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Rent A Downloadable Movie
Syn Ack writes: "The New York Times is reporting (free account, blah blah blah) that five (5) major Hollywood studios (MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures) are going to begin offering downloadable time restricted movies. The video will remain watchable for 30 days but will become unplayable 24 hours after it has been viewed at all. Sounds like if you start the movie at all, the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL. Downloads are expected to be in the 500MB range. However downloads will only be available well after the DVD release of the same movie so as to not cut into DVD sales. Expect to see something late this year or early next. Perhaps the Music People can get some tips from the movie people?" What a bargain.
Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time! :=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Please don't forget to put your name on top of the sheet.
Next week, we'll discuss the ROT-13 encryption used in some EBooks. Class dismissed.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Meep. Wrong answer. The copyright holder can rip whatever the fuck they want.
Just like Linus Torvalds can sell you a binary-only Linux version or Hans Reiser can do commercial versions of reiserfs.
Hmmm, spend 7 hours downloading the movie which I then have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting it, or drive to the video store 2 minutes away, rent it, watch it at my convienice and as much as I want over the next 5 days.
Factor in, sitting at the computer to watch it, or putting the dvd on the 61" tv with the full surround system.
<sarcasm>Hmmm that's a tough one.</sarcasm>
This sounds like it would be cool, but I don't think your average dial-up user is going to wait to download 500mb.
Besides, 250 of the 500mb are previews..
Possibly something crappy like Real.
Although, it would be quite ironic if they were to adopt DiVX as a codec!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
That's my guess. Of course, if they preview the format and ask for comment like SDMI I give it 3 months from the preview.
If there is a hardware component involved, I'll give it another..oh, say 3 more months.
Thats my guess.
Still, I think this is a good thing, as the MPAA basically has no choice about whether the stuff goes online or not. They may as well offer it online themselves, and if they make it reasonable I bet the majority of the public will pay to use it, DMCA or no DMCA.
Of course, if it's successful, the MPAA will give credit to the DMCA for stopping piracy, and if it's not a hit the MPAA will blame pirates. I have a feeling though the success or failure will more have to do with the number of people with broadband and their willingess to watch movies on their computers.
Oh, and if Passport is required to use it, I'll be pissed.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
by "I bet the majority of the public will pay to use it" I mean the majority of the public THAT USES IT will pay for it, not the majority of the public at large, because I mean, only a tiny percentage are going to have the bandwidth and want to wait hours and hours for it to download.
;)
Plus people with shared bandwidth are gonna piss off their neighbors
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Perhaps this is too obvious, but this seems to have a few fatal flaws. If the article resolves them somehow, I'd be happy to hear, but I don't have a NY Times account and don't really want one.
First, people don't watch movies on their computer. I spend about 15x more time on my computers than in front of a TV, but I still watch all of my movies on TV (mostly for the screen size, my chair and sound are superior on my computers). For most people they have larger screens, better sound, more comfortable seating for a group, etc.
Perhaps the most obvious is the 500 mb download. I rarely make such large downloads with my cable connection at home and network connection at work (1/2 T1 now, soon to be full T1). In fact, the only downloads I can think of that large are Linux distribution CDs, of which I have several. Why spend 30 minutes or much, much longer when I can make it to the video store, rent, and travel time both ways in about 20 minutes? We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming sources personally.
So of all internet users, only those with high bandwidth connections can use the service. There goes a good deal of potential customers. I don't think there is much of a market left. I actually think that DivX (the rentable DvDs that diabled themselves) had more chance of succeeding than this ill-fated concept.
Of course, since these are so obvious I hope the article dealt with them.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Didn't we just go through this with the e-book story?
There's no such thing as the "rental" of electronic information!
If you can view it on your screen, through a machine you own, you can make a digital duplicate of it! That's all there is to it, no matter how long the big companies try to struggle to come up with the next best way to cripple/encrypt the content that you have paid for.
And as soon as someone cracks whatever scheme they plan to use to "time-limit" the movies, we'll be seeing the lawsuits flying. As usual.
Until the media megacorporations realize and accept this (I'm not holding my breath waiting for that), we're just going to see the Skylarov incident and the DMCA invoked to hurt innocent people over and over and over again.
User: slash2001
Pass: slash2001
Enjoy.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
In principle, it could be much more convenient than existing PPV services from a cable provider, but the single-play thing isn't going to fly. If I rent a DVD at blockbuster, I might play it once alone, then show it to a friend, etc.
What the MPAA needs to understand, is that in this day and age the way to make money selling content online is to be the most *convenient* source for the content, not the most *restrictive* source.
Hell, why do people subscribe to porn sites, when they have a newsfeed? Because the material available in alt.binaries.nekkid.women is sporadic, and flooded with spam.
Maybe someday they'll figure it out, but I'm not holding my breath.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run.
Obviously they're going to develop a proprietry software package used to play the movies and control the copyright. It'll also have to be memory resident (or possibly run on boot) if they want to delete the film after 30 days.
To be really honest it sounds just like a dot-bomb venture:
The studios that will be partners in the service are MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures. Noticeably absent were Disney and 20th Century Fox, although sources close to Disney said that it intended to announce its own video-on-demand service within 10 days. Fox issued a statement late this afternoon saying that it, too, would announce plans soon for such a service.
...
The real question, though, is how many people really want to download movies onto their personal computers.
"To be really honest, we have no idea," Mr. Waterman said.
To be read: "Oh wow! We're going to put a product on to the internet which'll be really cool and people can buy said product anytime they want. And here's the cool thing! We don't even know if said product is useful!"
Other manufacturers: "Oh I'm going to do that too!"
More manufacturers: "Me three! Me three! Let's sink money into technology just because it's technology and forget all about wether or not we will make money."
Yes I am a cynic.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Downloadable movies? Haha, who are they kidding? Ok, let's go over the math again.
First, 90% of American households with internet access STILL USE DIAL-UP. Like people want to sit there and download a 500 meg file to watch it ONCE.
Secondly, those with broadband already have easy sources for movies currently in theaters or just released on DVD. Kazaa, Gnutella, Hotline, FTP, IRC, etc...
Thirdly, why would anyone want to wait to rent movies that are available as DVDs? If you have US Postal Service, you can sign up for NetFlix and rent DVDs thru the mail. It's $19.95 a month and you get to check out three DVDs at a time. They have new releases and foreign films. There aren't any late fees and to return DVDs, just drop them in the return envelope they provide. Mad easy! (Only problem with NetFlix is that since I'm located in NJ, it takes a while for them to ship and receive the DVDs I rent.)
w00t!
Rangers Lead the Way!
I don't know about anyone else but I treat downloadable movies (ie cam rips) as previews, mainly because I'm in Australia and we get movies some times months after the US. I download the first half and watch it while the second half is downloading. If the movie is bad I'll cancel the second half. If it is an ok movie I'll watch all of it. If it is really good I'll actually pay to go and watch it when it comes out. They are not good enough quality to replace the real thing and no substitute for the big screen.
Other than this the only indicator of whether or not you are going to like a movie is the trailer, an advertisement designed to make you want to go and see it, not to help you make an informed choice.
Most games you can get a demo of, books you can read a bit of in the store or at a library, a car you can take for a test run but movies you have to just fork out the cash and hope that its good. In my mind that just isn't good enough - if the movie is worth it I will pay to see it - otherwise I'll save my money.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
It seems like there's something very wrong with that idea of movies that "erase themselves off your hard drive" after 24 hours...Why does this sort of thing just give me the creeps? Is that just me?
It seems to be part of a bigger picture: The industies in control are literally trying to change the entire way of the Internet right now, to make it fit a more "profitable" model without them trying to change their existing business models.It seems a strange idea to me that anything or anyone but me should control what happens on my hard drive, but that's exactly what we are seeing...software that takes control of your personal computer and works it into a business model contrary to natural structure of the decentralized Internet we use today.
This little thing is not that scary...But behind the guise of lots of these little things lurks the ominous monster of a global information infrastructure controlled by corporations, not by individuals. We need to take this seriously...
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
DeCSS was created, and quickly became widespread, because it was the only way to play DVDs under Linux. If the studios have learned their lesson (and I bet they have), they'll release players for as many operating systems as they can think of. This might not slow down the development of a crack, but the crack would not become as widespread, and the media would be less favorable toward it than it was toward DeCSS.
The shareholder is always right.
Registration Free Link
If, on the other hand, they follow the example of DirecTV pay-per-view, with a higher price point than most video stores, or if the video quality is no better than a typical 1-CD DiVX rip, it probably won't do so well.
