DVD, consumers won't want a linear recording format. For example, the T2 dvd with three branches of the film, original, director;s, and with deleted scenes. These features have proven to carry a price premium, at little cost for creation for studios.
3. Backwards compatibility. Whatever HDVD discs will look like in 2004ish, a HDVD player will play CDs, DVDs, and Audio DVDs.
ostiguy
However, with the ridiculously low cost per bit, it might be acceptable to encode a large degree of redudundancy into the encoding to allow virtually any recording-process error .. . . ;-)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
And what about tape degradation? One of the reasons I hate VHS is that after a year or so, movies are noticibly lower in quality. A couple of years after that, they're unwatchable. Wouldn't DVHS have the same problem? Except instead of blurry pictures, I'd see little colored blocks popping on the screen
D
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
Pass directly the video directly among tapes at a low bandwidth channel, and all macrovision protection is perfectly copied to the resulting copy. In fact, it would add innecesary complexity to scan for macrovision to prevent (actually deny) the copy on such level, just so that the unit is DMCA compliant and can be legally sold inside the USA. Sadly, Go-Video had to do this to their otherwise perfectly fine units sold before April of 2000...
But since macrovision does not come in DVD video, it is a nonsense to use the video stabilizer devices in these. Much better is to rip out the Macrovision encoder, or access the hidden menu or move the hidden jumper somewhere inside the unit, or plain simply buy a non compliant unit without the Macrovision chip (Hint: Check UK and Taiwan, forget USA
So in case you haven t figured it by now, let me put it clearly. DVD video does not contain macrovision, it is added on real time by request of the disc. Yes, the request can simply be ignored by the unit, just like the zone selection system and the fast forward forbbided section.
And lastly, yes, Macrovision *does* degrade picture quality, so its better to avoid it than just post fix it later.
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Time to sell some stock.
This company wasted untold amounts of money developing a product that:
I can't believe this crap! Does the MPAA off whores to go with kickbacks, or something? Oh well. No need to worry, if there's one thing even my MOM hates, it's VHS tapes and having to pick them out of a VCR when they (inevitably) fail. This format is DOA, but if I was a shareholder, I'd be pissed.
..don't panic
Despite the claim by the article, I've had a DVHS recorder for almost three years now. It's integrated into my Dish receiver, and I've never seen a stand alone DVHS product, but it certainly wasn't $2000... more like half that. It's great for recording movies or shows with digital clarity, but I just use regular VHS tapes on it now. They look as good as something purchased commercially, and I can play them over at a friends house, unlike DVHS.
The clincher for movies is always going to be what I call the Blockbuster factor. If your local video store thinks you'll have the machine, they'll carry the movies. If you think your local video store will carry the movies, you'll buy the player. But for $2000, nobody's going to start carrying movie titles when VHS and DVD are already practially guaranteed.
Digital VHS may stand a chance in the professional markets. It won't sell anywhere else, period.
I have VHS tapes I recorded in 1980 with a JVC portable deck and camera (nearly choked myself to death; damn things weighed 40 lbs!) that show NO degradation today. They look as good as ever.
And of course, my "crappy" tapes can be left arround, used by the kids, and everything else, and still work fine 10 years later. No chance my DVD's would live half that long.
Some good points, but
DVDRAM is part of the DVD spec, DVDRW is not. Both have been out for at least 3-4 years, but prices for units are still way too high. I mean, look at the way manufacturers are still pushing faster CDRW drives to the public. There doesn't seem to be any plans to make a writable DVD unit cheap enough to be standard equipment.
Seeing the new multi-layer CDRWs they're trying to introduce to the market, I think we face a very real chance that DVDRAM/RW will only ever be used by studios and such.
---
Do these offer options similar to dvds? like multiple language/dub tracks? sure doesnt look like it. Whats the friggin point of these anyway? VHS is too integrated and it took ages for DVD to take off.. the only place this could possibly succeed is in the broadcast market (Where many still use betamax) even then, copyprotecting seems a bit pointless.
And why cant i just do d-vhs out to video-card in? eh? oh wait. you have to buy a specially liscened player. People already dont want to spend the extra cash on HDTV, they wont spend the extra money on something that doesnt work with their current system.
no
From the AVSforums.
