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DVD Player Chipsets To Support Windows Media Files
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article in EETimes, Microsoft previewed its next generation Windows Media technology, and said that chipset makers that account for 90% of home DVD players will be including the technology in their upcoming chipsets. I hope the various courts looking into Microsoft's monopoly examine this closely, there is a lot of potential for Microsoft to extend its monopoly here. The next logical step would be for them to pay movie studios to produce Windows Media format movies that are available before or cost less than regular DVD format, that is, if they are made available in regular DVD format at all! This would also be a neat way for studios to force us all to upgrade our existing DVD players use the now-cracked CSS." Ton van der Liet points out this article on ZDNet, writing: "Microsoft touts the advantages of Windows Media, such as longer playback. Wasn't MPEG-4 supposed to do this? And aren't the newest Windows Media codecs based on a draft of the MPEG-4 standard?"
neat - that a modern compression format (post-mpeg2) will be supported on DVD hardware
sad - that its not an open one
I DO NOT want WMP technology in my DVD player...
I'll refuse to buy one that includes.
You DVD manufactures listening to me? I *know* you read slashdot.
It definitely looks anti-competitive -- many other companies and persons have codecs that are just as good or better than Windows Media. Its only Microsoft's clout that gets them 'in bed' with the DVD chipset manufacturers. Apple, for one, will not like this.
I don't think that WMF really has the same potential at all as what is currently in use in DVD players. Microsoft doesn't have that kind of power. They can't change industry standards in industries they aren't even a part of!
What?
...because I presume this means I get to keep my music in WMA format now to playback on my DVD player. :)
Now, honestly, you don't think the studios are going to start producing WMV versions of movies instead of standard MPEG-2, do you, just because some of the players will be able to do it? There's just too much market penatration right now for the MPEG-2 based players. Look at how few and far between movies are with DTS (and most of them have simultaneous DD), even though it's present in many receivers and DVD players.
I expect this means that people will be able to burn CD-Rs with WMA and WMV format media and play them on their DVD player. From where I'm standing, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. One wonders why Apple wasn't jumping right into this kind of thing to make sure QuickTime was playable there, too...
So DVDs will have WMA support. Good. More people will buy them and use them. Don't say that "they suck because the do WMA," start complaining if they ONLY do WMA. I think it is good if a DVD player does more, just more options. Imagine one that could do MP*, WMA, avi, vcd, etc, etc. ....
That woudl be a good thing.
And aren't the newest Windows Media codecs based on a draft of the MPEG-4 standard?
Sure they are. Only Microsoft will "improve" on them, so that Mediaplayer will play standard MPEG-4, but will only work better with Microsoft (propriety) Improved MPEG-4, thus killing the standard.
When MS starts pushing to get their media formats implemented into hardware, it won't have as much opportunity to change. With the pace of video codecs these days, your DVD player will probably be obsolete by the time you get it home.
"Life has improved immeasurably since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously." - Hunter S. Thompson
MPEG-4, and Windows Media may well do great with low bit rate video, but that means it is more compressed. MPEG-2 does very well with higher bit rates and is designed for high quality video, not reasonable quality at a low data rate.
Any new format to replace DVD will likely have to deal with HDTV, a high bit rate high resolution video format. What MS is doing is positioning themelves to supply that new format; they aren't really trying to replace DVD. That'll put them in control of a very lucritive format for decades.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
I can't see this replacing MPEG-2 in DVD players. DVD players are reaching wide market penetration in many countries. That means that there is a huge installed base that is not compatible with these new technologies. The producers and distributors are not going to want to deal with an incompatible media format that increases their production and inventory costs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
... dare i ask whats next? It sounds like decent technology, but its a crying shame it isn't open source... but then again, I would far more trust those fans of open source to find something that much better...
..i think I'll stick to using mplayer, ogle and xmms, thanks.
However...If this "Corona" is freeware, then Real Players going to be in for a major run for its money, because afaik real player has gone from free ware to a 10 dollar purchase. (At least thats what the latest yelling and groaning match of my windows using friends has been)
-- RJ
Hey Slashdot editors, why not make yourselves useful for a change and start tracking and informing us of the producers that resist assimilation, so we can support them in the only meaningful way there is, with our wallets, and keep them viable?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
This is no good. Have the DVD chipset manufactures lost their faking minds? I will set aside the obvious security bashing (ie: Hasn't media player had a few security issues lately? WANT YOUR DVD PLAYER TO GET HACKED? THEN YOUR TV??!?!? THEN YOUR INTERNET READY MICROWAVE??!???), and say that even if MP codecs provide longer playback than traditional raw DVD data, so do other codecs. I'm not going to try and say 'Uh.. quicktime has even better compression!' because I'm not sure which codec really does the best, I just dont' know that much about them.
Bill, not EVERYONE hates you yet.... remember the yet part. Personally I think the open source community needs to get its ass in gear and start pushing their technology. I don't know as if it would have helped in this case, but what _could_ have happened if some open source codec happened to be presented to the DVD manufacturers before M$ got there? Of course M$ could have thrown them a sweet deal and stole it back. But not to discourage!
If OSS starts presenting itself more agressively (Not sourceforge, or OSDN, but the actually programmers), then maybe we can start to push the open source mentality and get software written by the people that use it on some of these nifty devices. Just my two cents.
Can all fish swim?
Divx redux anyone?
No big deal, we (consumers I mean) will kill it the same way we killed that piece of crap Divx that Circuit City was pushing. We won't buy it. Just get the word out to all your friends about this, and make them understand why they should not purchase one.
Nice, looks like another comment written in TrollMaster2000...
Before I get flamed - I'm not totally against Microsoft as I use some of their products in my daily life, I'm just getting really tired of them trying to "control all that you see and hear" to borrow a phrase.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
ZDNet had the story yesterday. The next version of MS windows media player is scodenamed Corona. It's double the DVD quality and 5.1 sound.
A new video codec will boost performance 20 percent over current-generation video codecs, and will enable the playback of high-definition 720 x 1,280 progressive scan video at 24 frames per second, said Will Poole, vice president of the Windows Digital Media Division of Microsoft. Using Windows Media's 4-to-1 compression ratio advantage over MPEG-2, "studios could put all the Godfather movies or an entire musician's discography on a single CD," said Poole.
boycotting is great from an individual, moral point of view but think about the people who make DVD's and their players. Who's their market? Fact of the matter is that video codecs and software monopolies go waaaay over the head of the average joe - can you really see the herds of western civilisation getting riled at this?
so boycott it, and I and half of slashdot will do the same until they've forgotten about it (should take about a week going by past experience) and we can all feel good but its not going to make a blind bit of difference.
sorry to play the pessimist
The entire point of DVD region encoding is to restrict the availability of these products to allow the producer to sell where they want, for the price they want.
It hasn't worked. It broke. Damn!
This may give them an out. Just start to release to the new standard gradually - dual release (with extra 'extras') to start, then early release, then exclusive release. DVD players are cheap - a lot of people on this site would upgrade if a 20 DVD Star Wars set came out in the new format - you think Bill couldn't persuad George?? "HOW many zeros???"
I don't think this is the format that will do it - but in the next 2 or 3 years a new DVD format will come along with WAY tougher restrictions.
Actually. I think 10-view DVDs will be the next big thing from the studios. They'll sell those babies for $5-10 and you'll only be able to play them 10 times (they put a film on the disk which goes opaque in the laser). Then its useless. They'll push them through rental shops to start with.
I hope the various courts looking into Microsoft's monopoly examine this closely, there is a lot of potential for Microsoft to extend its monopoly here.
Yes, I'm sure they'll hear about this, but will they care, no. The problem here is the focus of the anti-trust suits focus on the Windows OS and abusing that monopoly. Microsoft isn't extending themselves into the DVD market (and the console market) by abusing they're monopoly position in the OS market. Remember, MS is allowed to compete in as many markets as it likes, as long as they compete in a fair (and I use the word loosely) manner, and they don't gain a position in that market due to a monopolistic position in another market.
Last Christmas everyone and their mother got a DVD player. DVD already has serious market penetration, and it's set to last the next 10 years or so. People are not going to go out and buy new DVD players any time soon.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I sig, therefore I was.
Since Microsoft couldn't even do the DVD CSS correctly with their XBox, how would they come up with their own format.
I hope that I'm not the only one to spot just how ironic this whole thing is.
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
How old is MPEG-2? How long has MPEG-4 been in development? What are the folks that develop the standards paid by the hour? How many hours are there in the years it's been in development?
We've had DivX for how many years now? Why not just polish it up, get it out there in the hopes that it will take in the marketplace and start work on MPEG-5?
ARG. I need new gadgets...
-Pete M
so boycott it, and I and half of slashdot will do the same until they've forgotten about it (should take about a week going by past experience)...
<sarcastic>Why is this even an issue? Isn't slashdot already boycotting all DVD stuff because of the DeCSS case?</sarcastic>
Wasn't MPEG-4 supposed to do this? And aren't the newest Windows Media codecs based on a draft of the MPEG-4 standard?
:)
Yes it was, but the marketing guys were in a harry and they first thought about you...
Dude, do you know what "leveraging a monopoly" means? It means that they use thier ubiquity (monopoly) in other markets to place undue pressure on existing markets, in order to have their new products made the standard.
Face the facts: Microsoft has enough money to outright BUY a movie production house, several directors, and a DVD manufacturer. One big blockbuster of a movie (the "killer app" phomenon), and Microsoft formats suddenly exist on every new DVD player sold. Some kickback (in the form of "reduced-cost licensing") to the non-MS DVD makers to start dropping support for non-MS formats, and guess what? New DVD producers will begin to only make movies in the MS format.
2 + 2 = 4.
TheNewWazoo
What's the purpose of this? So what a DVD player can play WMF. Yeah for them.
Actually, I'm quite jaded on this issue. First, did you know that the MPAA gets cuts from every DVD sold? (You did)... not surprised. But did you also know that the MPAA gets liscensing fees for DVD tech from about $1,000,000. There's a reason China created the standard of SVCD. I'd rather not contribute to an orginazation that makes draconian 'rules' and essentially legislates thier tech to us. Instead of a DVD player, I invest in svcd's and have a tv in/out 500 mHz athalon for our movie purposes at home. VHS is just fine for us.
Josh Crawley
Does this mean that we'll have to upgrade our DVD drives every 4 months because their "obsolete" or "MS integrates IE 5 with DVD drives" or "MS has a hotfix for DVD security hole number 348647285"?
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
96kbit WMA burned on a DVD-R disc and played in a DVD player... assume an average of 500KB/minute, 4.8 gigs, 9,830.4 minutes of music >= 128k MP3 quality!
Yay to that!
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Which of the two sides (M$ or DVD manufacturers) feel like they are doing the other a favor?
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Franklin
If DVD players include WMV formats, then they could very start using flashable ROMs or some other method of updating codecs by the end user. If this happens, then DVD players could become much more powerful by adding support for the latest greatest technologies.
just like slashdot is boycotting gifs. Except for the slashdot icons.
Mostly this is a good idea. Makes it easy to create video-discs that are playable in DVD-players. There is nothing wrong about that.
The problem is the format, which is closed, proprietary and patented. It gives Microsoft total control over it. This can only contribute to increasing their already dominant monopoly situation.
I just cannot understand what would be so wrong about Microsoft having to release all of their protocols and formats under royalty-free licenses (Or RAND for commercial entities). Closed protocols and formats have ABSOLUTELY no benefits to the consumers whatsoever.
Windows XP has built into it now the capacity to capture and edit video (so say the ads) but *ONLY in the Windows Media format*
Stop. Ponder that. Consider that Apple is now pushing their own OS's ability to capture, edit, and burn DVD video. In MPEG2 no less.
God forbid MS would just *use the existing standards* that are in place and working-very-well-thank-you-very-much. I guess they get to claim this move as an 'innovation.'
Blech. Signatures.
A new video codec will boost performance 20 percent over current-generation video codecs, and will enable the playback of high-definition 720 x 1,280 progressive scan video at 24 frames per second, said Will Poole, vice president of the Windows Digital Media Division of Microsoft. Using Windows Media's 4-to-1 compression ratio advantage over MPEG-2, "studios could put all the Godfather movies or an entire musician's discography on a single CD," said Poole.
Ok, I might believe that windows media compresses 20% better than DVD. But I refuse to believe that using windows media format, you can fit ALL the Godfather movies on ONE CD.
Godfather 1: 175 minutes
Godfather 2: 200 minutes
Godfather 3: 170 minutes
Total = 545 minutes. Even on a 700 meg CD, that's 1.28 megabytes per minute for audio and video, or 23 KILOBYTES per second. . I wonder how good that's gonna look?
more anti-microsoft pile-ons...
"The next logical step would be for them to pay movie studios to produce Windows Media format movies that are available before or cost less than regular DVD format, that is, if they are made available in regular DVD format at all!"
Apple's already there. They have major licensing deals with movie studios to ONLY release new movie trailers in Quicktime format. It's a PITA to see these trailers if you don't want Apples newest nag-soft. (Pay for QT? Let me get this straight, I'm gonna pay so that I can have the priviledge of watching commercials? Yea!)
As far as the hardware goes, I think it's a great idea. A lower-bandwidth higher-quality codec built into chips? I salivate over the idea of DVD-Quality Video at DSL bandwidth speeds. (And you can't even begin to tell me that uber-lossy-DIVX is DVD quality.)
Geeze guys, as long as some card manufacturers make linux drivers, why complain?
Most people here on /. tend to get up in arms about one thing or another and a good bit of us do something about it. Well, now is the time for a fair majority of us to really do something and let the manufacturers know WITH YOUR DOLLARS.
I have to keep posting this same point. Slashdot readership is a piss in the ocean. You sir, are an unimportant blip on the gloabl market, as am i.
See that six-figure number that's your user id. How many is slashdot up to, 800,000 maybe, if that? How many of those are still active? How many have read this article? How many of those have read your post? How many agree with it? How many of those are thinking of buying DVD player? Piss in the ocean.
I don't live in a M$ world, nor do I want to.
Well, there's an easy way, or a hard way.
Now that was subjective hyperbole :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
At least with the current standard it takes a while to convert movies to divx, i don't think they'd really like a standard that only requires you to get past the encryption (which has to be weak, or the players would get very expensive).
So this is probably only good for playing your pirate copies of movies on your TV.
I can only hope that the proposal in the courst right now for the MS settlement case goes through, the MS be prohibited from issuing "breakware" stuff that breaks other companies systems, software, etc.
I have said this many times before, but I used to like MS stuff alot, but now it seems the everything new thring they do just makes me more and more cynical of them. They have lost my trust long ago and far away.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Would you be willing to buy a DVD player which includes WMP technology, but doesn't say so on the box?
(Heck, you'd probably pay extra for it!)
Closed source is not about profit, it's about control.
So, who "owns" your computer. (or DVD player)
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
If DVD players could be upgradable like this, then where's the incentive for consumers to buy the 'latest and greatest' models?
They said the same thing a year or so ago with NUON. Oh, NUON enhanced players are going to rock your world. NUON enhanced players are going to revolutionize DVDs. NUON enhanced players will get you chicks. I see this as more 'Nowadays, you can buy a DVD player that will play a CD full of MP3s. Now, it'll also play a CD full of whatever WMP spits out.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Windows Media V7 was based on MPEG4 but the newer V8 codecs (which are much more efficient)
are no longer based on MPEG4.
Really folks! Let's be a bit serious here: "...22 Hours of Music from a single CD." A single CD! I can compress my music in to 8 bit stereo 96kbps mp3s, or an equivalent Ogvorbis bitrate and fit more than 22 hours of music on a CD. THe point is do we really want that much music on a CD. With SACD quietly penetrating the market and available on many DVD players, sampling rates in the MHz range, why do we keep insisting on lowering the quality of the music we listen too. We all know the WMA and other such formats, including MP3s are still lossy compression architechtures, and until fractal compression makes its way into media file formats, all this jazz is just that... empty words.