The key difference between this and DiVX, in my mind, is the 30-day hard expiration date. That makes this proposition seem a lot less slimy and risky to me. With a DiVX disc, the theory was you'd be able to buy the disc and wait a year before activating it, which obviously was no good when DiVX Inc. went out of business in the meantime. But in this case, from what I can tell from the article, it's more like a one-day rental from a video store; you go into it expecting to not have the movie any more after a particular time. If they fold, it has no impact on movies you downloaded more than a month prior.
I imagine there'll be people who find this new proposal distasteful but aren't bothered by one-day videotape rentals (which similarly limit you to a 24-hour viewing window, unless you want to rack up late fees). I'll be curious to hear what makes one business model more acceptable than the other, if anyone wants to take that question up.
On another note, I wonder what the legal issues would be if you rented a movie and dumped it to videotape using your computer's TV output, then erased the tape within the 30-day rental window. Would that be considered the same thing as taping a TV show (protected by the Supreme Court) or would it be like renting a video, copying it, and returning the original? It might not be a DMCA issue in this case, since you wouldn't be using a protection-circumvention technology.
Although, it would be quite ironic if they were to adopt DiVX as a codec!
Adopt DiVX, FOR GREAT JUSTICE!
(okay, depends on whose side you are on for the definition of justice...)
What bothers me most about this isn't so much that they're considering it, it's actually logical and it may even have a market. What bothers me is that they'll likely charge an insane amount for it.
$5-10 per view (I can easily see that) or $20-$30 for the DVD? Take your pick. I'm sure their marketing department could justify full DVD price.
This would really fly if they did it on a monthly subscription, allowing several movies per month for a very reasonbly low price.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Then there's the rest of the world, although the US movie industry has historically and routinely screwed the non-US audience over, from bad dubs to delayed releases to restrictions such as region codes AND languages -- most DVDs sold in Germany only run with the German subtitles on if you want the original English sound.
Of course, downloading 500MB can also be frightfully expensive in most of the world, and the quality is going to be questionable, as other posts pointed out. We probably would've heard about some new CODEC or format. A 700MB DIVX;) -- if done right -- gets me about 90 minutes at 640x360 (like... say... Fletch), and I ain't paying squat for some 320x180 RealPlayer version of any film.
woof.
Those who do cannot remember Santayana are condemned to misquote him.
Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time! :=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...
Well, the article says it will be priced similarly to pay-per-view movies. Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.), except that you have to use your computer to view it. People buy pay-per-view movies now. Therefore, the only factor that its success hinges upon is whether people who buy pay-per-view moves are able to use this, and don't mind watching on a monitor (unless they have TV output). The time expiration in and of itself can't cause it to fail, because pay-per-view movies sell. Also, they might later decide to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of watching on a computer.
Actually, I don't think this will go over all that well, but that's because I suspect that the intersection of the set of people who buy pay-per-view movies and the set of people who want to watch movies using their computers is small. My main point is that people already buy time-limited movies for the price they will be charging.
If they would allow me to view movies in the timeframe that they are in the theater, or just before DVD rentals, this would provide value to me. Charge me as much as a seat in a movie theater, but keep the revenue all to yourself.
But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.
The movie industry is stuck in the same paradigm. They want to figure out where internet technology can be used to ADD to their current offerings. (Purely chasing up the revenue tree.) What they should be doing is asking, "What do our customers want?" But, there is that paradigm again. We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.
See how the whole mindset feeds on itself?
OK, for now there's not going to be a huge amount of people who want this, but as it becomes more popular I can see that the mainstream will pick it up much more willingly. There'll always be people with cracked movies just like there's still people who sell pirate videos, but if this service is simple enough then people will use it. People use Pay-Per-View when they could go and buy a priate copy of a movie for less money, so why shouldn't this work.
Additionally, they could eventually extend this to their whole movie library. Want to see some obscure flick from the 50's that never made it onto VHS? Well all you'll need to do is swing by IMDB, click on a link, and you'll be able to download it. This is a good idea (definitely better than just ignoring the problem and letting other people distribute your movies for free), and once they work out this niggles and broadband becomes more widespread I can see the service becoming incredibly popular.
The list of dumb ideas from dumb people hall of fame:
-CSS (if i can see it i can copy it)
-SDMI (they should have learnt from css)
-CPRM (the hard drive protection)
-That thing to disable electronics with GPS
-DMCA (not such a dumb idea as an evil one)
-SafeAudio (cut off your nose to spite your face but didn't work)
-WMA (we want to wean people off mp3 and onto superior digital rights management)
-DivX (the company)
-eBook (rot-13)
-Renting films (you cant rent data. period.)