"JVC announced summer delivery of a new digital VHS recorder intended for HDTV home recording. With a 28.2 Mbps read/write speed and 50 GByte per tape storage capacity it can certainly get the job done! Suggested retail about $2000. Ouch!"
1st.. 28.2Mbps isn't all that much more when compared to OTA data rate of 19.2Mbps. Thus the disk comsumption figures quoted by company reps is still false and misleading. Also note: There is NO PC recording option for HDTV that doesn't use the digital stream for recording. I.E. No one even tries, or has plans, to record all three of the analog streams(RGB).
2nd.. What purpose does it serve to partially decompress and then store?
Improved quality?? NOT!!!!
3rd.. Where do expect to find a HDTV source material that exceeds the OTA broadcast rates?
>>A 75GB . . . making trading over the Internet >>impossible..
;)
AS IF! If you can record D-VHS, you probably want to be able to view it again at some point.
If you can view it, then you can record it again, in, say DIV-X
If you can translate it into a codec-ified file, then you can trade it.
AND BE SURE about two things:
Hard drives will always get bigger,
and internet connections will always get faster.
lo_fye
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
While everyone's busy snapping up the latest DVDs and DVHS's and PDQ's and do-re-mi's, I'll just continue using my trusty, reliable VCR and scoop up all the discounted video tapes! Becuase while I like shiny new technology, I like cheap things MORE. And besides, 97% of the households in the US have a VCR. I'd say there's a good 10 years or so of life left in plain-ol' videtapes.
--M.
--
--
"Insert witty quote here."
OT, but why didn't you prune the tree?
FYI, pruning trees regularly is a good idea, it helps keep them healthy by removing dead branches, and diseased and damaged limbs. It also keeps errant limbs out of the way, and, if you know what you're doing, you can actully train a tree to grow in a certian shape or direction.
Getting back on topic, the problems you were having wern't your satellite system's fault. At the microwave frequancies used, the leaves on your tree where acting like miniture reflectors, scattering and disrupting the signal. Mircowave systems need a clear line-of-sight between the transmitting and recieving stations. Incedently, this is also why bad weather can interfere with satellite reseption, signals on some microwave bands don't so through water vapior so well.
"A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..."
Right right.... obvisly they dont understand or are lying.
C-Cube just announced so-called DoMiNo family of single-chip video codecs. Presumably, these puppies can encode HD at consumer price point.
hey in south america they use betamax vcrs at least they're ahead of us using that. Is way superior to the vhs.....
Tape, why not wax cylinder for video storage device, or flip books, those were awesome.
Where have we heard "can't be broken" before? How much you wanna bet, when this is sold en masse, that some 15 yearold will crack it? CSS all over again.
~ Detonating a nuclear device within the city limits will result in a 500 dollar fine.
Hold on for a minute now. They say that, since the video is uncompressed, it will not be possible to copy it and trade it over the internet? Do these people have any clue of what they are talking about?
I don't know about you, but I've never seen a whole DVD mpeg-2 movie copied, or traded over the net. An mpeg-2 DVD movie is over 4 Gb! Even with high bandwidth and disk space, it's easy to understand that you won't copy too many movies if you have to take so much bandwidth/space. The thing is that people don't care what the inital format of the movie is. They'll take the movie, make it into a bandwidth/space-friendly format, such as mpeg-4 (DivX) and THEN they'll store and trade it.
This 200 Gb movie will be just around 1 Gb once it's compressed into mpeg-4, just like any other movie out there. Saying that this will prevent copying or trading just shows that they have no idea of what the actual problem is.
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis
Since the content on the tape is encrypted, it may not be possible to compress it effectively. Encrypted data is very resistant to compression because the purpose of encryption is to obscure patterns in the plaintext data. That's why security guides say to compress your data before encrypting.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I think D-VHS, if they ever tried to market it, would die rather immediately due to the media it's being moved around on. I bought a DVD player not for the high definition, not for the incredible sound (although these two things are definately a plus), but I bought it because I don't have to A) rewind movies and B) I can start anywhere in the movie I wish. Now tell me honestly, is the higher definition of D-VHS going to outweigh the convenience of DVDs and the fun I have with the special features included on them? Not at all. D-VHS is dead to me already. Old technology trying to be new.
