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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?"
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?
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.