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Father of DVD Interviewed

Posted by michael on from the hard-disks-the-formidable-enemy dept.

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."

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Pet Peeve and question. by line-bundle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The worst thing I find about DVD is region encoding. Why is it there? It seems they wanted to put something to replace the PAL/SECAM/NTSC barrier. But I feel it might not help at all because people will (are?) buying Region 1 DVD player (I am from region 6 or thereabouts and things only appear for our region after decades).

    And a question. Is the NTSC stuff encoded on the DVD or is it an artifact of the conversion from digital to analong of the image?

  2. WTF are you talking about? by glrotate · · Score: 2, Interesting
    DVD - Video (primarily)


    RIAA - Audio.


    The RIAA had nothing to do with developing tthe DVD format.


    /. just cotinues to go down the tubes.

  3. It's even more easy than that. by Inoshiro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In Canada, a DVD of a certain movie could be about 14.99$.

    In the US, that same region 1 DVD is 14.99$.

    However, Canadian dollars cost less than US dollars. This is why US people should import all DVDs from Canada and never pay for them in the US, because the MPAA is just trying to segment Canada/US (which, considering NAFTA, shouldn't happen) for greater profits.

    This is also why any Canadians that do online shopping will be boned hard if they don't go to the ONE Canadian DVD site online that exists: cnl.com. They have great, Canadian prices and will ship titles to the US too.

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
  4. Re:Flash or HTML by captaineo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't particularly care about proprietary as in "controlled by one company," but I do dislike proprietary as in "different from standard practice for no good reason." I think it was unfortunate that the inventors of DVD went off and created their own half-baked UI system when better alternatives were in already in use. (yeah, that's about par for the course for most consumer electronics standards... =)

    Nor do I really like how most DVD releases use the menu UI system. I hate wading through un-stoppable movie menus to get where I want to go. I really wish DVD had the feature of laserdisc where you could just punch in "take me to frame #18275" and it would jump there immediately.

    (BTW I believe the specs for the Flash .swf file format are freely available, although I am not aware of any complete Free Software implementation.)