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A Closer Look At D-VHS At DVDfile.com

Posted by timothy on from the we-control-the-horizontal-we-control-the-vertical dept.

great throwdini writes: "Peter M. Bracke of DVDfile.com has written a more thoughtful piece on D-VHS (mentioned in the Slashdot article, Copy-Protected Digital VHS) based on his impressions of a press demonstration. Says Fox's VP of Marketing, Peter Staddon, 'If we thought it (D-VHS) was going to kill DVD, we wouldn't be doing it.' Peter has even put together a nice little factsheet on the format. Encryption may be absent on D-VHS tapes, but it looks like the practice of region coding may continue."

4 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. You can't protect something... by Stone+Rhino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    that has analog outputs. if there is a way to convert it to analog, it can't be copy-protected, etc. thus, this copy-protection, region encoding, etc. stuff is futile.

    --


    Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
  2. Hint: They're not compelled at all... by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nothing competes with the DVD (except maybe the big userbase of VHS players) and the movie companies themselves. The only reason they could have for releasing it in HDTV is the same reason they wanted to put it on DVDs in the first place, to give you some new "value" so they could sell it to you all over again. The ideal customer saw a movie in the cinemas, then rented the video, then bought the video and is now buying the DVD, maybe someday the DVHS version too (because it's HDTV) and then even later the HD-DVD version. If you don't believe it then think twice about why the Star Wars videos come before the Star Wars DVDs...

    What the movie industry realizes is that this is the last time they can do this. Maybe we're there already with DVD. DVD audio never took off and simply won't, because the CD is "good enough" (considering that most people find 128kbps mp3 good enough, well...)

    Kjella

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. DVD is more convient than tape by crazyprogrammer · · Score: 2, Insightful
    DVD Players are just now becomming as common as a regular VCR. I don't think too many people will want to shell out a few hundred more dollars for something that plays tapes.

    I think the reason most people like DVDs better than VHS tapes is the picture quality, it is smaller than a tape, you can start at any chapter immediately instead of fast forwarding for about 10 minutes, and no need to rewind it when done watching it.

    The MPAA would get a whole bunch of people pissed off at them if they killed DVD. And I would be one of them.


    --
    "the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
  4. The studios don't care by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I get the impression the movie studios don't much care whether you can make analog copies; they are worried about the perfect digital copies.