This is a serious question. DVD has certainly taken off, and people expect that DVD players and movies to be the hot item on the Christmas shoppers' lists this year; I've read that up to now, about 5 million homes have DVD players; now that they've surprassed the $100 market, they expect to see upwards of 10 million homes to have them. That number could easily double in the next year alone.
With that well-established market, will the movie companies and electronics markets shoot themselves in the foot by releasing DVDs that solely use the 'new' format and thus completely blocking off 5 million players from watching it? I don't think they're that stupid. There's parallels to the copyright scheme used by the RIAA studios to prevent CDs from being copies or ripped on computers, but RIAA understands that only a "small minority" (from 0 to 50% of the consumers) would be affected by this, and in most cases, these affected consumers have another option in which to listen to the music (stereo rack or portable CD player). Here, we're talking about complete unplayability of the disk without going out to buy a second DVD player.
(Note that there are specific cases of some DVDs being incompatible with certain players. However, these tend to be isolated cases; a single DVD may fail to work on a certain model of player, and rarely does the entire line of DVDs from a specific studio fail on a specific player if one DVD doesn't. In many cases, this are fixed with firmware updates by the makers or similar deals.)
At least, I can't see this forced upgrade happening in the next 5 years. Consumers would backlash harshly against it, with complacency with the VHS format in which all new tapes continue to work with the oldest players. However, we have the HDTV switch looming in 2006; while this might be delayed, it's going to happen at some point, and with studios and stations fighting for encryption of the signal from reciever to screen, the DVD market players may start pushing this forced upgrade as to remove the older DVD players from the market. But if they try to do this at the same time that people are forced to buy $100 converter boxes or $1000+ TV sets, they're going to find even more consumer backlash.
Instead, I expect that maybe we'll have a decade before "DVD Enhanced" movies are released, forcing those older players to be removed, and thus getting the market saturated with players tha support this WMP encoding in addition to any other changed the DVD spec may offer. This is not necessarily unreasonable, but again, given that VHS systems from 1990 are still usable today, this might be taken poorly by the consumer. Of course, by that point, the DVD-recordable models may be predominate and sufficiently low cost (less than $200) as to make it attractive to upgrade anyway.
(*) I beleive that this move is more an attempt to capture the market that Apple has with the ease-of-use video editing and DVD burning that it has built into the MacOS system. If MS can offer a similar path through intergration with XP and WMP, and avoid the encryption via MPEG-2 (a licensing nightmare), they'd have a low cost opponent against Apple's dominance in this area.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Embrace and Extend, my friend...Embrace and Extend...
m l
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.ht
can you really see the herds of western civilisation getting riled at this?
/. reader who cares), am willing to reduce my own morals/ethics to the lowest common denominator - and I assure you, that's not the case. I still haven't purchased a new CD, and it's been about three years now. I don't do Napster, either.
Should I care what the herds of western civilization think? To do so would imply that I (and any other
Microsoft is offering a solution to a non-problem that weakens the benefits of DVD v.s. previous technologies.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Just like we voted with our dollars against the MPAA and CSS?
Yeah, right.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
WMF DVDs.. hahah.
Attempting to download decompressor, please wait..
Could not download decompressor.
Attempting to download decompressor, please wait..
Could not download decompressor.
Attempting to download decompressor, please wait..
Could not download decompressor.
Attempting to download decompressor, please wait..
Could not download decompressor.
And then you get audio only. I for one can't wait.
The MS software DVD player shipped with 2K doesn't work properly. Windows Media Player is dodgy as f*** and now they want to combine the two into DVD players that can't even be patched when they realise the players won't play or crash when you try to skip etc.. Hah. What farce.
At least when Sony DVD players crash they have the decency not to show you a bluescreen.
I've opted for a tiny PC by the TV to use as DVD player. At least I can patch / update / get cracks for the necessary software so that I can actually watch the DVDs I've paid lots of money for. Heh.
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
Originally, Halo was going to be for Macintosh until Bungie Software was forced to sell out to M$.
So now I'll have to pay a MS surcharge on any DVD player? No thank you.
Call me when they put the Div-X (en)decoder in hardware.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I think you and I are in the minority.
It's is pretty annoying to hear everyone cheering "boycott the mpaa and DVD", only in the very next article to here about all the cool features that are going to be available on the Star Wars Phantom Menace release with everybody cheering "I can't wait!"
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Media companies are generally conservative, and are not going to jump to MS's new standard, even if it is MS and if it is twice the quality (or whatever whiz-bang other features it has). People don't upgrade their DVD players like they do their PCs, they aren't designed that way. DVD players play movies: 10 years from now, it's still going to take you 2 hours to watch a 2 hour movie, there really is no reason for upgrading. If you're a media company, and want to sell the most movies you can, you're going to want your movie to work in the widest number of players possible - if you're releasing software and (ignoring development costs) want to make the most money possible, you're not going to require Windows XP just because it has the newest features.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Actually, Bill Gates has the total net worth to buy EVERY film studio and everything that goes with it. Think about it. Titanic made, what, like 650 million domestically? And that's the top grossing movie of all time. That's less than 1% of Bills net worth.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
before all hardware gets tainted.
You may want to start keeping your old hardware; both computer and stereo. It will be a matter of time before all hardware has questionable "capabilities" built in and it would be illegal to manufacture/import/buy items that don't contain these "features".
Better keep your old hardware so when shit goes nuts, you will be grandfathered in.
I already do.....I use something called.....MP3. It's a standard (well a default one anyway). Until something comes along that will improve upon this, noone will buy it(well just for that feature alone). Anyone remember the Music industry trying to put out stuff on Minidisc's? It flopped because CD's were a standard (although the MD was superior since it could have track names attached). Now, MP3 is the standard. Yeah it ain't open like OGG, but ask your mom what a MP3 is and she will know. Ask her what a OGG or WMA is and she probably doesn't know. I don't think of this as a bad thing until Windows Media only players are developed and are the only ones sold. I look at this as just another cool thing a DVD player could do along with VCD and MP3 on most common ones available today.
Gorkman
Yes, we did vote against the RIAA, that should count for something.
It is called Napster and Morpheus.
Strong vote indeed.
Why are movie studios so worried about priacy of DVDs? The DVD market exploded on to the scene. I for one haven't seen too much priacy in this format. I also purchase movies at a rate I never thought possible. I don't see priacy becoming that big of deal. There's just something about DVDs that make them so collectable.
InstantCool
would you WMP in a house,
...
would you WMP with a mounse?
I would not buy them in the rain,
I would not buy them on a train,
I would not could not with a mouse,
I would not could not with in a house,
I DO NOT want WMP technology in my DVD player... sam I am!
Microsoft now can tell XP users "use WMF and burn CD's of your videos" watch them in modern DVD players... Much cheaper than DVD burn technology, it gives them an In into the desktop video market. Soon instead of burning weddings etc.. onto DVD those folks will offer cheaper MWF Cds. Download music /videos on your computer and burn them to cd to watch on your tv...
And only creatable on Microsoft PC's. Very clever indead. Although they may be too late to the party.
How long till these are playable on Xbox too.....
Logically this format could compress movies on a regular CD (700MEG) making it easier for pirates to swap movies around. No more DIVX players, just yer home DVD Player
-Johnny Blaze
.. Microsoft should take all the time and resources they are using on this, and put it into something more useful, like producing their patches faster, and taking more time when making new software so that it isnt released with so many holes in it.
Instead of which, they try to create a new standard, when the current one is doing just fine.
I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation.
Please tell me why it is "anti-competitive" for DVD manufacturers to support Windows Media. Simply because MPEG-4 exists and is an open standard does not necessitate that manufacturers support it to the exclusion of other formats.
Well, then there's also the matter of the shrinking market for Macintosh games at the time they abandoned the Mac platform. I am talking about back when they refocuesd away from the Mac, by the way, not now that Apple may get their slice of the market back with the new MacOS 10.
