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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?"
I DO NOT want WMP technology in my DVD player...
I'll refuse to buy one that includes.
You DVD manufactures listening to me? I *know* you read slashdot.
...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...
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."
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
Before I get flamed - I'm not totally against Microsoft as I use some of their products in my daily life, I'm just getting really tired of them trying to "control all that you see and hear" to borrow a phrase.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
ZDNet had the story yesterday. The next version of MS windows media player is scodenamed Corona. It's double the DVD quality and 5.1 sound.
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.
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
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
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?
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?
Windows Media V7 was based on MPEG4 but the newer V8 codecs (which are much more efficient)
are no longer based on MPEG4.
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.
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:
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.
I already do.....I use something called.....MP3. It's a standard (well a default one anyway). Until something comes along that will improve upon this, noone will buy it(well just for that feature alone). Anyone remember the Music industry trying to put out stuff on Minidisc's? It flopped because CD's were a standard (although the MD was superior since it could have track names attached). Now, MP3 is the standard. Yeah it ain't open like OGG, but ask your mom what a MP3 is and she will know. Ask her what a OGG or WMA is and she probably doesn't know. I don't think of this as a bad thing until Windows Media only players are developed and are the only ones sold. I look at this as just another cool thing a DVD player could do along with VCD and MP3 on most common ones available today.
Gorkman
would you WMP in a house,
...
would you WMP with a mounse?
I would not buy them in the rain,
I would not buy them on a train,
I would not could not with a mouse,
I would not could not with in a house,
I DO NOT want WMP technology in my DVD player... sam I am!
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.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
If I remove the topic "Microsoft" from my Slashdot front page, will it also remove all the senseless trolling by Slashdot editors against Microsoft?
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?
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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.
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 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.
Lets assume you can fit 7GB (as opposed to 700MB) on a DVD.
No, lets assume you can fit 8 GB (8.4 billion bytes) on a dual-layer DVD. This is 8 * 1048576 kilobytes. Divide that by 32,400 seconds (9 hours) for the Godfather trilogy, and you get about 256 kilobytes or 2 megabits per second. (For comparison, the binary code for the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 fits into 3 megabits.)
So now instead of 23kb/s you can get 230kb/s. Holy fucking shit, that's barely enough for a stereo mp3 stream!
You confuse kilobits with kilobytes. An average MP3 data rate of 24 kilobytes (192 kilobits) per second is enough for transparent reproduction of stereo audio according to r3mix.net, and even 5.1 channel Dolby Digital uses only 48 kilobytes per second. This leaves 212 kilobytes per second average for video, and MPEG-4 DivX video can easily do DVD quality at this data rate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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