Slashdot Mirror
High Definition DVD
Vinnie_333 writes "Looks like the specs for HD-DVD are currently being discussed by Hollywood big wigs, with an optimistic product release date of Xmas of 2003. Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm. Come on, more storage is always a good thing. Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."
Xmas 2003 is too optimistic. I'd add on another 6 - 12 months on that. Especially if all they are doing is sicussing things.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
Now we have to throw away all the current players and TV's to take advantage of this. People are just now getting used to DVD's and they want to switch formats so soon? Bad move.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
once the writes for those huge disks come out, hollywood would be shit scared. you could burn all of your mp3's on 3 disks and send them to anyone anywhere.
plus you could still compress the movies down to regular cdr sizes. you would just loose all that extra stuff you dont have now.
-- john
Movie makers will have to start intentionally holding back EVEN MORE footage to fill up the vastly expanded "bonus feature" section.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
Not a problem - we can currently cut down multi-gig DVDs to ~700 Megs with little quality loss. Might just take a bit longer to encode, but we'll have faster processors by then, so no prob.
How does this cut down on fears of piracy? Why couldn't they be compressed back down?
"Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."
No it won't, it will have no effect because people will just reencode it to a lower bitrate. Whether the DVD is at9 mbps or 20 mbps people will still encode it to 3000 kbps and fit it on 2 or 3 cd's
That kind of size won't be so scary. Remember when CD media first started coming out and the record industry smugly thought that it was unpiratable because 650M was just so ungodly huge. Even DVD movies, oversized as they are for net piracy, can be recompressed down to a file that can be transferred over a broadband connection with little trouble.
The moral of the story is: size is a poor piracy prevention tool. Technology will eventually catch up no matter how big you make something.
I read the internet for the articles.
you know i read on this site that he died a few months ago. that man just wont stay dead.
-- john
It seems to me the reason why hardly anybody owns HDTV is that there aren't many broadcasts in HDTV. But, there aren't many broadcasts in HDTV because there aren't enough people out there that have HDTVs. So, if people start buying HDTVs in order to take advantage of the better quality of HD-DVDs, will this provide incentive for more HDTV broadcasts since more people will own HDTVs? Or, are we just going to go another decade without HDTV?
Except that Blu-ray couldn't possibly be mass market by Christmas 2003. The nice thing about a red laser system is that the physical medium of the disc doesn't have the change, which means the hardware in existing DVD players can be mostly the same, with just a different decoder chip. Fast computers will just need a software update. And, of course, replication and duplication facilities won't need to chance, so it'll cost well less than $1 to make an HD disc, which means we could start seeing mass market prices very quickly.
This is really good from the Hollywood perspective. They'll get us all to buy 1280x720 red laser HD discs from 2003-2006, and then come out with 1920x1080 Blu-ray as a mass market technology around Christmas 2006-2008, when they get all the kinks worked out. Same way we've already bought DVD and laserdisc versions of the same movie.
The article claims that the compression technology will be from Microsoft, but my contacts tell me it is much more likely to be MPEG-4, in order to have a technology not tied to any one vendor. Of course, Windows Media derived codecs would offer better compression efficiency. We shall see.
My video compression blog
Quite a bit of intelligent and deeply detailed writing on this subject (and many more) has graced the pages of Widescreen Review. Their point of view is strongly in favor of waiting for a higher density, higher bitrate DVD formats over trying to rig the existing DVD format for high definition content. They claim the inside perspective is that high definition DVD is at least five (5) years away. They have also provided extensive coverage of the new D-Theater D-VHS high definition consumer tape format that is available right now for people with fancy video projectors and deep pockets. D-Theater doesn't look like it will ever be a mass-market technology, but its apparently a really nice interim technology and it seems to deliver video that truly does rival quality theatrical media. (If your projector is up to snuff, of course.)
The problem I see is that the existing DVD format has become a huge success, with the consumer electronics and movie industries heavily investing in it and heavily profiting in it. Consumers love the format, despite its irritating, customer-hostile feaures (such as region encoding and material the user interface prevents you from fast-forwarding through or skipping). I doubt either industry wants to compromise or confuse such a successful market. (Similarly, gamers have been so happy playing Half Life and its mods that Valve hasn't bothered to release a completely new game product in many years.)
it is people like you that justify the dmca... there are some people fighting for the freedom to watch movies they have purchased on hardware they have purchased and because of the software they have purchased it is illegal. and you are only thinking about how to pirate these films, this will only give them more reason to keep decss outlawed
i dont have a dvd player, and the only people i know who rip them use windows. shouldnt it be possible to pipe the information between programs?
/dev/dvd | avi_compressor -o dvd.avi -
something like this:
$bash: decss_dvd
surely this is possible, and it wouldnt require any more disk space than that required for the avi file.
-- john
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
correct me if I'm wrong but: 6 * 4.7GB = 28.2GB right?
so tell me again, why is it we have harddrives and not just a a couple Blue Ray-RW's ? I mean we could just put the OS on some kinda flash memory (that can be exchanged) on the mobo and have a bunch of Blue Ray-RW's for storage.
Of course the prices for drives as well as the medium itself will be high in the begining, but just as prices on DVD-RW (etc.) are coming down, so will they.
Won't it be more practicle (and cheaper) to have these instead of HDD's?
I don't think so.
;) The bigger the media, the more bandwidth will be required to transfer them, hence I predict that there will be a boom in fibre hookups for the residential market when the standard media for movies gets bigger.
:)
What do you think drives the bandwidth market?? Piracy of movies of course.
If this post makes no sense, it is because I just got off a long graveyard shift, and feel fairly rummy.
sig? what sig?
I think hardly anybody owns HDTV because 99% of people are perfectly happy with what htey have at the moment.
Current TV broadcasts are good enough for me, so I don't see any reason to get a new TV any time in the near future.
I also believe that 90% of people now have a PC that is good enough. I can't see a need for most people to upgrade unless there is a major development in PC's,say 10x performance improvement and 3+ processors, this is the kind of performace increase that high quality real-time or AI systems need. Current software dosn't need more procesing power than most people have.
I may consider getting a faster broard-band connection. but I can't see any need for more than 2-3 mbits downstream with 1meg upstream. It's engough to stream reasonable quality viedo over.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
...how long it will take to crack CSS's successor? ...how many offically sanctioned linux-decoders will exist after 3 years. ...whether they'll increase the number of regions for more finely grained price-gouging? ...whether there'll be click-through licenses stating that you don't own that copy?
I think not. before long we will have 500 gig hard drives, which will make that 20-30 gig movie seem like nothing.
the only thing stopping this is the fact that not everyone has a T3 at their disposal.
there will always be piracy, and it always starts small, regardless of how large the storage requirements are.
That the primary purpose of reviewing this is to "fix" the "joke" copyprotection that's on the classic DVD. The first time around they either poorly underestimated the abilities of a few dedicated hackers or they just didn't understand simple technology when it came to encryption. of course, as much as the copy protection was considered an important factor on DVDs, the storage capacity, image quality, and lack of degregation were more important when it was designed. The copy protection was an industry requirement, one that despite their efforts has made no difference. Not really sure what the purpose of region coding was, beyond forcing people to buy multiple DVD players or to use them illegally.
Despite their abilities to improve the encryption on their new DVD standard, it will only delay, but not competely thwart the efforts of those who have the desire and the ability to break it. The second ANY software is available to play it back, that software has to be distributed. It can always be disassembled and rebuilt from the assembly level. It will take a LONG time, but if someone wants it badly enough.....
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I expect that at least 128 bits will be allocated to region coding - the region, in this case, being the GPS co-ordinates of the player you intend to play it on.
:-) You will have to buy TWO copies.
Of course, you cannot expect to be able to play a DVD on the living room player AND the player in your bedroom, honestly, that's rediculous!
Also, bear in mind that you will only be permitted to watch the television with one eye open. Two eyes open violates the licensing agreement. Watching the first half of the movie with your left eye, and the second half with your right eye is, technically, not a violation of the agreement, as long as at no point you have both eyes open.
