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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."
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.
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
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:
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!
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