CD/DVD Manufacturers To Support Windows Media

Anonymous Coward writes "Seattle P-I story on MS's latest move towards having their finger in every slice of the content pie. Oh, goody. 'Microsoft Corp. plans to announce today that four DVD makers will incorporate its Windows Media Audio technology into their players, enabling consumers to play CDs and DVDs they compiled using that technology. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, DVD makers Toshiba, Panasonic, Apex Digital Inc. and Shinco, a Chinese manufacturer, will announce plans to support Windows Media Format in some or all of their models this year, said Michael Aldridge, lead product manager for Microsoft's Windows digital media division.'" We've mentioned this before, but there are a few more details now.

Comments

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[yellowstone]

Rio Volt (a portable CD/CDR/MP3 player) already supports Windows Media format.

Re:Hmmm... let's look at the stats...

[4im]

There are gigs and gigs of both pirate and legitimate divx3 and 4 videos out there to be had on IRC, Usenet, FT, and Gnutella.

The only ones who use WMV are corporate entities who don't have anything good to encode anyway...

I'm quite sure you're absolutely right there. Problem is, MS still isn't over the DivX ;-) guy's ripping of their codec, and go on ranting about that "pirated and poorly hacked" codec. Just check out their newsgroups. They go on saying how DivX is only used for DVD rips and pr0n, and "real" content providers wouldn't ever use anything but their own (better, supported) technology (their terms, not mine). Problem is, the corporate drones actually believe this. And as compared to Real Media, WM actually is very cheap.

Unfortunately, I have to work with WM right now. And I hate it, on technical grounds. Try to do anything beyond the most simple A/V streaming stuff, and you have to wade through monstrous inconsistencies and bugs, and no help whatsoever to expect from their newsgroups - I won't have to mention insufficient and hard to find documentation from MSDN. Only good thing: end of february, I'm outta here. And good riddance.

Re:Lies, Sex and Quicktime

[wowbagger]

The Sorenson codec may not be owned by Apple, but they are the sole licensees from Sorenson, and Sorenson cannot release the codec to anybody else without Apple's approval.

So, if you contact Apple, they will say "Don't talk to us, we don't own it, talk to Sorenson."

And if you talk to Sorenson, they will say "We'd LOVE to license it to you, really we would, but we cannot without Apple's approval, go talk to them".

Nice game of "Go ask your mother" there...