Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
I have to question anyone who continually refers to movies on DVD as "software". Also:
So, is there any real benefit directly for the consumer with D-Theater? Yes. Aside from offering a copy protection studio safe enough to compel the studios to release HD material as prepackaged media at all
The studios shouldn't be compelled by encryption, they should be compelled by consumer's desire for their product. If consumers are not the #1 driving factor behind a product aimed solely at consumers then there is a problem here. Someone has gotten so big that consumer desire will exist regardless of what they do.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
boondoggle (bndôgl, -dgl) Informal
n.
1. An unnecessary or wasteful project or activity.
2.
a. A braided leather cord worn as a decoration especially by Boy Scouts.
b. A cord of braided leather, fabric, or plastic strips made by a child as a project to keep busy.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Probably stored right into the video via steganography in hopes that removal will also destroy the image.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Ever the skeptic, I greeted the announcement yesterday and went into the demo with tremendous trepidation. I have devoted every single day of the last four years of my life to the DVD format, and have hundreds of well-earned discs to prove it, so how could I not greet the arrival of a new format with anything but a nervous gulp? ... HD is simply the Holy Grail of home theater and the demos bore this out.
Sounds more fanzine-ish than serious journalism. But I guess slashdot is like that on other stuff, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
sulli
RTFJ.
These tapes store enough to the entire run of most TV shows on one tape. If the MPAA was smart, they'd make it so I could buy an entire series on one tape for like $150 -- $200.
I know they'll never do this, but if they did, it'd negate the need to use Morpheus/Kazaa/Clone. I think the main reason that people do download TV shows from it is that they cannot be acquired otherwise. If they made the whole series avaialable, well then I'd understand their case to prevent Morphues from being used legally.
"Derp de derp."
Nope, they're slightly different, FireWire being the more flexible of the two.
Firewire provides power over the bus. iLink doesn't. So, any FireWire _or_ iLink device can be plugged into a FireWire port and should theoretically work fine, but FireWire devices that draw power from the bus won't work from an iLink port.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
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.
Remember the Digital Audio Tape? No? Exactly my point.
Don't Tread on Me
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
In light of my post above as well as this one, I think I should clarify.
You'll find that Sony devices typically use the 4-pin connectors on their iLink devices. These plugs do not carry power. FireWire plugs with 6 pins can carry power. So, if you throw a 4-6 pin adapter in the mix somewhere, you just have to make sure that no device connected in that fashion needs to draw power from the bus.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
What compression scheme are they using, if any? MPEG-2? Windows Media? :-)
Will data on tape be encrypted itself? Or will the copy protection just be a few bits indicating a flag to permit/prohibit copy, like DAT? If the latter, then expect for this to be broken quickly, like the DAT copy protection scheme.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Maybe that's what the article writer means
But the truth still is that the IEEE standard defines both 6pin and 4pin connectors (with or without power, respectively)
iLink and FireWire are only the brand names. Of course, Sony uses only 4pin ports, and Apple sports 6pins everywhere... (althought I think the original documents Apple sent to IEEE did include both types of port)
-Kz-
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
"Does 1394 have a formal name?
The name FireWire, which was coined by Apple, is still used by a few vendors. Others have adopted the name i.Link, which is trademarked by Sony Corp., and has become a popular moniker for 1394-enabled products and technology in Japan."
Guess it could be a little out of date then and iLink is now equivilent with 4 pin, Firewire with 6 pin, but I don't think that's been put down anywhere as official names. The IEEE standard defines both though, 4 pin being without power and 6 pin with.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Of course it's compatible with your Betamax tapes. In five years, they'll be interchangable when it comes to propping up table legs and such.
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.
The existence of this product just indicates one thing: storage density and cost still favor tape so long as you can live with the limitations (lack of random access, mechanical complexity, wear). For example: DDS-4 tapes (4mm computer tapes that hold about 20G uncompressed) cost about one-fourth of what a 20G hard disk costs. Recordable CDs are cost-competitive, but you need about thirty of them, which makes them impractical for an application where you need high storage density.
