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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?"
...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...
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
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
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?
DVDs, VCD's and music CD's are the most commonly played thing on DVD players right now. MP3 CD's are probably trailing a little, but many DVD players now support them as well.
Think of the codecs that are the most popular after these -- and like it or not, Windows media are pretty high up there. After this, they'll probably be looking at Quicktime, Realmedia and divx. Of course, the movie industry probably hates divx, and so if they're going to discriminate against anything, they'll probably discriminate against divx. On the other hard, the same DVD player companies that make region free players and players that can turn off Macrovision probably know that we'd want divx too and would probably give it to us :)
Windows media files are already being supported by many (most?) mp3 players. Like it or not, they're becoming a standard -- and they have the `content control' (translation: copy protection) that the industry wants.
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.
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.....
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.
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bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME