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A Closer Look At D-VHS At DVDfile.com
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."
I can understand copy protection even though I do not like not being able to make a back up (CDs, DVDs or tapes do not last forever). So although I am unhappy I can live with it. I have a region free DVD player because I think region coding is completely wrong and should be against the law. It goes against free trade and is simply a way of screwing extra money out of people for nothing in return. If I buy something cheaper elsewhere I should be free to use it. If I bought it I have not robbed anyone unless it is an illegal copy. So I think they have got it arse about face with this.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
blue laser DVD's, which will probably boost capacity by at least 100% if past technological trends mean anything. Current DVD's look poor on HDTV equipment, limited by their 480 line resolution and MPEG2 compression.
One can only hope that a blue laser DVD would get improved compression algorithms for fewer artifacts, better sound, and much better resolution (1080p anyone?). Unfortunately, I have a very funny feeling that Hollywood and the media moguls will not release any new DVD technology until they find something much, much stronger than CSS to safeguard it. We'll crack it, of course, but how long will it take, and how cumbersome will it be to do so?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Region coding is the biggest ripoff I can imagine. Traditionally, you could go to other markets to buy things at a cheaper price with some items. With video games and DVDs already making items from other regions inaccessible to hardware in this region, it cuts that off. As an added bonus, the producers of the video games, DVDs, and their respective systems are trying to make it ILLEGAL to modify the hardware so that it will play games or DVDs from another region (aka mod chipping). This is one of the more noticible ways corporations are trying to make it illegal to not buy what they want you to buy.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
All I can say is that I never watched movies much. I don't like going to the theater for a large variety of reasons. I did watch movies on VHS (sometimes) but I found it somewhat inconvient. Having to rewind, the slow fast-forward, the bad picture quality you can get (especialy when paused). But when DVD came along, I fell in love with movies again. The quality is fantastic (and I'm using a PS2 to play them on a 27" analogue sony TV, so it's not like I'm useing $50,000 worth of equiptment). I like being able to jump anywhere in the movie, how the screen is crystal clear when the movie is paused. I love how I can watch movies on the road with my laptop and all the interesting extra features that can be added to DVDs (deleted scenes, little almost "pop-up-video-esque" info like on the Akira DVD, etc). D-VHS may look good, but it seems to me that it might end up as just another laserdisc. Used by moviephiles, but not by the public at large. Maybe it will even become the Betamax to DVD's VHS, a different format that's good, and is used, but not as much. It will be interesting to see.
As for the here and now, I see three problems: first and formost, I don't have $2000 to blow on something that I can't rent movies for at my local blockbuster. Second, DVDs already have a huge install base and are a goliath to go up against. And third, very few people (remember that /.ers are disperportionatly techy) have HDTVs. So for someone with only a normal, analogue TV like me, would I see any benifit over DVD?
Just some random museings.
Ready... Set... Moderate!!!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Forget D-VHS or whatever it is called...
The box manufacturers could make a DVD system today that would store enough data to record a movie and all the associated goodies in HDTV.
All they gotta do is make a plastic shell (which represents one movie for instance) that holds two or three (ever how many it takes) DVDs that hold the data.
Then they build a DVD player that swallows that shell, reads the first DVD and plays it until it detects it is within lets say a minute of finishing the first half of the movie. The DVD player then buffers the last minute or so in RAM.
Then using the same technology that allows for CDROM switching in, lets say, car stereos the DVD player switches to the second DVD and buffers in the first minute of it as well.
With the last minute off the first disc buffered in and the first minute off the second disc buffered in there is no reason why a smooth transition couldn't be made and no glitches appear in the movie.
It's a fairly simple proposition, somebody just needs to sit down and do it.
I cannot remember the guy's name at Sony (I think it was the President, CEO, or whatever they got) who came up with the shirt pocket size diskette, the walkman, etc. but that's the kinda person who needs to get the ball really rolling.
Not some pinheads who cannot see past the end of their rich, conceited, lazy noses.
Thanks for listening
Caution: Contents under pressure
"It never made it however. It still required winding tape if you wanted to skip a song so Minidisk and cd-r took its place."