I might as well try to install Linux on my Commodore 64.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
1)Cost, DVDs are WAY cheaper to both buy and produce
2)They're already out there... every new computer has a dvd player, video game consoles are coming out with DVD capability...
3)Longevity (sp?), a DVD will last just about forever if you take proper care of it, no worries of it being ruined by your player, or it being destroied when your son or daughter decides to put peanut butter in the dvd player (though the player itself will most likely not fare too well)
4)Size... DVDs are small and can be caried anywhere easily, those D-VHS tapes are larger than standard VHS tapes, and we know how portable those things are to begin with.
Too little too late JVC... if you had this just a few years earlier, MAYBE it woulda taken off. The only way these things will stay around is if JVC finds a way to force companies to use that technology over DVD somehow.
-Z
Me too!
I'm too sexy for you.
For a variety of reasons (most of which, I assume, have already been pointed out by the more intellegent slashposters...). :P
1) Cost.
Come on, I have to buy a $10k tv, $2k dvhs vcr and $10-15 per media, just to use this?
2) Piracy??
argh, ok
a) a special connector that will only work on their hdtv set (so far) won't fly
b) 75gb=30 min of video uncompressed? Am I the only one who has thought about the prospects of compressing it? (surely not, unless you count the majority of (non-technical) aol users)
c) Invariably, someone, somewhere will beat it
d) Like most attempts to "protect" something, it is only an annoyance to the consumer and the 'casual pirate' (Media co's: These are NOT the same!)
3) Replication.
The major vhs tape manufacturers *might* go for this.. but then, how do you get the masters to them? It would prolly be a huge bother to get this done (resulting in inflated prices.. more so than dvd)
Then again, I work in the cd replication business.. not cassette replication
What I'd rather see?
VCD or SVCD-rw drives.. standalone drives that will record tv shows onto common data cdr or cdrw's.
This would quickly fill the consumer's need for a cd-based video storage option.. This could progress to dvd-r or dvd-ram versions when they are ready, to allow for higher quality or longer run times.
Of course, this will never happen because the media companies love to hoard every penny..
I wonder what the Internet would be like if it came about as a result of Big Media, instead of Big Government? I imagine that you wouldn't be able to print or download web pages, and many of the advances that came to the Internet, would never have happened.
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
second of all, I sure don't want to be rewinding tapes all the time.
i'm going out to buy another DVD!
DVD took quite a while to reach mass acceptance, but it's finally at the point where it has a large enough installed base that it isn't going away. I don't think it's the best technology, but it's clearly superior to VHS in every way.
DVD is simply too limited in the amount of data it can store. When CDs were first released, 650MB was many times larger than the average hard disk. DVD, with its 4.5GB per layer, already looks small compared to newer hard drives.
The physical media might have a future in the HDTV era though. Video compression has become considerably more effecient since MPEG2 was created. MPEG4 at a tenth of the bitrate of MPEG2 has the same quality. So, DVD media, with MPEG4 video stored on it, would be large enough to accomodate HDTV resolution.
Yes, it would require a new player, but that player could be backwards compatible with MPEG2 DVDs.
Not that this will happen, but it should. I have a feeling we will be watching NTSC resolution DVDs on HDTV sets for a long time to come.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
Like big dot coms, the "free broadcast" channels are going to have to figure out a new business model due to dropping advertising revenues (from everything except elections.)
I pay for content when I rent videotapes at my local, non-chain video store. I pay for "free" tv with the time I give up having to sit through commercials for things I won't ever buy. I pay for access to the Internet so that I can read Slashdot, among other things. I "pay" for Slashdot by participating in the community and seeing the banner ads. I won't pay for HDTV.
I don't care about HDTV. I need bifocals, and the definition is lost on me.
Why? Simple. Content Control & renting control. DVD does not adhere to the 'sell through' pricing such as VHS currently does. Meaning when a movie is released to Video, it usually comes out first at a price of $120 or so per video. This allows Blockbuster to purchase them, and then rent the heck out of them. Then, three or four months later the video is released at 'sell through' prices around $20. DVD however is better quality, better content, and out at $25 MSRP day and date with the rental video. Blockbuster locks at this as a threat to their business model and do whatever they can to come up with another model to Stop this. MPAA loves this, because for now, the amount of data on the tape is too big to reasonably pirate over the 'net.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
And no, D-VHS will not replace DVD - not at over $12000 just to watch the bloody thing. And now that everyone's used to being able to view interactively on one's PC, who wants to go back to TV?!
