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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?"
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.
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."
Also, if they change format away from DVD so soon after it was released, consumers will backlash. It took years for DVD to finally be accepted, and only recently has become cheap enough for the average home user. DVD is past the infant stage, and the industry will have a very hard time displacing it anytime soon.
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.
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
What kills the standard is when the standards body mopes around taking so long to establish the standard.
Also an issue is when, as is almost always the case, they charge $400 for a printed copy of the standard. Because 'it's so expensive to come up with standards' as I am sure the ANSI people are eager to tell us.
Standards should all be published openly online. ALL of them. It shouldn't be a rich-man-club that can afford to read them.
Until that day, interests like Microsoft will always be able to pre-empt 'standards' with things that become the defacto standard.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
SkepTech wrote:
> And what will Apple do about it?
>
> What's their market share again? Maybe 5% in a good sales month?
What did Apple do about the plan to include copy protection in hard drives? They opposed it, and together with several other companies, put a stop to it.
What did Apple do about the Microsoft settlement plan to dump $1 billion in MS software and reconditioned hardware on our poor school systems? Jobs and Apple screamed 'bloody murder!", and the judge in the case is at least listening. This is the first time in five years that Jobs has personally and forcefully spoke out against Microsoft.
Apple's influence does not match its marketshare. Microsoft is usually too busy copying them for that to be true. Apple's size is also very temporary. At one time, they had 40% of the market. They are getting set up to retake that marketshare. They are one of the only desktop computer makers to be firmly in the black, and hiring instead of doing massive layoffs. Given their 26 stores, OS X, and the new hardware coming out possibly as soon as next month, they will finally be ready. The December 3rd Time ad, "The only thing we have a monopoly on is complements", was a gauntlet tossed directly at Microsoft. 2002 is going to be a *very* interesting year for Apple. And remember, any increase in Apple's marketshare, whittles away at Microsoft's core monopoly: Windows. Without that monopoly, Microsoft has no power and no teeth.
Apple does have a concern about this issue. Not only does this hurt QuickTime, but also iDVD, DVD Pro, and Apple's superdrive. Do you think they will not care about the Mac's DVD authoring capablilities? Do you think Apple will like using Microsoft's formats instead of their own?
Come on, Tok Wira, these sharks have got to pay!
New Kirk calling Mothra, "We need you today!"
The heroic, wonder-working deity returns, in TWO days!
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.
And if you scratch said disc....
I can't see this going anywhere, like the 'inclusion' of Windows CE on the Dreamcast. For starters, Theres already an established base of DVD players out there. Most of them still work. The average consumer replaces entertainment equipment for two reasons:
A- its got some great quality/feature upgrade
b- its broke
WMA enabled DVD players offer NO real advantage to standard MPEG players. Sure, i'd rather not have to change between the two episode 1 dvd's, but its not like its a laserdisk. I don't have to get up or put up with a pause after every 30-45 minutes. Theres what? 6 hours of content on these discs as there is.
People embraced dvd's quickly because they offered more. Much better quality plus hours of extra footage and supplimental material. All on a 5" disc that didn't degrade like a tape. It was an improved laserdisk, in every way except you still couldn't record (hell, you can barely do that now).
Now...as for "all the Godfather movies or an entire musician's discography" bit...i heard that when dvd's came out. You can do that with a current DVD...are you willing to pay for it?
If an average CD costs $18 now, imagine the cost of 6-10 cd's worth of material on one disc. That's what boxed sets are for. Also imagine navigating said disc. Skip to track 110....sounds like an mp3 cd....and like i started with, what happens if you scratch it?
Now, the one thing i can't really argue with (much) is the higher resolutions enabled by DVD 2.0 (copyright m$). except the fact that the tv's to take advantage of said resolutions are still 5 years away from being affordable. This feature sounds like it will be limited to the high-end set for years, if not always. It just seems to me that the large-screen projection style tv's have always been priced about 4x the cost of the "average" tv.
Now, i realize that i could be wrong about this..next year at this time i could be embarrased about my inability to "look to the future" just like i thought that I'd never want a hard drive over 20gigs. But this seems to be a benefit only to the content providers, and reeks like divx (the dvd 'format') did years ago.
besides, if you want to protect content, don't compress it further, bloat it. DVD's were difficult to copy when they were introduced because few people had the storage or bandwidth to copy or transmit a full movie. Shrinking file sizes only makes it one step easier to copy.
First of all, Microsoft Research has been around for ages. Early September marked the 10th year anniversary of the MSR arm. They are involved in everything from Accessibility research to applied math theory and signal processing (from which the likes of ClearyType came out).
And second, what is it exactly you have against smart people making money? Did you get cut out of the dean's list by 0.01 GPA? It has been shown time and time again that smart people working with other smart people in an environment like the one MSR creates, is a Good Thing. You actually work on modern equipment, on relevant problems that have the potential to change the way millions of people work with computers. And you can get paid more than a living wage and you don't have to put up with snobby and moldy academia.
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