Anything More?
Most companies have some sort of technical advisor/analyst/window-cleaner who can tell them if an idea is dumb or not. Obviously these studios don't. This is _very_ serious, these people along with those responsible for the list above, are making business decisions everyday. Its plainly obvious to see that something is very wrong here so i have come up with some possible explanations:
1. They are on crack or some other expensive narcotic and need money to keep the habit growing.
2. They have been abducted and replaced by aliens who have no business experience.
3. They never went to harverd etc.. and just lied their ways into high positions and now they don't know what to do.
4. They are just really really really dumb.
5. They actually have a plan and all these seamingly dumb ideas somehow fit together to produce something big that we couldn't possibly figure out.
-tfga
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/ 17STUD.html
As always.
Hmm...
Lets see. A standard 56k dial-up connection gets about 5.25 KB/s with a *good* server and ISP. The movie is 500 MB. That's about 1,625 minutes, or around 27 hours to download, +/- a few hours.
On a 750 Kb/s cable or DSL line it would take between 1-170 minutes to download, streaming if the movie is at least that long.
Anyhow, for most people they're saying that after you wait over a day to download it, that you won't be able to play it possibily and if you do it will be but once?
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
"Didn't you say the neighbors had a copy of this on DVD?"
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
As we have Streamgate here, this is somehow pretty much what those hollywood-companies try to do. You will get a DSL (with 1024kbit/s download and 128kbit/s upload) and you could watch movies which will be "streamed" to you and could be watched for 24hrs.
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/1 7STUD.html
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Ah, but at least then the movie studios will be able to declare movies over the internet a failed experiment, and persuade the legislators to pass bills banning movies being distributed over the internet, or in fact in any form the studios don't want!
Somehow it didn't copy right; I'll post a working version.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/1 7STUD.html
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.)
You don't have a TiVo, do you?
What if the p1r@t3D DVD rips came out earlier and looked better?
Oh.
Wait.
The rips will be out earlier..
Now. About the 500mb file / encoding / view part.
I've put divx (700mb encoded rips, not the failed divx, btw, did this in canada, where it is still legal) movies (via TV out) on a 54" TV and could not tell the difference between that and a DVD (I have a cheap sound system, i.e. 2 speakers).
In any case, it'd be interesting to see how they shave 200mb off the file. I'm sure people will, um. adapt it.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
That's quite an interresting thought... when you come to the video shop.. of course you can run out through the door without paying for the casette. Do you do that ?
People tend to be willing to pay for things they like, but also because they dont want to be criminals. They dont like paying overprices, and they dont like paying to small either (thats only annoying). But a dollar or three to be able to leave the evil polluting car in the garage and sit back and relax to a good video.
And.. ofcourse DVD is a lot better, but compared to VHS, a 500MB divx (or other high compression format) is a fair competitor. I cant count the nr of times I rent a VHS with annoyingly bad quality, flickering picture etc...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
of the movie studio's
/.'s Squadron of Attack Elephants?
... lets run down the options:
i mean, seriously, do they employ
ok
Movie Studio's Official Format:
Lifetime of file: 30 days
Watching period: 24 hours
File size: 500 MB
Encoding: Proprietary (in all likelyhood)
Interface: Most likely pretty useless and annoying
Availability: Some time after DVD release
Cost: Something
DivX:
Lifetime of file: Unlimited
Watching period: Unlimited
File size: 600MB-1200MB depending on quality desired
Encoding: DivX (mpeg-4)
Interface: Anything you want
Availability: At or Pre-DVD release
Cost: Nothing
Yeah, sure the new format is gonna be successful
(opinion brought to you in part by Scarcasm(tm))
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
How about all those only entitled to 1GB/month or whatever before they get billed for excess bandwidth?
Who is seriously going to pay $15 to rent a movie?
http://www.themeparks.ie
The highest throughput I know of for an FTP server is Walnut Creek's record of 1.39TB over the course of a day, that's about 115 movies per hour or so. Let's say you can provide this sort of throughput to several servers all the time. How much bandwidth is required for this system to make any money at all? It's pretty fantastic, especially when you figure in the cost of maintaining the hardware which has to store all these movies. To figure if this will make any money at all, decide how many potential viewers you're going to have. How many people have the bandwidth necessary to download these movies that don't have DirecTV/Dish Network (who can pay a couple bucks for an all day movie pass on a PPV movie channel) and aren't so fucking lazy that can't drive their secretary asses down to the video store. This isn't really anything I couldn't do with DirecTV and a TiVo.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
1. Order movies for later viewing, it downloads to your TIVO or similar device.
2. Movies NEVER to be on DVD, or old TV shows of the same. (now that I might pay for, if the movie was like 2 dollars or something, tv show 2 to 3 dollars per 5 episodes.