I would reckon that as soon as someone figures out how to grab the video content, we'll be back to trading mpeg4's over the internet again. Goodbye "non-piracy" theory. Information will always win in the end.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
and darned if i've seen anyone trading 4-7Gigs worth of VOB's to watch one stinking movie, even on broadband no one wants to wait that long. Given, the quality of the VOB(MPEG-2) outputfar surpasses the compressed AVI(MPEG-4) but it's just not worth it.
If you can see it and you can hear it, with the right equipment you can rerecord it and get a good quality movie.
Expect for the real quality zealots, most people (including me) will not replace TV with HDTV or VHS with DVD or D-VHS (unless we are forced). Why? Because the current quality is good enough. My TV is good enough. I can't justify spending a ton of money to gain a slight improvment in picture quality, at a loss of a ton of freedom. Right now, I can record and playback anything off my TV and VCR, I can rent/buy any movie I want, and I see no reason to give that up.
Make all the new devices you want, but if all the R&D is going into new features for the MPAA and company, with no real benefit to me, the consumer, I'm not interested.
Finkployd
Those copy protection schemes are optional.
You needed special hardware to by-pass Macrovision for copy VHS to VHS. You still need that hardware copying DVDs to VHS. But only those that have Macrovision added.
I think what we have right now, DVD with digital TV signals from cable sources and 5.1 sound, is about the most complex that we can go in the A/V technology without disinteresting any more consumers. HDTV is a good example of how most consumers are happy with what they have now and don't want to go any further. What the hardward and media content producers should start looking at is paralleling the technology, adding more things like TiVO-like systems, interactivity, or the ability to watch any program at any time. A good portion of consumers have the ability to do this, so why not start exploring how to improve the content distsribution, as opposed to making the consumer buy toys that could easily be antiquated in a few years.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Calculating it out, that's about 100GB/hr. If in fact that's the spec, then the four-hour capacity gives you 400GB, not 600 as some have stated here.
It seems to me that JVC may now be implementing the HS standard, as well as an on-the-fly MPEG-2 encoder, HDCP copy protection mechanism and DVI connector. I won't jump into the debate about the security of HDCP, but recent history suggests its future looks bleak.
Of course, it's all vaporware until it's sitting in your living room.
They're called "early adopters" and they're the sort of people who already have an HDTV set, and are frothing at the mouth to be able to record "Everybody Loves Raymond" in super high fidelity.
Most of the posts (up to this one) seem to have neglected the fact that these tapes will allow you to record HDTV in actual High Definition. That's kind of the point. And $2000 is really kind of cheap for the first release of a new technology. Remember how expensive calculators used to be? Apple computers?
If you set aside the whole "copy protection" and "transmission over the Internet" issues, this is actually kind of cool. Sure it would be better to have a DVD-RW that could record HDTV, but that's not possible right now-- even with compression.
I regret that the folks who announced this technology felt that they had to address those issues. And even though they brought it up first, I'm pretty disappointed that when something like this emerges, it's immediately criticized from the perspective of "they're trying to keep us from copying stuff willy nilly", rather than as a new technology that will allow us to do something we couldn't before: preserve HDTV broadcasts at home in High Definition.
Others will! It will be just like DVD's. VHS is being replaced with DVD's. Try to find a movie not CSS encoded and region free. I heard analog TV is scheduled to go off the airwaves in the USA in 2006. Digital TV will all be encryption protected by law. Your choice is to do wihout or join in. Good luck. I have the same problem. I can't rent Laser Disks at my local video store anymore. They were not copy protected. They were too expensive to buy. I bought the player when they promised laser disks woud be cheaper than videotape because they could be cheaply stamped in mass. Tape became cheaper and laser disks became more expensive sold as premium content. Studios simply refused to provide in that format because they were afraid the media would last too long. Therefore laser disks had very limited selection and very high prices due to inflated royalties. (unless you bought the famous titles like "how to watch NFL football and how to play golf") It never became a mass market item.