This is just the start of what is to come with it's newest tenticle: Microsoft Research. The whole idea behind the division is to grab the brightest people out of acadamia with a fat paycheck (from monopoly profits) and some great collegues to work with(previously bought out). This way they can come out with products such as WMA with an almost instant time to market buy releasing a new version of Windows Media Player or DirectX. This is great if you are running Windows. You get the latest algorithms straight out of the labs. Kind of sucks though for the rest of us.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
From the article: In particular, the updated video format is capable of quality double that of DVDs while taking up half the space, Fester said.
I've always wondered, how do they measure "double the quality"? Is there a heuristic comparison they can run on the decompressed and original images to determine quality loss? (I say heuristic because perceived quality is most definitely not the same thing as information loss -- which is the whole basis behind the psychoacoustic models used for MP3s. Do they use similar things for video?) Can they say, "this new codec is only 1.8 times the quality of the old one"? Or is there some guy watching the video who goes, "that looks twice as good!"?
Further, wouldn't twice the quality in half the space be translatable to some single measure, such as four times the quality in the same space, or equal quality in one quarter the space?
Sounds like marketing crap to me, but I could be wrong.
-Puk
See what happened there? It's never too late!
For a second there, I read that as "DVD Player Chiapets to support windows media files". I need another drink, or maybe I've had to many.
AOL/Time Warner publish quite a lot of DVD's? Perhaps it's just me, but I can't see them encoding anything in WMA.
Look! Real competition, not often that happens.
Uh, no, dumbass. That's called the "I want free stuff" vote.
Gates' wealth is probably 90% theoretical. It's all in M$ stock. The minute he starts selling off significant amounts of it (like he would have to to buy out an entire industry) the share price will drop like a lead balloon. First because the increased supply would drive down prices, then because investors would see Gates selling, assume that he knows M$ is going down the tubes in the near future and sell their shares as well.
Now, if he could convince all the movie studios to sell out in a stock-swap deal, that would be a different story...
0 1 - just my two bits
The sky is falling, the sky is falling.
Ever consdier how much time and energy you waste watching every move MS makes. How much free press you give MS in your ranting and raving. Rule one of marketing is make sure people talk about you no matter if it is good or bad. Because the public has a short memory for detail and only remember they heard something about MS. So later when at the store buying software, they get MS, because they remember hearing about it a lot.
As many other have pointed out spend your time talking the benefits of open source, FreeBSD and Linux, not why MS is bad. You talk about MS more than you talk about yourselfs.
Gee... If everyone on slashdot boycotts these, that'll wipe out 1/10 of 1 per cent of the market.
Big deal...
They'll probably just give better prices to those players that only include WMA. The explicit exclusion of others will probably wait a few years... but XP may cease to recognize the file type, or use it for something else. So if a player can handle WMA, then that may be all that gets used. (Auto updates of XP could remove any competing players. It's in the contract [or at least in the published beta of the contract].)
After they have sufficient penetration, they just increase the price differential until effectively everything is WMA only. Any agreements to not create MP3 players would probably be verbal only (and along the lines of "You're such a great customer that why don't we give you this special price discount. We really like the way that you have kept your WMA players free of interference from extraneous software. It makes things so much more efficient." This would probably allow them to get off without penalty even if the agreement came to light).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What is the real plan here? I see another thing happening with this. Most of the new "copy" protections on audio CD's rendered their playback useless on anything but a standard audio CD player. This results in many unhappy consumers. With this new ability by DVD players, now the record companies can start including MS encoded audio tracks so they to can play the CD on more then the standard cd player and have support for more electronic devices? Imagine now that you can listen to the uncompressed raw audio with an audio cd player (and only still left on the disk for backward compatibility), and the encrypted, encoded MS version when the cd in played in anything else. What a plan. Its a win-win for big business and a lose-lose for Joe consumer.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
If I remove the topic "Microsoft" from my Slashdot front page, will it also remove all the senseless trolling by Slashdot editors against Microsoft?
It is a lot harder to stand up against the MPAA and CSS when all the products include it. If you want to participate in popular culture it's hard to buy products that aren't dictated by the monopolies. I can typically buy open hardware (to some degree, eg. multi-region hacked DVD players) that is more open then what MPAA and RIAA want. I can also buy and return products like copy-protected CDs. So the closest you can do is vote with your money by buying DVD players that don't support WM, HDTVs that don't support HDCP, etc.
And how exactly were they "forced" to sell out? Did Big Bad Bill G place a gun at the owner's head and force them to sell out?
"Sounds like marketing crap to me, but I could be wrong. "
Nope, you're right.
Using a statement like "Double the quality" is such BS. Unfortunately the general public will see that, tell their friends and the proproganda will spread. It's already started, did anyone else watch TechTV last night?
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I have been a fan of Microsoft for quite some time now and have been enjoying their latest technologies. However, latley, they have been "stepping over the line" in becoming a monopoly, I beleive. If this continues, I foresee "Microsoft = Rules world", and I don't want that to happen. I think this should not happen, even though, it'd be very nice. --Nate
Come on, guys, is this so bad? Yes, I'm a conspiracy theorist, too, but I hardly think DVD manufacturers would go with WMV as their de facto format. It's not *that* good. As /. pointed out before, they are even looking into MPEG-4 as the new format.
Besides, how is this different from DVD players now? Ours at home supports MP3's, VCD, etc. etc. It's just another format to throw into the mix. I see no harm in that. I like playing MP3's on my DVD when I'm away from the computer, working on housework or something like that. Hack, even firing up those Christmas tunes in the living room while setting up the tree is nice. With this, it's just another format you can play on your DVD systems.
this is absolutely unacceptable. SHUT THIS FUCKING COMPANY DOWN before I have to install MS dreadful crapware into my toilet before I can take a dump in the morning. Surely Sony aren't going to stand for this shit?
That was classic intercourse!
I don't get what this would do for me... Sony DVD players don't allow you to play any -r/-rw media only original media please.
Microsoft probes star fleet resistance on
many fronts. Middle manager schmoes everywhere
are infected. You can't get fired for "going
microsoft". Safe bet, go with the borg. They
will make you feel happy.
Don't give Microsoft more ideas!
The walls have ears!
Funny!
Please mod this one up!
- Freed
"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." -Turkish Proverb
There's something I haven't yet seen posted regarding this article. Slashdot editors and posters are running right to the "Microsoft wants to take over my DVD player" without looking at the tiny step in between.
Consider these three facts:
1. New copy-protected CDs come with Windows Media tracks for your computer instead of regular audio tracks.
2. People are complaining that these new CDs won't work in their DVD players.
3. Thus, the MPAA encourages Microsoft to put WMA support into DVD players so that people will stop whining about their CDs being unplayable.
Once 90% of the people can play the CD on their Windows computer, and most of the others can play it on their DVD player, very few people complain about copy protection.
Microsoft and the MPAA undoubtedly have larger intentions here, but this small facet of the whole WMA deal has been completely overlooked.
Keep complaining about copy protection, and please try to buy a nice high-end DVD player NOW, rather than later. We don't need copy protected CDs, and we can make them fail, but not if we keep buying the technology that makes them work.
Let's all stop superior technology like the WMA format because it belongs to a company that is a big player in some other area than soundformat technology.
Like the world is gaining anything with that. Why is it so hard for some people to realize sometimes actually something good and usable is created by that 5 billion $$$ research budget.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Microsoft owns the world anyway, we might as well try to enjoy the situation.
Now how do I convert movies from DIVX AVI to ASF, and play them on these players? Everyone knows it's all Microsoft MP4 anyway, so the bitstream hopefully won't change. Possibly re-multiplex the sound and slap on a new header.... bingo.
Although the idea of Microsoft infiltrating into every appliance and the kitchen sink, there might be a small advantage: isn't it very easy to convert your dix ;-) movies to wmf? In that way, we could see DVD players that can play our converted DIVX movies...
MS is creating an environment to let bright people work with other bright people. Yes these smart people get a lot of money for that. But, if these smart people were not into the concept of 'working and getting payed for it', would they accept a job at Microsoft Research? Probably! You know why? Because there are no limits, plus other bright people work there too. The budgets are high, while at universities they're (much) lower, the paychecks make it possible to live a life without moneyproblems and you can work at all the new stuff and toys you can think about.