For existing content, they can forget it. If I can get it on DVD the charge for the movie that I HAVE to download would have to be in the 2 dollar range to make it even worth my time.
(still downloading to a computer is useless overall to me, I have a big TV just for watching movies, and my computer is NOWHERE near my entertainment system)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that this is going to be limited to Windows? It will, unfortunately, limit their audience as I would have thought that Mac's would be good for this kind of thing. Oh, well...
Legal: Yes
DiVX
Legal: No
That right there is enough to make most people avoid DiVX. Most people don't want to be criminals, even if they know they won't get caught.
"Sounds like if you start the movie at all, the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL. "
Saaaaay...what kinda movies are you watching anyway, perverts? Oh wait, you meant 'peeking'...
________________
Private Essayist
I'm not looking forward to this garbage clogging up the net just yet. Now it's still easier to rent a VHS copy on the way home from the grocery store. There are some people it will be good for, who live way out there where there's only one video shop censored by the local prudes. For the rest of us, the 9 Gig downloads of common movies will be a drag. Expect a novelty peak of joe AOL's next year downloading "I love Lucy" to make "I love you" look small.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've run into the same problem with Media Player, as well as RealPlayer, and a few others. The workaround I've found is to designate the screen you want to display the video on as the "Primary display" in the Desktop Properties control panel. Then you can watch videos on that display. It's a little annoying if you don't really want it as your "primary" display, but it'lll let you watch the videos okay, while continuing to work on your other monitor.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Who will pay pay slightly less and $500 for a TV out card to get a shithouse quality movie(paticualry after going though a consumer level TVOUT card) on your 4foot plasma?
You're targetting the wrong demographic.
Think any TV-out card (nVidia, ATI, etc.) going to a standard TV. The type of people who buy a $500 TV-out card and have a plasma television are also the type of people who use component video and $500+ DVD players.
I think the type of people to download a 500M movie are the same type of people who download DivX movies from eDonkey and burn them to CD anyway... quality should be about the same and if you have a ballsy-enough computer to do all the postprocessing it looks like a good VHS tape on a normal TV. Hell it looks like a DVD to me on my 17" monitor but I end up dropping frames since my computer isn't ballsy enough. :-(
Have you tried a vbox time limited demo? As of late companies are getting much more sophisticated at defeating this technique. While not perfect, they can seriously screw things up when you try everything you can think of to fool the system. Quite amazing.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If " A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run" is all, then burn a copy onto a CD so that it won't be able to erase itself.
:)
of course the old changing the clock in the BIOS trick might work too
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL
:)
i think it refers to the habit (which i, of course, would never condone, let alone indulge in) of taking hallucinogenic drugs before sitting down to watch a movie or video.
2001 on the big screen is very good.
deus does not exist but if he does
...so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL.
That sounds strangely sexual..
If Landau actually beleived what he was saying, then he would use a standardized and non-copy-protected format instead Yet Another abomination. Software developers have understood the uselessness of copy protection for many years.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Another major problem with this scheme is that the video quality is going to be awful. 500Mb means it's going to be equivalent to VCD/MPEG1 which is about the same as a cheap VCR.
A DVD stream uses MPEG2 and gets up to 10 Mb/s. If you assume an average of 5Mb/s (which is low) and a 90 minute movie, that's 27GB.
They could be planning to use MPEG4 which is better quality, but even then they'll be compressing the hell out of it to get a film down to that size.
I'd rather drive to the video store or use NetFlix and watch a real DVD. Not to mention I can do that a lot sooner after the films release.
In my experience downloading... erm, "independant" films through gnutella, I've found that a 500mb DIVX file is simply not going to be very good quality. And I'm not talking about amazing sharpness or biting sounds. At 500mb, there are often annoying intruding audio artifacts. The video is a tenth of the resolution of DVD and it looks like a JPEG on the highest compression setting.
The gap between 500 and 800mb really seems to make all the difference in the world. At 800mb, the quality is just good enough that you can forget about the artifacts and get into the movie.
-Erik
P.S. I know the length of the movie changes the file size. I'm generalizing here.