The truth shall set you free!
Using it as a tape backup system for a PC? At 15-20 per tape with 75 GB it's certainly competitive with the other systems out there. Of course, you would only need it if you back up 75GB.
Best Slashdot Co
This year. Actualy, you can get an 80gig HD for around $250 nowadays. And I don't see why you couldn't just compress it...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Can your Tivo come to your son's preschool graduation, and easily capture video from a camera? Are you willing to mail your TIVO to a friend when he wants to see a show you recorded? TIVO's are great, but they don't cover all of the needs tapes can, just as tapes don't cover all of the needs TIVO's can.
he doesnt use the word 'virtually'. he says it is 'impossible'.
But this could even things out a bit, what if DVD was the unrestricted, free media that it should be, and the 20 year old VHS format was replaced with something strictly for home entertainment systems? I think that would be the ideal solution, THEY get their proprietary format for high end home entertainment, we get the free unrestriced, high quality DVD's for our PC's.
I say they accept the D-VHS satandard and open DVD wide for all of the world to use.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
...so it has all the drawbacks of tape. You have to rewind it, you can't instantly skip to a specific chapter, etc.
DVD is here to stay. At least until recordable DVDs get cheaper...
How you see the world is how the world sees you.
"D-VHS": Will it replace DVD?
I'd bet money that it won't even come close. CD/DVD media has one big advantage which VHS will never have... it isn't tape.
DVD players are becoming popular not only because of the better resolution when compared to VHS but because discs typically last much longer (and at a higher quality) than videotapes. Permanent collections of favorite movies are now more attractive than they were before, especially with all the extras a typical DVD offers. I don't see the general public ever wanting to take a step back.
This sounds like something that would have more use in the professional/educational instutions then it would in my living room.
One thing that confuses me is that all this work is being pushed towards digitizing the home theater and yet the movie studios cling to old film mediums. Someone should tell JVC and their ilk to develop the technology so that digital film isn't just a Speilberg/Lucas specialty.
Record the movies in full digital 75gb/minute then worry how to translate that to the home you f-ing moronic hollywood f's! F!
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
bah, people will just xfer stuff between oc-3's and the pull it off from their shell overnight. *duh* .. and anyways if we ever hear anymore updates on the holographic drives, according to those guys storage won't be a problem.
but then again - 640k ought to be enough for anybody. ;)
The HDCP system can't be broken, however, because only high definition sets will have the HDCP decoder, according to Dan McCarron, national product specialist in JVC's color TV division.
I'm not a genius. I know I couldn't have written DeCSS. But isn't saying "Such and such can't be broken" pretty dumb? Didn't only DVD players and authorized DVD software have the correct keys in the beginning, too?
I just think it's a little optimistic to say "Ooh, lookie at us, you can't break our encryption. Ever."
I have CDs I bought 15 years ago and they still work flawlessly. I can't say the same thing about any cassettes or videotapes.
The move to CD from cassette was about durability, random access and ease of use. Quality considerations were secondary for the vast majority of users.
VHS to DVD was the same. (Although, quality was a much bigger consideration this time around.) Why would we take a step back now?
Fade in:
D-VHS Tape looks over at the large server computer, and says: "RAID? Oh NO!!!"
D-VHS tape is quickly recorded and then explodes...
RAID. Kills tapes dead, where they hide.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You know, when I read this I couldn't help but think about the parallels in the audio world. We had audiotapes, and they sucked, but they were good enough. Then they came out with CD's, and they were pretty good quality, but you couldn't record to them. They took over audiotape much like DVD is taking over VHS today. Then there was DAT -- Digital Audio Tape. Great quality, recordable, digital in/out, the works. Very expensive, and because nobody ever bought them, the price tag never went down. I think a new DAT Walkman is on the order of $800 today.
Meanwhile, out came the first generation CD burners. They were slow and very expensive, so not many people bought them. But given that CD's already had such a large installed base, it made sense to work to improve the CD burner until it was cheap and fast, since it was reasonable to believe there was a demand for it. Since DAT had virtually no installed base (outside of the professional market, where it still remains the "low-end" digital tape format) it didn't make sense to bother trying to make it any cheaper or better.
