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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?"
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."
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.
I think that it will be much too late to complain when they "ONLY do WMA" (I presume you also mean WMV).
.ppt, etc) situation. In a way it is worse, because MS has a good chance of blocking compatible systems by legal action with the audio and video formats.
The complaint isn't about players supporting additional formats, or about them "suck"ing because they support WMA. It is that this smacks of another attempt by MS to take over a new chunk of the market of digital stuff. Maybe they are just trying to "participate" in it, but it is naive to think that they are going to suddenly behave differently in this market than they have in others.
This is something like the other file formats (.doc,
To answer your question directly, I care.
Oh, and VCD is an MP* format. (In exactly the same way that DVD is an MP* format. Namely, there is a separate standard for how the files are managed, but the data files are MPEG.)
-Peter
Actually, DVDs are /required/ to have a Dolby Digital or PCM track. Having additional audio formats (i.e. DTS) is optional.
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.
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:
http://ff123.net/128test/instruct.html
This test is actually being analysed properly, using the insights gained from his previous 128kbps test, whose results you can find here). You can see the preliminary results here: http://ff123.net/128test/interim.html. In particular, look at the results of the last of the three test files. With overall 95% confidence we can say that on this test clip:
mpc is better than xing
ogg is better than xing
lame is better than xing
aac is better than xing
mpc is better than wma8
ogg is better than wma8
lame is better than wma8
aac is better than wma8
Aside from this, listening tests have previously shown that WMA8 is better than WMA7 at the low end (sub 64kpbs), at the expense of being worse at the middle to high end (112kpbs upwards). For listening to music on anything that costs more than $10, you would do best to stay away from WMA (and, looking at the other results on the page I previously mentioned, from Xing encoded MP3s as well...).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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.....
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.