Apparantly, you can replace the www in the URL with archive for any NYT story and it will Just Work.
I don't care so much about movies, since I don't imagine they'll be releasing anything for download that isn't already available on DVD. However, I'd love to see the TV networks pick this up! How many times have you said, "Doh! I missed The Simpsons again!" (Or, more likely, "Doh! Fox screwed around with its schedule again!") I'd pay money to be able to download a missed episode of my favorite shows. Make 'em available for download a week after the original air date, and I'll guarrantee they'll find an audience.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Because the resolution is going to be very bad. A DVD has a multi-GB capacity. 500MB is good for a choppy or poorly resolved 320x160 feature leangth movie.
This is not the kind of quality you invite pals to watch at your place.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
It is a preemptive measure. They want to get it into place before such trading systems get popular so that they can avoid the bad publicity the music industry is being hit with. They don't want congressmen asking them why they are stalling on electronic services (as has happened to the music industry.)
Six years ago, the idea of a downloadable music service would have seemed flawed as well (too slow at 14.4, not enough harddrive space on the average machine), but ask yourself this: if the music industry had a system for downloading music in 1995, would Napster have the millions of users it does now? Probably not.
The cake is a pie
Cough %$Bullshit$% a DIVx rip from dvd under the mystical 700mb cd limit or thereabouts for a 2 hour flick has more artifacts than King Tut's Funeral Chamber.
Without postprocessing, you're 100% correct. I use mplayer with the opendivx libraries. On a dual celeron 466 and no postprocessing, it is what I would consider the digital equivalent to an EP recording of a copy. However with the postprocessing set to its highest level (4 for DIVx) it is wonderful. Of course, my system isn't good enough to handle this so the audio gets out of sync with the video very quickly. :-)
System: Abit BP6 (Dual Celeron 466), 256M RAM, GeForce2MX-400 (32M). Yes this is in fullscreen under X 4.0.3 with the latest nVidia drivers (1251 I believe). The movie: Varsity Blues. Filesize: 629441536.
Ease of use - AOL Joe isn't l33t. No codes, no dongles, no Captain Crunch decoder wheels. Quick initial registration, download and double-click, get billed monthly.
:)
There's a better argument for the importance of ease of use than "AOL Joe isn't l33t". They'll be competing against P2P services like Audiogalaxy, which is extremely easy to use, as in you click buttons next to a few songs in a list on a web page, and your AG client downloads the songs as soon as it gets a chance with no additional user interaction.
Actually, now that I think about it, the movie and music industries might not be able to compete against Audiogalaxy in ease/efficiency of use because of Amazon's "one-click purchase" patent. This could be interesting
The shareholder is always right.
I predict if you can fit a whole movie in 500mb, then we'll soon be seeing a way of decoding these movies and putting them on a CDR. Then people will be motivated to take advantage of this - and keep them forever.
There's a lot of people out there creating VCDs. It's getting pretty easy to put video on a VCD, and many dvd players will play it (even though some don't even mention that they will). Some dvd players will only play VCDs encoded on CDRW's since they're closer to the laser frequency of DVD's than CDR's.
The original format is VCD, which is 352x240 at 1150kbits/sec and will play on most dvd players. Then there's svcd, xvcd and xsvcd with higher bit rates and faster drive spin speeds.
a good info site is: http://www.vcdhelp.com
It's mostly PC-oriented. I'd like to hear about people who've created VCDs under linux. (most win98 users can't create video files greater than 2g)
I believe that was after the plant that manufactured 80% of the d-ram chips burned up in hongkong. Other than that incident $40/meg was the standard price for many years.
Does anybody know if Criterion CSS-encrypt *all* of their discs?
They distribute the first disc in the following list of pre-1923 DVDs for sale at CNL (The links may ask you to login as guest):
Ok, it appears there's a lot more there than I thought there would be. The list of 1921 discs is longer than the 1922 list and I haven't even checked for older ones. I'll stop here, but I'll bet at least one of those discs are CSS encrypted.
It would be interesting to know for sure, though.
Do you seriously believe that movies that have passed into the pay-per-view window are of lower quality than those still in theaters or being sold on DVD?
The standard is more are they at least the standard of a TV broadcast or VHS tape.
But yeah, I wholly agree that at the moment most of the people who could use such a service are not the people who would use the service. But it's a step in the right direction and it could eventually lead to a worthwhile distribution model.
And do you really have a distribution chain called "Nobody Beats the Wiz"? :)