Anyway, what with the whole digital video "revolution" nonsense going on, I predict the recordable video market splits off into two distinct paths: The high end consumer format, where people edit their own video and burn it to DVD, and the low end consumer format, where people simply record shows off of TV onto VHS and play them back later (I don't think most people record movies off of TV anymore, since the quality is generally pretty low and you can go rent the damn thing for less effort and less money than a blank tape). That would closely resemble what we have today for audio, with the exception that most people with CD burners aren't creating their own music to burn to CD. After all, you can still buy audio tape decks and tapes without too much trouble.
Oh, and as for recordable on the fly DVD? I don't see that really going anywhere. They have recordable on the fly CD burners now, and as it turns out it's much easier to edit a mix on a computer anyway, so the only consumers who buy them are people with CD players but without computers or computer skills (or someone in the house with computer skills =-) ), which is a rather small segment of the market these days.
"Video on D-VHS tapes is uncompressed, so it's enormous. A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..."
HA HA HA. Excuse me while I pick myself off the floor from laughing.
What kind of illogical argument is that? "Well since it's really big, they won't be able to copy it!". Excuse me, but such thinking is incredibly shortsighted.
DVD's were thought to be probably "impossible" to copy. But what happened? We have people who used hacked MPEG-4 CODEC DivX who distribute movies on 2 CD-ROMs. Nothing is impossible. You are merely taunting the pirates by proclaiming since it's so big they won't be able to pirate it.
I repeat - what an awful, awful, argument. The size has nothing to do with its ability to be pirated. Just as people watched crappy VCD's of Star Wars Episode 1 Bootlegs (come on Slashdot people, ADMIT IT) there will be people who will compress this new format down into a reasonable size while sacrificing quality.
DVD's are great, with adequate care they can last a very long time. The same goes with CD's. If you invest in the clear protective overlays for the top surface as many rental places do then they can last an extremely long time.
The other problem I don't see how this device could be affordable. The media may be inexpensive but the bandwidth required to handle 2.5 gigabytes/sec will be expensive. 2000 bucks for the recorder, 10000! bucks for the TV.
Claiming that large uncompressed data will prevent piracy is rather inane as well. If there's that much data the picture quality will be incredible making it that much easier to rip a copy (albeit degraded) that is acceptable and is tradeable via broadband.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Well I doubt D-VHS will replace DVD soon. First of all the DVD has just become a standard accepted by the consumers so I doubt that the motion picture industry will run the risk of introducing a new standard so soon. On the consumer side, D-VHS has some advantages but I don't think that'll be enough for the consumer.
On the other side there are a lots of drawbacks that prevent this system to get a wide acceptance from the public:
To add a something on the motion picture industry support to HD I doubt it'll come before years. The next challenge for theaters will be to switch from analog classical film to digital projection. The only two systems demonstrated so far had resolutions of 1920x1080 and 1280x1024. Yes, that's right, that's HDTV resolution or a little bit less. So I don't think that the studios will like to give the customers the same quality they use for theaters.
And the last thing: how many customers are interested in picture quality? If many people really cared about picture quality I think that analog HDTV could have been a success in Europe or Japan and I also think that the motion picture industry wouldn't have dropped the 65mm cinematography and the 70mm prints.
Why would I want tapes?
I've got my tivo to record on, video on demand is just arriving. 3 years from now the idea of having tapes to pass about the place will seem quaint.
_____
My Journal
- players are expensive (2000$)
- dvd r and dvd rw will become available shortly and will be compatible with existing dvd
- in the long term, tapes have a higher production cost than dvd-r and dvd-rw
- we already have tivo like devices, what the hell do we need a digital vcr for?
Jilles
At home. Widescreen displays are hugely priced here.
I haven't bought DVD because of the brain-dead CSS stuff that dosn't prevent copying but does prevent me from viewing the content. I think that you're all pretty sorry for bragging about how good your DVDs look.
I did but TiVo, but the advantages of random access that people bring up in preferring their DVDs over any tape solution is uncompelling to me. 99 and 44/100ths percent of the time I'm watching this stuff sequentially. A tape solution is fine.
