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?"

Comments

It's for a new version of WMP

[alen]

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.

Re:I'm pleased...

[jonathan_ingram]

There was one recent newspaper test, done very badly, comparing files encoded at different bitrates, non-blind, which said WMA was best. This was about as far from scientific as it is possible for an 'objective' test to be. Luckily, there is a properly organised test underway to compare WMA, MPC, AAC, MP3 and Ogg at 128kpbs (which is still a very popular bitrate). To participate, go to
http://ff123.net/128test/instruct.html

This test is actually being analysed properly, using the insights gained from his previous 128kbps test, whose results you can find here). You can see the preliminary results here: http://ff123.net/128test/interim.html. In particular, look at the results of the last of the three test files. With overall 95% confidence we can say that on this test clip:
mpc is better than xing
ogg is better than xing
lame is better than xing
aac is better than xing
mpc is better than wma8
ogg is better than wma8
lame is better than wma8
aac is better than wma8

Aside from this, listening tests have previously shown that WMA8 is better than WMA7 at the low end (sub 64kpbs), at the expense of being worse at the middle to high end (112kpbs upwards). For listening to music on anything that costs more than $10, you would do best to stay away from WMA (and, looking at the other results on the page I previously mentioned, from Xing encoded MP3s as well...).