Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Netcraft has confirmed: DVD is dying Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered DVD community when recently IDC confirmed that DVD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that DVD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. DVD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict DVD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: DVD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for DVD because DVD is dying. Things are looking very bad for DVD. As many of us are already aware, DVD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the DVD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that DVD has steadily declined in market share. DVD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If DVD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. DVD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, DVD is dead.
Fact: DVD is dead
At least one audio track on a DVD must be Dolby Digital or PCM audio. Any other audio codec is optional. That is why most DTS DVDs have Dolby Digital on them, and if they don't they have to have PCM.
As for Quicktime, MPEG4 is based off of it. So, when the next generation DVD players that use MPEG4 come out, they will.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Apple supports MPEG-4 and has a strategy to be the digital hub (the first product in it is the iPOD and is stiking ot standard--mostly open as well. BSD Unix, GNU-Darwin, Java 2, Perl, C/C++, super-cool Aqua with OpenGL: looks like Apple may end up being the only reasonable alternative to M$ pretty soon. I don't regret making the switch at all--although I am waiting for Final Cut Pro 3 and Universe 4 on OSX (just a few more weeks though) and I wish someone would come up with an elegant way to run X apps without compromising OSX operation.
HINT: the more money slashdotters spend on Intel and even AMD gear in the end strengthens the Wintel cartel/monopoly and increases the M$ war chest used to cut deals like this. In the end, you are hurting yourselves even though you don't realize it. Go Mac before M$ owns you.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
-- Alexander Pope
"The price of freedom is a Mac...and man is it worth it."
-- Anonymous Coward
Now, when there is going to be a thing compatible with Microsoft (DVD players), people complain that the Microsoft monopoly is being extended!
Make up your minds.