Cooking up new technology that will be used by millions is another plus. Why is this a bad thing? Because YOU tend to HATE microsoft? Get a life.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Wazoo, that's an interesting idea, but it ignores the competitive position Microsoft is in with respect to AOL/TimeWarner.
:-)
While MS does have a considerable amount of cash (not a crime), they would never ever ever buy a movie production house. Why? Well as you know this would put them in direct competition with other big IP companies, which they are *desparately* trying to court. The "we won't compete with you" argument has so far been very successful, landing them deals with Disney, NBC, etc. Steve Ballmer even stated recently that, if they had it to do over again, they wouldn't have done the MSNBC deal, for exactly the reason I stated.
For the moment, I'll ignore your misuse of the monopoly leverage claim.
Damn there billy goes again securing everything under the sun in his world domination plans.. heh, aparently he does use the strategy that he suggested to apple. read Apple the inside story if you dont know what i mean.
I doubt this is actually going to happen, this is just an attempt at microsoft to get their file formats entrenched into other industries so when the DOJ tries to forbid their proprietary file formats in the settlement they can prove how widely used they are. I cant believe any manufacturer of anything still trusts ms anymore, have they been living at the South Pole?
-- The Editors
considering the MPAA wants you to rebuy every movie you own every couple of years.
Lets review: Microsoft controls the majority of computers out there through Windows. It has extended itself to control the majority of people's internet access through MSN and IE. It controls the majority of word processors with its Office suite. It controls a heck of a lot of emails through hotmail. Now it controls our tv watching. What else is there to control? Our food? Our air? It seems all that there is left. Even then, they probably will find something else to control. --theKiyote
Let's get movin' on reverse engineering the WMV standard.
We did it for SAMBA and DVD.
Why should WMV be any different?
Im thinking this a ploy to sneak in DIVX-style (the pay per view dvd format, not the PC Codec..) controls once again. I wouldnt be the list bit suprised if these "Windows Media Enabled" DVD players ship with built in modems for "Media Use Rights Verificiation" and soon we will see movies come in only Windows Media format, and then they will become pay per view. Now that the world is hooked on DVD, why not do it this way? If Microsoft can convince studios (as I am sure it can) to use their methods, it will go downhill fast. DVIX was attempted before DVD's were in nearly every home and at the time there was always the alternative to buy the standard DVD. If there is no alternative, what do you think the average consumer would do?
Obviously the government is already in Microsoft's pocket. There is little left to do short of hardcore protesting and voting with our dollars, refusing to give in to Microsoft's monopolistic practices.
I can now record all those WMV porn clips I have into a DVD and play them on my DVD Player :)
The more formats the DVD Players support, the better.
As a Multimedia Producer who does DVD authoring, we do keep up with the sales numbers in the US.
According to this chart DVD player sales in the US are already above 22 Million, not including DVD ROM drives. Granted, some homes (including mine) have more than one. Conservatively, 15 million homes have DVD players.
Now,you totally missed the point. The point is not "legacy" DVDs. It's "next-gen" DVDs. Whatever the pundits say, Microsoft is doing a great job working on HDTV technologies. The X-box supports HDTV resolutions. The simultaneously released Game Cube does not. This new technology supports HDTV resolutions as well. This is simply a business trying to get ahead of the curve!
So, you slam Microsoft for "unscrupulous business practaces" when they release competing projects, and then slam them when they try to bring something new to the marketlpace.
Cory
(apparently, a microsoft apologist, today.)
Why not use that instead of Windows Media? Because M$ always gets their way.
And how exactly did they "abandon" the Macintosh market? Name one game they put out that was PC only. Halo originally was going to be a Macintosh and Windows release, so that doesn't indicate any abandonment by Bungie. Bungie has stated repeatedly that Halo will be coming out for MacOS/Windows. The last title they released before Halo was Oni, which is available for MacOS 9 and X (Bungie developed Oni before it was split off when MS bought Bungie out.) Before that it was Myth II, which was Mac/Windows. Bungie abandoned the Mac market? You're talking out your ass.
The test isn't completely blind - the listeners are told in advance which of the samples is the original.
In order to be completely blind, the original recordings should have been included in the test, to eliminate listener bias (If one person consistenly rated the original as worse than the encoded samples, then that person's results should be taken with a grain of salt.)
But it is a far step ahead of the other "test".
We need to recognize that they probably have a five or ten year plan to capture control of all A/V media recording and playback. Adding unpublicized, currently unused, DMCA-protected security capabilities to the low-level hardware is the best place to start. The resulting new generation of players and recorders performs just like the current ones on current media so we'll never even notice the change when we buy new hardware. During that same five or ten year period, PC architecture will continue to evolve. Unpublicized, currently unused, DMCA-protected security capabilities may be added to processors and support chips, and into graphics and sound cards. You'll never even notice the change when you buy new hardware because the new stuff will be backward compatible with what you have now and the new "features" won't be visible. In ten or so years, given the product cycles of high-tech gear, they can safely assume that 90+% of all the systems in use today will be in a landfill and replaced with systems incorporating their new security features. Then some new "better" encoding or media format will be introduced which can only be played by activating the dormant capabilities. Media and hardware companies announce that all hardware built in the last few years supports the new format and they quit supporting the old formats. Nearly all consumers couldn't care less. The few consumers with ten year old systems are grumpy, but who cares about them? Surprise! You now discover that your hardware refuses to process the new media in any way other than what the copyright owner wants you to. Nothing you can do about it, the security (encryption? bus protocols? hardware handshakes?) is built in to low-level electronics. Clever drivers won't help. Besides, who'll want to risk spending 20 years in prison for violating the DMCA by attempting to crack the security? You can still play your old CDs and DVDs, but you can't play any new ones because they're only available in the new format. Unlikely scenario? No.
Umm, the decision has already been made and you will have no choice (of course, you can always stick to using a VCR for everything). The tendency for cartels (formal and informal) to form is one of the primary weaknesses of capitalism in its current form. I'm not saying capitalism is bad, but it needs more work to serve the consumer properly.
Yeah, I'm going to vote with my dollars against Microsoft.
--
E_NOSIG
So the closest you can do is vote with your money by buying DVD players that don't support WM, HDTVs that don't support HDCP, etc.
No, the closest thing you can do is not buy one at all.
I don't own an HDTV.
I don't own a DVD player. (Ok, technically I have one in the TiBook work bought for me, but I've never watched a DVD on it and I don't own any DVDs.)
I don't own an MP3 player, especially not one that has content restrictions.
Contrary to popular belief, you can live without these things. Saying "Oh, I came close" is just a cop out- kinda like we hear the /. regulars constantly talk about being free of the Evil Empire yet somehow they manage to play Windows-only games.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Now all you have to do is get all of your friends and relatives to buy new WMF compatible DVD players.
DCMonkey
Assume that the average consumer purchases a non-upgradable DVD player containing CSS and WMA decoding algorithms. The consumer also buys a disk containing a non-changing image.
With both images static, if WMA is cracked, the cat is out of the bag. Again. And it's only a matter of time.
So bring it on...
For us carnivores, "Sucking the marrow out of life" isn't a transcendentalist philosophy but a practical instruction.
wait till the movie industry figures out what this will be used for in the real world... Namely to butn pirated movies from various file sharing methods to cd that can be watched on ones dvd player and have it look almost as good... I think some one is going to get in trouble over this... too bad it prolly wont be microsoft.
I don't think one needs to buy a DVD player at all. I was ready to buy one two years ago when the proverbial shite hit the fan, and somehow managed to live without one since.
It is entertainment, after all, and when I rank what I value, entertainment comes up somewhat below consumer's rights and freedoms.
I don't mean to impose my beliefs on anybody else, but there was a great rallying cry on slashdot about boycotting MPAA, not going to movies, not buying DVD players, spreading DeCSS as much as humanly possible.
What happened?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'm no expert, but I believe MS did this to get Windows consumers to use their "movie editting" product. I don't think it is intended to be used by the major studios. Seen in this light, MS avoids the problems of burning DVDs that currently plague Apple's DVD - playback on consumer devices.