It's inevitable that random-access (disc/disk) technology will catch up. Rewriteable DVD stores 4.7 Gbytes on a relatively affordable disc now, but that's only one-quarter of the available storage on one of these D-VHS tapes. Presuming that it takes a few years for a suitably large random-access medium to emerge, I imagine that D-VHS will fill a hole in the current high-definition market for a while.
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
The article made a most useful point. I hadn't thought about it before (since HDTV is currently way out of my price range), but once it becomes mainstream I'll be awfully annoyed if I have to downsample the picture to NTSC to save a program. Now I'm sure DVRs will be more commonplace at that point too, but it will be an incredibly long time before those are useful for long-term storage. For now, this format fills a gaping void, and I would think that as HDTV becomes more popular and comes down in price, this will too.
I assume that almost all of the people with the comments like "tape sucks, why would I want this?" have never seen an HDTV broadcast..
It's all about quality. Ever since I got my HDTV, I find it difficult to watch standard (Lo-Res) TV. After watching High Definition movies on HBO-HD, DVD's look poor by comparison.
I will probably buy one of the D-VHS units, because I want the best quality I can get. I would rather have HD-DVD, but I'll use D-VHS for the five years until HD-DVD arrives.
I doubt its true but someone once told me that VCR's with RCA inputs had [to] include a macrovision chip to scramble the signal.
It's true. Page 4 of this LoC document states that the DMCA requires new VCRs manufactured or sold in the United States to respond to automatic gain control and four-line colorstripe copy protection; both techniques are used in the Macrovision system. The relevant statute is 17 USC 1201(k).
Will I retire or break 10K?
"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.
I want my HD DVD, now. I don't want this tape format, but I could see some people buying it if they don't get HD DVD off the ground soon. If the players were cheap enough I'd pick one up and rent movies for it...but I'm not buying any movies on tape.
There should be an HD DVD standard coming out SOON! It would have been nice to have had HD support in from the first day and just start using it when needed. That way they could release movies in standard definition with tons of extras, or use the space for an HD version. I'd love that.
It sucks that movies on HBOHD look better than those on my DVD player.
I'm pretty confident that the album business model will collapse in the next few years. The main problem is that the MPAA and the RIAA aren't flexible enough to provide formats that we, the consumers, want.
For example, I want to buy lower quality versions of movies on a DVD format like that used on the Game Cube. It'd require using a lossier format like DivX, but it means the discs are more portable. Less bulkier, and the quality loss would be acceptable for this portability.
Too bad they're not more open to these ideas. They'd rather sue me for implementing this myself.
"Derp de derp."
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?
For example, I want to buy lower quality versions of movies on a DVD format like that used on the Game Cube. It'd require using a lossier format like DivX, but it means the discs are more portable.
What point would there be to making it smaller other than to make it handheld or otherwise wearable? And why would you want to make a medium that requires a user's full attention wearable? Movies aren't like CD audio, which a fellow can listen to while walking down the street.
Less bulkier
The box for a DOL disc is the same size as the box for a DVD. (DOL discs are the Nintendo GameCube's optical medium.) This shows that DVDs are already "portable enough" in that you can easily move them from one DVD player to another.
Will I retire or break 10K?
they don't get scratched.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
OK, I don't have a DVD player, but I do own a good number of CDs. You can say what you like about video tapes overstretching and wearing out over time, but there's this phase between the ages of 1 to 4 years where children love to play with everything. Video tapes, while not indestructable are fairly robust and can take some beating from kids.
CD's on the other hand are just DESTROYED by kids. Finger prints, weird scratches, you name it. If it's a kids educational CD and they have access to it and think they can play with it, it'll get wrecked.
I guess it's all perspective on longevity...
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. :-)
"What point would there be to making it smaller other than to make it handheld or otherwise wearable? And why would you want to make a medium that requires a user's full attention wearable? Movies aren't like CD audio, which a fellow can listen to while walking down the street."
For a few reasons:
1.) I want it to fit in my pocket. I need a really big pocket to fit a CD player, but halve the size and now you're talking.
