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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
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.
...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...
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
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
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
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
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.
But it is an issue. It's not really fairly competing, it is leveraging their OS monopoly to gain ground in other areas. Just like they used Windows as leverage for IE, and that was bad. They have more subtly leveraged their OS monopoly to get their media player on every desktop. It seemed harmless at first, but now they are managing to push the more proprietery .wm* formats through their bundled encoder (along with digital rights managemnt). Now they feel that they have sufficiently established their .wm* formats that they can use it as leverage to break into the DVD market.
.wmv movies on disc any time soon. With X-Box, the hardware is impressive, but the games are really lame for the most part. As we saw with the Dreamcast, even with great hardware you need great titles, which Nintendo and Sony have. Incidentally, I noticed that a lot of Dreamcast games are being continued on the X-Box, is this an omen? :) Besides the games, a lot of people I talk to have grown to distrust MS product quality due to so many BSODs. For their computers, MS is a necessary evil, but they will not purchase Microsoft stuff if they don't feel they have to, as is the case with desktop PCs.
Same is true of the X-Box. For example, their most hyped game is Halo, right? Halo started as a game for Windows, but MS somehow convinced the developers to both develop for X-Box and delay work on a Windows release so that they could sell more X-Boxes. Again, leveraging their monopoly unfairly.
On the plus side, I think that neither X-Box nor this DVD idea will see much market penetration. Current wave of DVD players are too prolific for the publishers to avoid. While it may be a standard feature for many future DVD players, I doubt you'll be going to the store to pick up
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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?
If DVD players could be upgradable like this, then where's the incentive for consumers to buy the 'latest and greatest' models?
Embrace and Extend, my friend...Embrace and Extend...
m l
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.ht
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.
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.
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.
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.....
Erm... ever played on a dreamcast? It had easily the best line up of games for the two years it existed.
What the dreamcast showed is that you have to have good marketing, and not look like a company that is going to collapse in a few years. From what I've seen, MS don't match that pattern. Sad but true.
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
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.
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?
There will NOT be a new DVD format in the next couple of years. If we look at history, the typical lifespan of a consumer A/V media format is on the order of 20 years or more (there's still a respectable market for VHS today, and it's been consumer-grade technology since I was born).
The DVD format has only been on the market for about 4 years. Don't expect any 'super-DVD' formats to gain any popularity at all until maybe 2015 or so.
As for your limited-viewing degrading DVD concept, you do remember the Circuit City DivX debacle, don't you?
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.)
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.
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).
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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.
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.