I'm concerned about the copy protection, but if it merely prevents dubbing from one unit to another, I don't care because I rarely duplicate tapes (the big exception is when I forget to change the tapes and get my Buffy episode on my wife's Gilmore Girls tape)
I just want fairness. I will time shift. If that means that I continue to use the TiVo (which does let you copy off to VCR, BTW) long into the future, then I will.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Don't underestimate the importance of access times in media. I remember when CD's came out, everyone was saying "Wait until DAT comes out, it will replace CD's." Not true. Any tape mechanism makes access times between the beginning and end parts of the tapes take much longer than on CD/DVD. The convenience of nearly instant access weighs heavily in my decisions anyway.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
When CD players first came out, they went for over $1000 and would skip if you stepped to hard on the floor near it. Now you can get one for under $100 that you can wear on your hip while you jog. This didn't happen overnight, and likewise the price drop of HDTV won't happen overnight. Give HDTV a few more more years to come down in price before you write it off.
...that someone would consider being a space and bandwidth hog a feature, instead of a bug...
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
"75GB per 30 minutes....4 hours per tape"
That's 600GB per tape. The hell with video, that's a sweet data backup tape!
Let us remember the lesson of the VHS tape backup system: a single flubbed bit in an analog data stream gets lost in the shuffle; a single flubbed bit in a digital data stream will flub the readout of an entire portion of the tape.
Imagine digital artifacts from a dirty DVD disc, except permanent.
jvc introduced the d-vhs about two and a half years ago. the fact that you are only discovering it now shows how popular it is. one major drawback is no analog to digital. analog sources are recorded analog, giving you about a 50% degradation of source material.
Impossible? What nonsense. It's digital to begin with, so it's even EASIER to copy. With current tech, I'd just set my computer to automatic. Copy over 15 minutes of movie, compress it, copy over another 15 minutes.
By the time this thing gets out, I'll have enough space to copy the whole thing at once though.
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Optical storage is quickly becoming the standard with CD-RW's, etc. I still see the use of 8mm and DLT tapes for backup, but I think any development in the use of tapes to distribute movies, or music is a waste of money. Remember DAT audio tapes, and DAT audio tape drives. They were supposed to catch on, but no one bought them, because CD's were much more practical.
I remember back in the days of cassette tapes, and when tapes used to get eaten by the cassette player (same with VCRs, DLT Tape drives, 8mm tape drives). I don't even own a VCR, and don't want one either (my last one broke). If a movie doesn't come out on DVD, I probably didn't want to see it anyway. If this catches on, I will develop a method of storing movies on 8 track tapes.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Who else is thinking home tape backup solution? I know I was when I read that.
And actually, that's probably all this will ever be good for. Face it, tape is dying.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The reason why it will not replace DVD is because DVD are convenient in their on-the-fly chapter seeking, and up to 60X fast forward and rewind. I cannot imagine DVHS bieng able to do this seeking quicky and efficiency without causing some tape damage.
I do, however, think that D-VHS will become popular because of its massive storage capability. Yes folks, as much as I hate to say it, even though I love my S-VHS prosumer player, I would rather have something like D-VHS for taping shows of of HDTV or general purpose standard TV.
With a loss-less algorithm, you gets out what you puts in, so it will be fine.
Really.
Trust me.
I wonder how far the high-res tv stuff can go, considering that at some point we hit the quantum limit for wavelength resolution. Of course, long before that, we hit the (rather weak) limitations of the human eye. Now don't get me wrong; I would love to take a scanning electron microscope to my generation 42 HDTV and see the hidden messages on Intel chips during their commercials, or the microbes on Jodie Foster's hands in Contact, but aren't we focusing in the wrong direction? Maybe our A/V technology is just good enough that we can start focusing on something a little more useful, like, say, I don't know, a cure for cancer or something...
I can see it now... The MPAA will sue anyone distributing zip/gzip/arj/etc and file splitters/joiners because they allows their "undistributable" 300 GB movies to be packaged in little (compressed) chunks and sent over the internet... :)
What's the typical compression ratio for a movie (lossless)? How about lossy (eg MPEG) compression? Though I shudder to think how long it would take to MPEG-encode something that huge...