If there is a mirror in the room, it MUST be covered up, prior to playing the DVD, otherwise the reflection counts as piracy. The mirror may be confiscated as it violates the DMCA.
VHS became popular in the mid 70's I think. (I don't know, wasn't conceived then). DVD was released in 1996-7. I bought my first DVD player in 1998 from Circuit City. I paid 250 for it, got a new movie, and 5 divx discs. (Still love whipping them out and scaring my friends). When Divx went under I got 100 check in the mail. So my question is, will this new standard be avaliable less than 2 years after its release for 150 dollars? If not, they are wasting theirs and our collective time.
The most good that will come from this format is putting the last nail in the VHS coffin.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Look at the difference between wavs and MP3s. uncompressed vs compressed.
Even with as huge format, all you need is someone with a acceptable to the mass market format that people will tolerate. People listen to MP3s all the time even though it is usually easy to hear the difference between that and the real original.
depending on the content, people will put up with a lot of stuff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm.
Yet Another Inaccurate Slashdot Summary. (YAISS). That's not what the article says at all. The implication is that the haven't "disregarded" Blu-Ray, but that one particular studio, Warner, has found it lacking because it would require a brand new manufacturing process and this would preclude a quick launch date which is needed to compete with Fox's D-VHS. One analyst specifically states that Blu-Ray is likely to be supported by Sony/Columbia-Tristar.
Anyway, one point the article fails to mention is that a highly-compressed HD format which takes up 9 GB is unlikely to be further compressible without a substantial loss of quality. Someone would essentially have to copy all nine gigabytes in order to maintain HD quality. But a 30 to 50 GB Blu-Ray movie, loosely compressed, would be the basis of a very high quality DivX type dub. (It's like the difference between trying to recompress your mp3's as Oggs or going back to the source CD for a higher quality compression.) Not to mention that if it's a MS controlled format they'll easily be able to restrict a Palladium OS from copying the disk. So for those reasons, Hollywood might prefer to release Warner's format to the Sony/Philips backed Blu-Ray.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Columbia specifically endorsed Blu-ray, as do most of the members of the DVD forum. Only Fox has given (half-hearted) support to Warner's red laser.
...
...
...
I mean, read the article, people.
"Warner is clearly the biggest advocate of red laser," said Doherty. "Warner has a proprietary interest in the existing DVD machinery continuing for decades."
Fox, for example, has already indicated its support for D-VHS. However, sources said the studio is showing early signs of supporting Warner's leanings, at least verbally.
Meanwhile, Doherty said, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment is likely to support the Blu-ray Disc standard
Indeed, Blu-ray, which requires an entirely new manufacturing process, is the optical-disc technology favored by the majority of the consumer electronics companies that occupy the DVD Forum.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... Hollywoods biggest fear is that Britney Spears will try to make another movie.
Piracy is a close second.
$random-funny-comment-of-huge-storage-and-my-massi ve-pr0n-collection.
Well as we've seen in the past, hollywood is more apt to whine and cry to get their way than they are to use their heads. They've been doing this since day one. What makes you think they'll change now? OH sure, they've had a few great strokes of genious, like the VHS, DVD, Digital projectors (thanks to Lucas) and much more. Then there are other times you wonder what they were thinking.
how in hell (excuse me) are we going to use these things on Linux? You can be sure they'll use something better than 4bit DeCCS this time.
"Not only will it give us the quality we deserve, it is likely to cut down on Hollywood's largest fear (piracy) by making the media ungodly HUGE."
Well if you want media that's ungodly HUGE, it's time to switch back to Laserdisc, and stop using those little wimpy 5" DVD discs.
We need to pursue using frequencies outside of the optical wavelength range and into perhaps microwave or infrared frequencies to read data off of discs.
This will give more clarity, higher digital quality, and cheaper prices for consumer devices.
