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Digital TV Still Indecisive
/dev/trash writes "The logjam between Hollywood and Silicon Valley seems to be over. According to this article on cnn.com. It looks like they want to just add a flag that says "this is a broadcast, do not allow more than one copy"" If it
was only that simple- the article makes it sound like there isn't a lot of
progress being made.
...because it had such a copy prevention flag.
While you can go to the store and choose between two boxes, one that can record/replay anything and one that can't (and assuming all else being equal) the box with the copy prevention will stay on the shelf.
You can already see this with DVD players. Nobody need buy a region restricted player any more. Almost all DVD players can either be configured by the supplier or the owner to play any region disk and the makers are unlikely to end this any time soon (nobody wants to end up with warehouses full of DVD players with the wrong region set...)
Actually afaik they've managed to keep the encryption standard for DVB under wraps in Europe - I don't think anyone has broken it yet. Of course, people have reverse-engineered the authentication modules, and the encryption keys are freely available over the net... -s
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For once, screw NTSC, PAL and SECAM. I still can't figure out why various countries chose to have different broadcast signals in the first place. Hopefully Digital TV will make this a moot point, once we all share the same "format" (and it better be good :)
Uh... riiight. Whatever.
HDTV is a North American only standard. Japan has it's own analog high definition standard. Various countries in Europe have their own standards (e.g. - the UK. Not sure what the status is of other countries at the moment).
Second, this can also be the occasion for designing a newer DVD format [slashdot.org] better suited than current DVDs for high-res TV.
There are already ongoing efforts for an HD DVD standard. Blu-ray is one of them. The name of the other (which is a single company, not a consortium) escapes me at the moment. If there's any relation to the HDTV broadcast standards then it'll be more because the hardware is already setup to deal with specific resolutions than for any other reason.
I think these will be every happy times in 5-10 years once the technology will have matured a bit.
Some of the issues are not solvable. The 8VSB broadcast standard sucks wind. It doesn't fulfill it's goal properly - multipath transmissions kill it dead, and its current operational range is pathetic. If you live within 25 miles of a HD tower you'll probably get reception. If under 50, you may. If 75, you'll be lucky. Over 75? Forget it, the signal won't be strong enough to get a picture.
just hope that the same mistakes (the ones we did in the past with analog broadcast) will not be repeated..
No, they're making all new and improved mistakes. The FCC apparantly got neutered in the past couple decades and they haven't done anything that is in the consumer's interest regarding HD. Removing the "must carry" clause for cable when it comes to HD was the nail in the coffin. At this point they're just throwing dirt on top (no recording standards, no cable box standards, no encryption standards, etc.).
I love the idea of digital. I've seen HD and it's absolutely stunning. But the rollout has been so mismanaged that I'm increasingly of the opinion that HD is doomed to become the next DAT.
If your local affiliates are up to speed (this biggest question mark at the moment, IMO), or you've got Dish or DirecTV, there's quite a bit of astoundingly impressive HD content out there right now, and with HD sets in the sub-$2K range, it's more accessable than most people think.
Actually, if you are willing to build your own PVR (and I can understand that some aren't), there are quite a few options for timeshifting HDTV content. Namely;
AccessDTV: http://www.accessdtv.com/accessdtv/index.htm
Hauppauge WinTV-HD: http://www.hauppauge.com
Telemann HiPix: http://www.telemann.com/products/dtv200.html
There are quite a few opinions on these cards, and if you are really interested you should be sure to check a more recent one because as the software they use changes, so does the capabilities of the cards. As always, a great resource for all of this is the AVS Forum: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ [avsforum.com]