MS neatly avoids having to support MPEG-4 and the battling standards to determine which DVD recordable format wins. They win regardless since Windows users will be using WMP formats, not any kind of open standard format such as MPEG 4.
As for Apple and Real licsensing QuickTime and Real respectively, it doesn't really matter. QuickTime is the basis of MPEG-4 and Apple is expected to have the next version of QuickTime support MPEG-4, beating many competitor's to the punch. Real recently said they'd support MPEG-4.
Nope, I think MPEG-4 will be the default DVD recording format in the near future. MS neatly avoids the implmentation problem by going to the manufacturers. Its a great business move to prevent Windows users from having to watch their home movies on their computers, but the real impact probably won't be known until DVD recorders are widespread.
Read my other response - one I wrote before reading this one. I agree 100%.
I own a cheap CD based mp3 player, no restrictions at all.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
This just reflects what is readily becoming apparent, that standards developed by standards bodies are becoming a thing of the past thanks to the incredibly long time required to come to a consensus (not to mention all the baggage that ends up in the spec).
Many in the Slashdot and free software world don't like Java or C#/.Net, yet the very reason for their appeal and popularity is the fact that with one person/organization in charge they are very focused and as a result quickly respond to changes/needs of their users. Also, their versioning is very simple so the user/programmer knows what they are getting (ie Java 1.3 contains x, but Java 1.2 doesn't). Try the same thing with the "standard" C++ where the feature set of each compiler is different so you never know what you are getting, so you are forced to program to the lowest common denominator, and as well C++ doesn't have the built in libraries that Java/.net have (and yes C++ is starting up the standards process for new libraries, but is it going to take another 10 years to come to an agreement again??). Note that much of this same stuff also applies to languages like Pearl and Python, or for that matter the Linux kernel, all of whom have clearly identified people in charge.
So now we have MPEG-4, created by a standards body, that nobody know when it will be fully implemented (is it even an official standard yet?), or we have MS's answer which is a standard (of their own admittedly) which is available now and is being rolled out all over the place.
So it comes down to a private standard that is available now, and comes with the backing of a company with billions of dollars to be used for marketing/bribing/buying content as well as a huge existing base. Or in the open standard corner with have something that may be available in a year or two (or three or...) and has the backing of Apple, a minority player in the multimedia market with limited resources. Not really a difficult decision if your goal is to make money.
I bet they will use "Superior digital rights management" as an advertising slogan and people will think its a good thing (if it has superior in the name, it must mean its better. The new players will be designed to stop playing old css-based dvds at midnight january 1 2003 so everyone will have to buy all their films again. The movie industry can do this neat trick again when hdtv disks come out. Also, the new players will need to be plugged into a phone line once a month to "upgrade" (i.e download new DRM systems when the old ones are cracked - i mean, the new one that replaces the old one that was already cracked)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I'd be willing to put down a large chunk of money that Apple won't have 15% of the market share in 5 years. Much less getting anywhere near 40%.
Nope, I think MPEG-4 will be the default DVD recording format in the near future.
Why? MPEG4 is "the standard for multimedia for the fixed and mobile web", what does this have to do with DVD? MPEG4 was designed for streaming over a network. MPEG2 is a great fit for DVD and HDTV. There is no reason to abandon it for MPEG4.
Q.
Oh yea, WMV is going to conquer the home market, no doubt. Look at how well the Nuon technology was implemented into all of the home dvd systems.
I gotta go, I need to play some more Iron Soldier 3 then check out the neat menus on Bedazzaled.. maybe after that I'll try to find something else that supports this shit
You aren't so stupid as to think the artistry of a movie is represented by the MPAA or its methods of encrypting the file formats? Or are you?
Yeah, except that would definetly ruin their "we aren't a monopoly" stance, and the gov't would have no problem convincing any judge anywhere that that is illegal. The problem know exists in that it is unclear to alot of people what constitutes the MS Monopoly, but when they move into other markets and try to control them as well, then they will get in big trouble. I wouldn't be too concerned about this. There has to be some business person at MS that knows what they're doing.
What?
When is the first Service Pack for Xbox coming out..My XBox is making funny noises. Let me know.
Would you be willing to buy a DVD player which includes WMP technology, but doesn't say so on the box? (Heck, you'd probably pay extra for it!)
Closed source is not about profit, it's about control. So, who "owns" your computer. (or DVD player)
Put some Microsoft code in that DVD player, and any HaXor could 0wn it...
Yes, they most likely will use their position to clobber competition if and when they get a monopoly, and we will need to stop them from doing that, but we'll have to wait and see.
at least this time they'll have heavy hitters such as Sony to deal with. If the player manufacturers have a problem with Microsoft, then they don't have to deal with them.
I honestly don't understand why it's such a bad thing that a FEATURE is being ADDED to DVD Players.
Yeah yeah, it's cool to hate Microsoft, blah blah blah. "I don't want to support MS, therefore I won't buy this product", -- ok, fine. Go have fun.
Let me tell you why this technology is interesting to me.
- You can get the WMP encoder for FREE. The MPEG group wants you to pay for software to encode MPEG2 stuff. At least that used to be the case, I haven't looked into MPEG in over a year now so my info may be old. To the best of my understanding, in order to burn a DVD that can play in a DVD player, you need special software to do this. With WMP support, I can just make the WMP file, burn it to a DVD, and watch it on my DVD player. This is *COOL*.
- I use WMP at the moment for a home-brew PVR. (Go to http://www.snapstream.com if this is interesting to you) Eventually I might switch to DivX, but at the moment I'm using WMP because it's easy to use, and it isn't half bad.
Eventually I want a portable solution. When PocketPC's get a little faster, I'll be able to play the files I capture from SnapStream on them. This will make airplane travel much eaiser to bear. Unfortunately, even if these machines do get faster, there's RAM limitations. I've been hoping to find a way to encode my TV shows so I can watch them on a portable DVD player.
And now, this might happen!! I might be able to take my output straight from snapstream, burn it to a CD/DVD, and play it on a portable DVD Player! Now THAT is totally cool.
"Derp de derp."
There may be an interesting side effect here. The moment WMA format becomes implemented in hardware in any significant scale, the format is effectively "fixed" -- since you can't force people to go out and buy a new DVD player every year, you have to make sure that all new audio and video programs are playable on those Version 1 chips.
This means that WMA is no longer a moving target for anyone who wants to reverse engineer the format and put together a compatible player. Undoubtedly the Evil Empire will unleash swarms of lawyers at the first person who does it, but the effort could be lead overseas (that is, until Microsoft realizes that buying the US government wasn't enough and begins to start buying other governments as well).
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
DVD manufacturers don't give a shit what you want. They don't have to. They can phase this into being en masse, and eventually you won't have a choice.
/.'ers out there, who still maintain a Windows boot partition to run Diablo II for Windows. Linux geeks love to scream and bitch about stuff like this, and demand boycotts, and the /. editors still constantly post about how great the "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" movies are, usually within hours of complaining about the horrible actions of the movie companies against "freedom."
/. readers are a bunch of lazy, overweight dorks happy to just sit inside enjoying their high-paying computer jobs, and go home at night to engrosse themselves in pop culture.
Hell, in the long run you will end up buying one anyone. So will 99% of the
Geeks have no conviction. In the long run
Guess you'll not own a DVD player then.
Screw limited viewing, if they ever get pay per play movies on cable, that's the only way you could get this sort of limited view on your home box.
You know most cable television systems already offer pay-per-view movies, don't you?
But Microsoft isn't a monopoly in games.
Correct; the existence of the popular games "Monopoly" by Hasbro and "Basketball" by Naismith demonstrates this. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in video games either; the continued profitability of Sony and Nintendo demonstrate this. However, Microsoft does have a monopoly in the following area: operating systems for machines that can run commercial sim games (i.e. not freeciv). The average sim game (such as simcity, civ, or any RTS) requires a keyboard and a mouse for best efficiency (no, the joypad interface to super nes simcity and the like is not all that efficient), and the machines that come packaged with those input devices as of December 2001 tend to be PCs. A U.S. federal court has decided that Microsoft has a monopoly on PC operating systems.