-
26 year-old Web developer from Seattle. And yes, chicks do dig *nix
Typical movies are still about 2 hours long. Compress it to divx format and it'll be 600mb, which is burnable on a typical cd-rom. And the quality? Not bad.
On the other hand, you may be thinking, perhaps they'll make lenghthier movies then. I for one REALLY doubt that the movie studios are going to come out with 20 hour movies.
eTrade SUCKS
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is impossible to make a good software copy-protection mechanism for a writable technology. (in fact, it was rigorously proved that nothing can be copy protected with a software-only mechanism; sorry, can't find the reference.) Surely M$ knows this (they're the ones writing the compression, why not the copy protection?). I would be willing to bet that this new technology will be protected with Palladium.
Now, this wouldn't work if it used DVD-9 disks, because you could just dupe them like you can today. But the article only says that they are like DVD-9 disks. Hmmmm. Perhaps they'll change minor details of the format to stop it from being read or written with existing DVD-9 technology, force us all to buy new drives (as if I would do that for some Hollywood-sponsored crap) and Palladium to watch a movie. Sure would drive up the hardware manufacturers' profits if they could do this. And maybe help the acceptance of Palladium.
Trust me, anything backwards-compatible enough to be played with just a software upgrade is backwards-compatible enough to be duped with just a software upgrade.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I'm imagining that the largest downside with Blu-ray is that it requires the DVD producers to completely upgrade their infrastructure of DVD mastering equipment. With a different encoding standard, you could theoretically use the same equipment to master both DVD's and HD-DVD's. How big of a downside that is... I don't know.
I wonder why the industry doesn't just do both? Better compression, better capacity means even more freedom for content producers.
If there is one thing we have learned over the past 15 years it's that there is no media that is considered ungodly huge for more than a couple years. Something writable will come along that can suck many times that amount, it's just a matter of time. A matter of a short time more than likely.
1) will the new media be compatable with older machines?
2) will the new machines be compatable with older media?
True capitalism = lots of similar companies = jobs for everyone who wants one.
Deserve?
What makes you innately entitled to higher quality?
I'm serious. This is a point of annoyance for me because of those credit card or loan commercials or whatever they are, with all those people saying, "I was $8 million in debt from reckless spending[1], but now I can get the credit I deserve!" And then you have the average couch potato sitting at home, saying, "Yeah, I *do* deserve to spend more money I don't have! I'll sign up with them!"
My point is that we overuse the word "deserve". It implies entitlement. And we already think we are entitled to too much (such as credit!). We don't need to start acting like we're entitled to improved media compression technology as well.
Just a thought...
ChicagoFan
[1] Yes, I do know for some there's some legit reason things went bad for them...medical expenses or whatever. I think they are the exception, though.
Are you telling me you have 90 gigs of mp3s?
Assume that three Blu-Ray discs hold 30 gigabytes each for a total of 90 gigabytes. Assume that archive-quality stereo MP3 audio takes 32 kilobytes per second (256 kbps with LAME or FhG). This makes 937500 seconds (260 hours and change) of music spread across 3 discs.
Now assume that a typical album is one hour long (some run shorter, some longer). It's not inconceivable that a collector may have purchased 260 CDs from RIAA and independent labels, not to mention some tape and vinyl that the collector has digitized and DSPd to hide the artifacts inherent in those mediums.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I was talking to some people on an HDTV forum about this. I want an HDTV, but I'm not going to get one until I can get a DVD player and an HDTV that can do 720p
To have a DVD that can contain enough information to have that kind of resolution, you need the blue laser.
Someone said that currently, blue lasers have a lifetime expectancy of 300 hours. Does anyone know if this is true? Is this a major roadblock?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The second ANY software is available to play it back, [it will be cracked]
Well, what if the decoder uses strong encryption (256 bit Rijndael or something), done partially in a tamper-evident hardware dongle?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I fail to see how a larger, different format could stop piracy. Remember how we had this thing back in the mid 90s where CDs stopped piracy? Look at them now. Expect a similar change when DVD-R comes down in price. Any new DVD format is likely to follow suit, just a matter of time. It may slow down piracy and give the market a window of time in which it can grow as a result of hard-to-duplicate material.
