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Father of DVD Interviewed
An Anonymous Coward writes "Interview with Koji Hase. Talks about some of the interesting history behind the DVD format, copyright protection, and competing formats for audio."
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Somehow, I can't quite see that quote coming from the average corporate suit, where "proprietary" is regarded as a feature not a flaw...
You don't understand, do you? Obsolescence is a feature, not a flaw.
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I had thought that one hour of CD quality music is about 600Mb, so how does he get over five hours of CD-quality music?
Father? Like this is a big invention?
B**locks. The technology was there for the next generation laser disks. "Father of DVD" is father of the standard that made it : encrypted, region coded, specialized for Video, made a deal with Hollywood for the new big thing that will boost the move sales.
What an important person indeed!
What a great inventor!
Thanks to this man, mankind can enjoy "digital videos with the use of a laser disk on a computer that was designed for much more than just movie viewing"
I vote the next nobel award to be given to the father of DVD.
I always hated this argument because old movies that are no longer in theaters are also put on region locked discs.
Examples of region locked discs (from IMDB):
* The Wizard of Oz (1939)
* Gone with the Wind (1939)
* Snow White (1937)
* Tron (1982)
* Star Trek 1 (1979)
* Casablanca (1943)
* The Maltese Falcon (1941)
I could go on and on and on.
The real reason for region control is price fixing, plain and simple.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Examples of region locked discs (from IMDB):
[snip]
I could go on and on and on.
The real reason for region control is price fixing, plain and simple.
I kinda bought Hollywood's "we want to stagger DVD release dates because we need to stagger cinema releases because we don't have enough prints to go round" argument until I noticed this for myself a couple of months ago (not having really paid much attention to DVD until then...)
This is basic economics; if you're able to artificially segment your market, you'll optimise the total revenue by charging the most each segment will pay for your product. Without region coding, europeans like me would probably be importing all our DVDs from S-E Asia or the US where they're cheaper.
Playing the DVD game ensures you'll get screwed by the content publishers because the rules have been set by them entirely to their advantage. I've chosen not to play (apart from region-free discs such as music...)
--
DVD is the bastard created when our beautiful innocent High Tech was brutally raped by the RIAA. The engineer who created it ought to be deeply ashamed of his actions as an accomplice in that rape.
The copy protection and region encoding on DVD's have nothing to do with preventing commercial pirating and everything to do with controlling what the customer can do with the product that he bought. Claiming that copy protection has to do with piracy is a flat out lie. Commercial pirates are not inconvenienced in the least by copy protection - they make a bit for bit copy of the disk and stamp them out as fast as they want. Only you - the customer is affected in what you can do with your own property . According to the RIAA 'fair use' doesn't exist, and they won't be happy until the courts agree with them.
I think once digital projection for movie theaters becomes common by 2010, the idea of phased release of movies may become obselete.
:-)
The reason for phased release is simple: the very high cost of duplicating movie prints (each complete set for a 120-minute movie costs about US$2,500 to US$3,000 and you have to make about 6,000 to 8,000 prints for a blockbuster movie; you also have to factor into the cost of shipping each 35 mm print set weighing 210 pounds each for a 120-minute movie).
With the development of blue-spectrum LED lasers in the last few years, a theatrical-quality digital movie could probably fit on a single 300 mm optical disc; given today's technology to master and duplicate optical discs it'll probably be substantially cheaper to master and duplicate 8,000 optical discs than 8,000 film prints, not to mention shipping costs being a very tiny fraction of a 35 mm movie print!
With that substantial drop in duplicating and shipping costs simultaneous worldwide release of blockbuster movies may become the norm, not the exception.
Why the manufacturers don't just make different language releases, I don't know (presumably to keep costs down), but for whatever purpose, they have divvied up the zones along language lines, as well as geographical and release date-ical.