2.) I can carry a bunch of disks with me as well as the drive. Again, this has to fit in my pocket. Why? Because I want to take this with me when I travel.
3.) Less likely to skip during a bumpy trip. This, of course, is theoretical, but I'm pretty sure that since the disks are a lot smaller, they are less likely to wobble around when it gets bumpy. This is another must-have when travelling.
I never said anything about wearable, I just want more portability. I have RSI so my wrists hurt when carrying something like a heavy book around, so I want my devices to be pocket sized so I don't have to hold them. Today I can buy a portable DVD player, but it doesn't fit in my pocket.
"The box for a DOL disc is the same size as the box for a DVD. (DOL discs are the Nintendo GameCube's optical medium.) This shows that DVDs are already "portable enough" in that you can easily move them from one DVD player to another."
I honestly don't follow this comment at all. If you are talking about the box that the disc comes in, aka the box that is sold on the shelf, then that has nothing to do with the discs being 'portable enough.' It has to do consumers recognizing that Game Cube games are just as good as PS2 or XBOX games. Nintendo could very easily fit a GCN game into a Game Boy Advance box, but that'd likely confuse people into thinking that they're getting a GBA game instead.
If you mean the CD case for these discs, that's not very conclusive either. I want these things to fit in my pocket without concern of breaking them. That is not an unreasonable desire. Nobody has ever complained about technology making things smaller as long as the interface is good.
"Derp de derp."
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.
This could also have the effect that codec wars would die out as well. Why use one when you could record raw onto it? (well except for those Dr Who marathons) A DVD player that would not need decryption/encryption is cheaper to make.
As data backup it would be great I could store approximately 450 CD's in MP3 format on a single disk. Imagine a portable player for that baby! I'm drooling already.
Unfortunatly this tech is still about 2yrs away. I can't wait!
There is a small consolation however - I've seen a new DVD-RW drive showing up here. It's a HP CD-RW drive recently advertised at $599us. Hm.. wonder if it does VCD's as well.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
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
Is that all this capatalistc stuff got it's start from trading things from where they were plentful (and cheap) to where they were scarse (and expensive). The Silk Road, the Hanseatic League and so on were all around so that good could be traded all over. Now that we have the technology and systems in place to have world wide trade and since corperations now span the globe, they want to go teh other way and create artifical scarisity.
:)
Creating the very thing their ancestors sought to eliminate
I agree that Sony would bring the warranty up. Part of what makes this an interesting case, is the mixture of "contract" and "copyright" law. The manufacture's warranty is part of the contract, but there are a number of other contract considerations that come into play. They range from the "value" of the sale, rights given up or extended, customer expectations, etc.
I actually think the warranty will end-up being both a strength and weakness for Sony. On their plus side, they will be able to claim that they shown some responsibility for taking care of VHS defects. On the negative side, they admit that VHS has (or can acquire) defects. The policy of limiting back-ups of a medium that has known defects show how they can unfairly take advantage of the consumer.
A discovery order from the court could obtain Sony's internal documents showing the expected rate of deterioration of a VHS tape (they probably have pretty accurate details, since they manufacture tapes and decks). The discovery order could even produce a "smoking gun" memo that shows a x% increase in sales due to customers buying new copies to replace worn-out or damaged copies (now that they have been prevented from making back-up copies).
Realistically, I don't think small claims court is going to issue any sweeping discovery orders (although wouldn't it be cool). They are going base the decision primarily on contract law, and although INAL, I believe there is enough substance that this would have a good chance of prevailing.
RF modulators will introduce signal degradation of their own (it's why when I recently snagged a TI-99/4A, I built a cable for it to pipe the composite video straight into a TV instead of using the RF modulator that came with it).
There are other devices that take composite video in and spit out Macrovision-free composite video. They used to sell for $40 or so and ran off a 9-volt battery for about a year. Radio-Electronics magazine even published plans for such a device back in 1988 or so, so a trip to the nearest library ought to turn up those plans. (You could also search Google and find all sorts of newer devices that do the same thing with composite and/or S-video.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.