On a different note, my DVD collection is larger than my CD collection. DVDs cost me more than CDs do, too, then again, movies cost more to produce. I wonder what'll happen when DVD-R media comes to the same price that CD-R media is at now.
On the other hand, you may be thinking, perhaps they'll make lenghthier movies then.
You mean like Lord of the Rings (3 parts total 9 hours), Star Wars (6 parts total 12 hours), or Harry Potter (7 parts total 12 hours)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If Hollywood thinks I'm going to switch to the new format, they're dead wrong. I've already purchased many DVD's and I'm going to hang on to them for at least 10 years. I hope everyone who owns DVD has the same attitude because they can't change the damn format every 5 years.
Right. That's what the MPAA is trying to do--stop piracy by imposing pragmatic means of copy protection, not with lawyers.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Heh, I've been upgrading my computer over the past years from a PII 400/Voodoo 3, then Athlon 550/GF2 MX, and now Tbird 1.2/GF3 Ti200. I may purchase the latest game available and play it for a week just because of the visuals. Afterwards, I uninstall it and go back to StarCraft BroodWar and Half Life TFC. I've been playing Half Life and StarCraft since 1998, and there seems to be no end in sight! I guess I should have stayed with the Athlon 550 and GF 2 MX because I won't buy another game for a few years.
- Moritz's DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux
howto
- Linux SVCD guide, written in French
- My own Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide (shameless plug) -- intended for anime fansubbers but perfectly serviceable as a ripping guide if you ignore the stuff about subtitles.
The summary is that all the stuff your friends do under windows (divx, vbr, two-pass encoding, pulldown flags, inverse telecine, etc.) are perfectly feasible under linux too, using free software.I seem to remember reading something earlier on a holographic method of storing information. Hollywood's going to have to decide which thing it wants us to buy.
The only reasons I got broadband were
Software downlaods took such a long time on dialup.
Dialup has a 2 hours line termination time in the UK
I can set-up a pratical home server for mail &co...
dial-up is find for just browsing the web.
I could run my monitor at 1600 x 1200 and get great resolution etc... but i can't tell the difference between 1600x 1200 and 1280 x 1024. and 1024 x 768 is fine for most things!
I could wathch a DVD on my PC monitor at 1600x 1200 (far better than HDTV) but It looks fine on
my crap old TV.
Given that I gan already watch viedos/DVDs at better then HTDV quality but choose to use my old crap TV instead, I don't see myself getting HTDV any time soon.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I checked out Widescreen Review, in particular the article on D-VHS® D-Theater. I was greatly entertained to hear that they thought $1200 for a DVD player and $20,000 for an HDTV scan converter (sorry, "processor") was just the price of doing business for high quality DVD playback. Good Lord. My Hollywood+ MPEG-2 decoder card does a pretty good impression of 720p output onto a VGA connector for about $50 plus another $40 for the DVD drive. In fact I dare say that for anamorphic source material it is guaranteed to have more vertical resolution than any 480p player -> scan converter solution. And I would be surprised if the horizontal resolution were not at least as good as the $22000 solution.
OK, I have to say it, but your maths sucks!
/lot/ of music!
90 GB = 92160 MB = 94371840 KB
94371840 KB / 32 KB = 2949120 Seconds = 49152 Hours over three discs, or 16384 Hours per Disc. That's a
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
I got...
- 7-1 on it being completeley reverse engineered DeCSS style within 6 months.
- 23-2 on someone being imprisoned for doing so.
- 19-1 on someone being imprisoned for hosting or linking to it.
AliPh33r m3!!!