It is illegal (and termed "money laundering") to finance a new venture (such as Xbox) with funds gained from illegal activity (such as predatory monopolistic behavior).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Someone please explain to me what monopoly Microsoft is using to force all of these poor industry hardware vendors to accept these terms? Yes, those very same poor hardware vendors who adopted CSS.
So, you're telling me that Microsoft could fuck industry hardware vendors through restrictive licenses and cause them to go out of business?
Or, you're telling me that the entertainment industry could fuck all of their customers over, thereby angering them and effectively signing their chapter 11 filings?
If so, what's the problem? And if not, uhm.. what's the problem?
And last I checked, video entertainment still isn't an inalienable right. Write your elected officials!
You're mixing DRM and the codecs. Given the current DRM implementations, it's doubtful that you're going to see DRM on a DVD player. Presumably all Windows Media on DVD content will need to be 'in the clear'.
The only interesting thing in the announcement was support for 720p (1280x720, progressive scan). For the growing HDTV market, this is a great improvement.
I'll reserve judgement until I see two things:
- How restrictive is the format? I don't have any need/desire to copy DVD's, so as long as it doesn't impede the user experience I don't care about underlying protections.
- How good is the *REAL* quality of the video. They use vague terms about the quality relative to DVD, but no quantitative analysis. While the video might look great in a window on my 19" monitor, how does it look on my 34" HDTV, or on a 100" projection system. Current 1080i and 720p HDTV look great in those formats, if this doesn't it's useless to HDTV consumers.
on common sense
They didn't leverage their monopoly status, just their very large sums of cash on hand.
That would be money laundering. It's illegal in the United States to finance a venture with money gained unlawfully. Buying all your competitors (especially in hostile takeovers) may also be illegal under some circumstances. Even without considering government-imposed penalties, acting anticompetitively may bring short-term rewards, but it eventually hurts the bottom line by degrading the value of the company's largest asset: its name.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What we need is real MPEG-4. Not this Microsoft Windows branded crap.
Just say no to blue screens on your consumer electronics devices.
Rob Koenen, president of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum, said progress is being made, noting that Apple is poised to release an MPEG-4 compatible version of its QuickTime technology "within weeks."
Frank Cassanova, Apple's director of product marketing for QuickTime confirmed that the company has already released a version of QuickTime 5 to a handful of testers.
Mr Snide: No, it doesn't support HDTV resolutions. Frankly, I don't feel this needs to be explained, but lest anyone be confused, 480p is not HDTV, just the weakest mode supported by HDTV. HDTV requires 1080i and 720p modes, as well as 480p.
So, No, your crappy TV doesn't support 480p, but several non-HDTV compatible tv's do. (or did)
For a more lucid descripton of the shortcomings of the gamecube's resolutions, check here.
And with Nintendo's gay ass games (pikmin? wtf? and have you seen how fucking gay they made Link
"Gay" means happy. Yes, Link is smiling for the camera. Let me guess, are you a Tori Amos fan?
"Gay" also means homosexual. How does Link look any more homosexual than some of the little hero characters in any anime? And there certainly isn't any "f___ing" or "gay ass" (don't click it) in Zelda 9.
Gamecube looks like it's aimed at the 5-10 year old market
How again is it impossible for 18+ gamers to have fun playing Rogue Leader, Dave Mirra BMX, or Waverace Blue Storm? Just because it isn't as full of gore as Mortal Kombat or Quake III: Arena doesn't mean adults hate it. Heck, the next five years' worth of Capcom Resident Evil games will be GameCube exclusives.
whereas Xbox, despite its flaws, at least looks like something that someone over 12 years old might be able to enjoy.
Not if the right-wingers behind this list of politically incorrect toys get their way: it'll become illegal for retailers to sell M-rated games to children or to adults who don't sign a contract "I will not expose my children to this game." Most reviewers consider the M-rated game "Halo" the only outstanding game for Xbox. Without Halo, Xbox is nothing more than a GameCube with a hard drive and a DVD player.
I am completely unimpressed by nintendo's games
True, Super Smash Bros. Melee isn't a clone of Street Fighter II or Tekken like most of the other fighting games on the market: it introduces battlefield tactics that a flat plane just can't provide.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Because it is more flexible. Sure, it will stream but you don't *have* to stream it. Since MPEG-4 will allow all kinds of cool things like multi-language tracks, subtitles, close captioning etc, why would you NOT use it? Plus, with MPEG-4 you can store a current DVD's content on a VCD. MPEG-4 uses an object-based coding standard which makes life much easier for authors, service providers, and end users of interactive multimedia content. These are all features the spec allows.
m l
Quit thinking of DVD as a video deployment format. It is a storage device and as such allows interactive content (including audio and video) to be stored on a single object.
I would also encourage you to read an article that provides the answers you need in greater detail. http://www.webreview.com/mmedia/2001/03_16_01.sht
Is it just me or is this just another way to exclude other OSs from playing DVDs? I doubt MS will license it WMV codecs to anyone else. Consider trying to play a WMV DVD on Linux/*BSD/whatever...
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
But then I'm not so stupid as to be bothered by a troll from an anonymous coward, either.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The absolutely obvious solution to all this is to lure a DVD manufacturer to make a player that can read DiVX. Technically, it would even be legal with DiVX4. Mark my words: if this doesn't happen, the "best" movie trading group in two years will be alt.binaries.movies.wmv. I don't want this kind of future, but I don't see how to prevent it.
Possible salvation: some sane soul makes a linux-based living room DVD player that doesn't have a DVD decode chip but instead a bona fide CPU (Duron? Crusoe?) to do decoding. It also has an ethernet port and can play movies stored anywhere on the home network, and can upload and install new codecs at will--including, of course, DiVX. People, we have the technology to do this now. Please! Please! Can't you hack an X-Box into one of these things? In any case, I promise you I'll buy the first such player that costs US$500 or less.
Lets assume you can fit 7GB (as opposed to 700MB) on a DVD.
No, lets assume you can fit 8 GB (8.4 billion bytes) on a dual-layer DVD. This is 8 * 1048576 kilobytes. Divide that by 32,400 seconds (9 hours) for the Godfather trilogy, and you get about 256 kilobytes or 2 megabits per second. (For comparison, the binary code for the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 fits into 3 megabits.)
So now instead of 23kb/s you can get 230kb/s. Holy fucking shit, that's barely enough for a stereo mp3 stream!
You confuse kilobits with kilobytes. An average MP3 data rate of 24 kilobytes (192 kilobits) per second is enough for transparent reproduction of stereo audio according to r3mix.net, and even 5.1 channel Dolby Digital uses only 48 kilobytes per second. This leaves 212 kilobytes per second average for video, and MPEG-4 DivX video can easily do DVD quality at this data rate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Don't worry, in the end you'll end up breaking down and buying one.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
and until fractal compression makes its way into media file formats, all this jazz is just that... empty words.
Fractal compression as we know it is also just empty words. Michael Barnsley's patented fractal transform is an implicit vector quantization approach that scales each 4x4 pixel block from an 8x8 pixel block elsewhere in the picture and adds a constant RGB offset (Read More from the comp.compression FAQ). It has been shown not to be that much stronger than JPEG, especially the new JPEG 2000 that supports wavelet decomposition (no more blocking artifacts).
Will I retire or break 10K?
XBox has parental locking features built in. All a parent has to do is turn it on, and hey presto - no kid can play that game.
Then what's the point of the Xbox if parents are going to lock their kids away from the only game worth playing? Then it becomes an expensive ($330) DVD player. To succeed, a game console needs to penetrate households, and this means it needs launch titles. Currently, GameCube has a better set of launch or near-launch titles (Monkey Ball, Smash Bros 2, etc).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe there's security measures in place... I do not know, but given Microsoft's history of security conscious design (lack thereof), there's probably a very interesing WMA/WMV security alert or virus opportunity (depending on the shade of one's hat, I suppose). It'd be really amazing if consumer DVD players had a typical Microsoft security hole in them.... but since they're not networked it's hard to imagine it becoming a major problem. However, consumers have much higher quality standards and generally expect warranty coverage for their DVD player components (something Microsoft doesn't know much about from their buggy-software perpetual-upgrade business model). It's not clear if these new DVD players will just execute code from Microsoft or if the manufactures will re-implement the WMV/WMA "standards".