What region encoding does it provide a means to prevent distributors who do not want to compete with one another from doing so. A producer can sell rights to a DVD producer in the US to produce US-only DVDs, knowing that they can sell to another in Europe without the European distributor believing that they'd be in competition with the US distributor. As the marketing plan for the European DVD may differ radically from the US distributor, there is a potential conflict, especially, if the US distributor is competing with another US distributor, and a price war spills over into the EU with people finding it cheaper to import dumped DVDs than buy from the EU distributor.
That's why films like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Great Escape, etc, are being region coded, despite having been released around the world decades before DVDs were even a Valentian wet dream.
This is the real reason. It has nothing to do with staged releases. It probably wasn't originally to do with screwing customers, though that's the ultimate effect.
My personal opinion: Dixons, Currys, etc, the major consumer electronics retailers in the UK, should stop selling Region Two, or even Region Free, DVD players, and start exclusively selling Region One players - which are cheaper anyway. That would seriously screw up the market - DVD importers would have a field day, DVD player buyers would have more choice, Region Two distributors would essentially be forced to sell unlocked discs or bi-regional discs or face ruin in the UK, and long term the entire concept of region encoding would be discredited to the point I doubt any attempt would be made to implement it for DVDng.
Well, I can dream...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The one thing I wish were done a little differently with DVD (from the perspective of one who occasionally needs to author them) is the menu system. Instead of DVD's convoluted, proprietary menu implementation, I'd really prefer to see something like Flash or even dynamic HTML with Javascript. Imagine what DVD creators could do if they knew every DVD player had a Flash interpreter... (acknowledging of course that Flash was in a much more primitive state back when DVDs were being developed, if it even existed at the time :])
In the article he states near the end that he sees DataPlay becoming a widespread technology (note to others - that does not mean he nessicarily supports the format, just that he sess a future for it).
I don't with that prediciton though - for MP3 use, I'm pretty sure small HD's will remain on top. The 10 GB iPod is about the size any DataPlay player would be, and holds a lot more... plus as the tech gets better and better, the iPod advances in capacity much faster than DataPlay. He said in the interview that HD + RAM will take over for home video use, I'm not sure why he doesn't follow the same line of reasoning for audio players (or just about anything else!).
As for the other possibly use of DataPlay, cameras - I can possibly see this as the cost of a DataPlay disc (about $20) is a lot cheaper than CompactFlash... but the question is will DataPlay be used in devices much before ~500Mb compactFlash cards come down near to the price of a DataPlay disc? Furthermore, I see 500mb as being way too small to be meaningful in the future digital camera market, as resoultion and color depth improves the storage needs will grow quite a bit. Here again, I have to wonder if a HD solution will not win in the end - either an HD embedded in the camera, or seperate bluetooth enabled HD packs that you wear somewhere and that the camera transmits pictures to.
In the end, I have to think that while he might have been good at bringing a particular technology to the market, he doesn't seem like a true visionary - most of his predicitons listed in the article seem pretty simplistic to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I see your point, but I thought the major reason of phased release is the time it takes to dub or sub-title the movies. Not everyone on earth can understand English. This could add, depending on the size of the market and resource in a particular area, significant time between the finish of the US version and others.
:(
Perhaps another thing to consider is that sometimes they have to edit a movie to comply to whatever regulations they have in a particular company. There are equivalents of MPAA in other countries, too.
One more thing to consider might be, in relation to the above, each country may have their own distributors and depending on whatever the suit in the distributors think, they might want to edit. This could add some time between the releases.
Not that releasing at the same time all over the world is not impossible, but it is true that the preparation for a release in a different country can take extra resources.
On a bit off topic issue, I hate when local distributors change the titles. It's not just a matter of translating English title to German or Japanese (well, I have experiences only in those countries). They sometimes stick (sometimes extremely silly) ENGLISH title to movies that laready had an English title. Recent examples I encountered were: Miss Undercover for Miss Congeniality (couldn't spell, so I figure why they changed the title), and ``Crime is King'' for `3000 miles to Graceland.'' (Is there any law in Germany that prohibits the use of English system? BTW, the quarter pounder of cheese is called Royal TS in Germany. And yes, they sell beer in McDonnald's.) I feel pretty embarrassed when no one knows a popular movie that has an English title