This is the 21st century. There's no need to have direct access between the tape and the viewer. You put in a hard drive to buffer the tape (think Tivo), have the tape read at speeds that we currently associate with "fast forward," and by the time you're finished watching the stupid FBI warning and trailers the movie is already on the hard drive. Viola: random access.
So long as I want to record television I'm going to have a VCR. Period. TiVo is nice for short-term storage, but that still doesn't allow me to have a collection of Enterprise or whatever the hell else the Betamax decision lets me do with what comes into my TV.
As for DVDs, even if DVD recorders eventaully trickle down to the home entertainment market, unless some true genius figures out how to make holographic recording cheap and easy recordable DVDs will always be half-capacity compared to commercially stamped ones. You can buy a two hour movie but can only record one hour of television. Sure, you could cut the quality of the recording and squeeze more in, but you could do the same thing to a 120 minute tape at twice the capacity.
I've already got time and effort devoted into a VHS collection and, no matter how big my DVD collection may get, I won't be getting rid of my tapes. So long as this new digital VHS standard is recordable like my old VHS recorder, I see no real reason not to get this (beyond the cost factor that is).
I'm already thinking about getting a new VCR anyway since I'd like to at least have one in stereo. My next big purchase will probably be a digital television (the idea of having a 36"+ computer monitor makes me moist) and maybe an HDTV receiver. Right now I don't intend on getting a new computer because come May my PS2 will be able to do everything I would have wanted a new PC to do. So, really... why not?
Macrovision is defeatable. I have a device right now that strips away the macrovision signal and replaces it with a regular video signal.
Why do I have this?
My TV only has one RCA input on it. In order to select my DVD from my IR remote, I have it hooked into the system through one of my VCRs. In doing so, I fall into Macrovision's trap, and my DVD's video signal get's goobered by the VCR. I don't want this to happen, since I'm not actually taping the DVD, I just wanna watch it with convenience.
Last I heard, devices such as these were legal to buy, legal to own, and legal to use ... so long as all you were doing was viewing a program (this was in pre-DVD/pre-DMCA days though). There are certain brands of VCR/TV combinations that respond to a Macrovision signal on a VHS tape, despite there being no second VCR to muck up the video ... and this device allows them to properly view their legally purchased VHS tapes.
If your intention is to take a Macrovision protected VHS or DVD and pipe it into a Video Capture card that repsonds to Macrovision, then there is no reason that a similar device shouldn't be able to "fix" the video signal for you.
FWIW, I bought mine out of a "Radio Electronics" type magazine ... way in the back, there was an ad for one. You can buy one ready-made, or you can probably find the schematics on-line and build your own. If I recall properly, I paid ~$20-$40 for mine. Totally worth the dough...
And yes ... a device like this *does* make it possible for you to copy a commercial VHS tape, or a DVD that's protected with Macrovision. However, a friend tells me you could have always done this ... if you dump the signal to say, a (high-end) Beta machine. :-)
I work with some video production equipment from time to time, I'm pretty sure that this doesn't apply to commercial grade VCRs. All of the adjustments I've seen are done manually, like so many other pieces of professional grade equipment. (Having a deck without manual adjustments would be like having a version of Photoshop with automatic color correction only.) Not being able to adjust gain manually would drive any video engineer I know nuts. Plus, I've worked with new (I believe post-DMCA) S-VHS decks and have copied Macrovision protected tapes no problem...
Which brings us to the (often quoted) next point: If one person can copy and share unprotected copies, what's the point in copy protection?
44GB of data on a single magnetic tape with digital format sounds like a great backup media to me. If it catches on as a consumer product, readers/writers and blank media would be dirt cheap (as opposed to things like DLT).
OK, the 140GB disks around the corner mean it wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would still be a very attractive one.
I wonder how long it'll take for some intrepid soul to gerry-rig one of these D-VHS VCR's as a (relatively) inexpensive backup medium? Whilst the cassettes are bulkier than DLT and such, 44GB per tape ain't bad at all.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Didn't they try to kill the CD or something with a smaller form of DAT or something similar to that. I just remember seeing regular sized audio tapes with digital information on them (which really doesn't seem like a bad idea for data storage actually)
Crashx99