Anyway, I thought I'd pass along this little tidbit, which I really don't know anything about (but hey, this is slashdot....) It I'm totally off-base, just mod me down.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
You know, the people yelling for boycott of the MPAA are not necessarily the same people clamoring for the next StarWars DVD, don't you? Broad generalizations tend to paint one as ignorant.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Yes. I don't have a DVD. Intentionally. (It was because of copy protection issues, but I will remember to check out your comment if they ever resolve that.) I am not aware that MPEG costs to use, but as far as I know I don't use it.
OTOH, I didn't say that this would be sufficient to cause a product not to be used. Merely that it was sufficient to deny it the status of "standard". I frequently use a proprietary graphics program, which has a proprietary file format. I would never consider calling that format a standard. There isn't any reason that everything should be a standard. But calling a proprietary interface a standard does everyone a disservice.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't mean quality-wise; MPEG2 is superior to MPEG4 and its ilk at high bitrates.
However, MPEG2 is patented as well. It's to my understanding that implementing MPEG2 encoders/decoders requires paying licensing fees.
MPEG2 may be a standard, and it may not be controlled by a single company, but it's still not free (as in speech nor as in beer), folks.
After all that effort I can't see 90% of them just rolling over and accepting what MS says should be the format for DVD's.
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
While no one's mentioned it, it seems likely that the new generation of WMP file formats include support for some manner of MS-Sponsored DRM.
This would be especially likely given the smaller size of the compressed video produced (given that smaller size is often viewed as lowering the barrier to copyright violation, and thus raising the need for DRM).
While it would bother me, it would not surprise me to see the inclusion of a DRM scheme that encourages the proliferation of the MS Windows OS. Additionally, as the WMP format proliferates, expect to see it incorporated quietly into other hardward devices.
At the point that the majority of installed hardware (think CD/DVD players) supports MS's WMP format and an associated DRM, expect that it won't be possible to plead "fair use" before a court for removing the DRM features and encoding to a different medium.
Your data already belong to them, it's too late, become a vinyl nut and learn to love the classics.
I'm sure the DVD Manufacturers will be influenced by 5 less customers.
Let's get real. For the average user (who has no weird technological agenda), playing another format is a feature.
There's always someone (usually thousands of people) on slashdot yelling "fire!" Let's pick our battles people.
Now, when there is going to be a thing compatible with Microsoft (DVD players), people complain that the Microsoft monopoly is being extended!
Make up your minds.
Nice troll.
When 80% of the posters claim they'll boycott MPAA (not even go to movies), and boycott DVDs, and then 80% of the posters claim they "can't wait" for "The Matrix" on DVD, or the Simpsons first season DVD, or whatever, then there's something wrong.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
What does this have to do with the monopoly? It doesn't seem like Microsoft is using windows to do anything in this case? If Microsoft does anything to extend it's business is that it extending its monopoly?
I dunno about that.. Their registration key scheme is pretty good. I don't know of any keygens for Windows yet. Of course, it may just be that it's so much easier to share one and no one's really tried their hand at it yet.
Geeks have no conviction. In the long run /. readers are a bunch of lazy, overweight dorks happy to just sit inside enjoying their high-paying computer jobs, and go home at night to engrosse themselves in pop culture.
Hey! I am not overweight.
You're kidding me, right?
Call Microsoft what you will, 'evil', monopolistic, untrustworthy, whatever. One thing they are *not* is stupid. FNANB / Circuit City was stupid to try DIVX (I know, I worked for them when they launched it. Despite big incentives for selling DIVX enabled players, I wouldn't unless a customer specificly requested the feature. (which never happened))
If Circuit City hadn't fallen on their collective faces with DIVX, MS *might* consider doing this. But Microsoft is a company that lears from the past and as it is, I see no way in hell this will happen. Perhaps time will prove me wrong, but I can't see MS doing something so... well, stupid.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
As another responder to you said, broad generalizations tend to paint one as ignorant. Don't assume I'm a troll just because I say you are wrong.
an embedded MS security agent in your private network.
Think, Sony Playstation II *created* the Japanese home DVD market. PCs in Japan have quickly tried to converge on home AV market and shortly we will have lots of home AV networked servers (like all the new Vaio towers for the past year).
Anything M$ would like more than to 0wn your house? It will be easy and convenient, and they will also get a revenue stream (a new one or through your utility or maybe NTT DoCoMo) in which lots of nice copyright charges can be inserted. Maybe a few bucks a month for the next DirectX, Harry Potter II on WMV/DVD without commercials, pay per view over DSL etc. It can be done with current technology and infrastructure and it would sell.
I'd guess if the U.S. lets them get away with this (leveraging OS monopoly using WMP which has already been a major tool in killing RealVideo Server, Darwin, Quicktime, etc etc) their company will be one of the most profitable in the 21st C.
So long as new software releases are closed source and break standards, they are laughing all the way to the bank.
By so doing, you are allowed to use this on 1 (one), and only one, device. Should you so choose to utilize the contents of this disc on more than one unit, please contact your nearest Microsoft representative to purchase additional licenses.
Why would someone say they won't buy a DVD player that can support WMP? That seems absurd. If you don't like it, DON'T put a disk in there that's in that format!!! Jeez! At least the set-top makers are opening up to other standards. So it's MS!!! It opens the door for a company like Apex to say "Hey, cool, we can go open-source and not pay the license fee..." Who know's maybe MS flexing it's monopli-muscle will HELP the open source version, it sure as hell isn't hurting it cause I sure as hell don't think Divx has the backing to push the chip makers into doing it but with a nudge in the right directionby MS, the chip makers may warm up to non-mpeg2 standards!!! Damn don't be so paranoid!!!
...n8
Why would anyone want to store 22 hrs of music on a CD?
Now that would be cool. WMA, nobody uses or likes it.
This is nothing new on Microsoft's part, the question is, is the next DVD player you buy going to have the WMF in it?
My list of games that I enjoy includes Dead or Alive 3, Oddworld, Arctic Thunder
All three rated T for Teen (the idsa's equivalent of mpaa's pg-13)
Amped and Project Gotham Racing.
This leaves only two that are rated E for Everyone (the idsa's equivalent of mpaa's G/PG).
Source: Xbox Catalog
Will I retire or break 10K?
They may say it's impletmented in "Hardware" but it's more likely to be an updatable software effort, do you really think they'd make it that easy?
Carrot007
+----------------- | What is the question!
Again, One reason DIVX failed was because there was an alternative. You take away the alternative, consumers would have to buy the MS version or none at all.
This wouldn't be stupid on Microsoft's part. Sneaky, relentless, monopolistic, yes. And I wouldn't say Microsoft learns from the past... but thats an issue for a different discussion.
DRM is tied into the Windows Media spec. The way MS has been touting DRM in recent times would be a good reason for them to include it right in. After all, they were just awarded a patent on a DRM OS, and why else would MS care to include "in-the-clear" Windows Media on a dvd player, especially if it would make piracy easier just by sticking the disc into a pc and copying the files?
I say you are a troll because you didn't say I was wrong, you said I was studid - stupid, apparently, because I disagree with you. If it walks like troll, and talks like a troll.....
If the artists are affected by my decision, then they might try to change how they offer their art - and I have won.
If they don't care about me (and I'm sure they don't), then I don't care about how I negatively affect them - as long as I continue to negatively affect the companies that control the media. I have still won simply because I am happy with myself. It's existentialist. I'm doing what I know to be right, regardless of what the hypocrites around me are doing.
It may sound extreme, but if you apply the "on my deathbed" approach to moral decisions, I will be satisfied with my choice. On my deathbed, I won't be happy with myself selling out my liberties for the sake of being entertained.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I guess it's another pc clone for me now.