Consmers have been screwed by hollywood already, ill break it down:
HDTV, as a potential standard, has been around for a LONG time, but the bug media players keep stonewalling, and pusing back the date the FCC would have them force adoption by, among other things, throwing a million different standards out there and not agreeing on one. I seem to remember the FCC deadline being 2002..... And now, i have to wait another year to get what will more then likely be a defective standard. The reason, is they need to FINALLY invest in an infrastruture change after forcing consumers to stuick with the relativly low bandwidth and quality TV we still have after all these years. This then creates a catch-22, as it has for years... BigMedia doesnt want to invest in something where there is no market, tv makers cant drop prices and make a "standard" box because BigMedia wont decide on a standard and wont/cant release content, and then consumers may want but have no content or way to view it.
The end result of this will be: consumers get screwed out of a GOOD standard that provides (potentially) excellent quality, and i fear it will end up with inferior quality and useability.
On to DVD: People have know for YEARS that DVD does not provide the bandwidth to do full HDTV content. Issue one, 9gb is too small, issue 2, home readrs cant get to the datarate needed to even read off a datastream at that resolution. So, once again,insted of taking an oportunity to think ahead for once, we will end up with a standard that is 2 years dead when it comes out. And consumers STILL need to buy a new player. Most just wont know they are buying obsolete technology as they have been for years.
Im completly frustrated about all this, and the FCC needs to apoint an OUTSIDE firm with no intrest in bigmedia to hammer out standards that are good for the consumer, are timely, and have potential of more then 2 years ago. I dont know why what is happening is acceptable to anyone.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
4 years ago I was standing at WHD@CBS (the testing grounds for the ATSC Grand Alliance) in Washington, demo'ing datacasting over ATSC.
Not so interesting, except for the fact that Panasonic had two engineers from Japan with a demonstration of HD-DVD. Their prototype demo with two black boxes and a (at that time) prototype 50"+ plasma display used existing DVD discs, and it worked.
On the other side, professional MPEG2 encoders are no longer required to use 14-16Mbits CBR to encode HD. A lot of optimization has taken place in the last 5 years. VBR and optimized motion estimation have squeezed the bitrate all the way down to 1Mbit on still scenes.
Food for thought. Ask yourselves why we need new discs, players, and compression. CSS was a screw-up, and they are looking for any way possible to make this new delivery platform as hard to pirate as possible, with bullshit reasons as an excuse.
It is also a known fact that many people (standards body members) would prefer to use MPEG4 (pt10, whatever) to carry HD-DVD, since with this it can fit on existing discs, albeit requiring a new hardware dvd decoder that supports the codec. I'm sure that will not happen, for reasons we all know.
DVD encryption is flawed; don't presume 'clever hackers' can fix the next gen.
After all, the only realistic way to decode a PGP message is to guess the password, clever hacker or not.
The problem with this reasoning is that VBR encoding (popular with the divx crowd) requires two passes over the video, once to find the hard to encode spots and twice to actually do the encoding. Copying the whole thing to the hard drive actually speeds up the I/O, since two reads to the hard drive is much faster and less taxing on the system than two reads from the DVD-ROM drive.
For SVCD (which is usually done with CBR), this problem does not exist, and indeed the tarball of the mplayer program comes with a shell script called mencvcd which decodes a DVD to raw uncompressed video and then reencodes it at once to [S]VCD using a named pipe to save your hard drive the 100GB of space per hour that uncompressed video would otherwise require.
I hope electronics makers are smart enough to make players with component output and not be forced in to DVI like the film makers want. Really piss off the current HDTV owners.
They're not ignoring the blue-laser encoding. They've dismissed it since it would require a retooling of the entire recording industry, requiring the movie industry to pass the cost on to consumers. Some people might be willing to pay $35 to $50 per DVD, but I'm not, and neither are the vast majority of consumers.
...but movies get their profit from theatre release. DVD is icing. CD music release generates the profit. Radio etc is the icing. That's way DVDs are relatively cheap.
90 GB = 92160 MB = 94371840 KB
I admit that I screwed up and mistakenly did my calculations assuming one disc. You're a lot closer than I was. However, storage device capacity in press releases is generally stated as metric gigabytes (1,000,000,000), not binary gigabytes (1,073,741,824). 90,000,000,000 bytes / 32,000 bytes/sec = 2812500 seconds.
2949120 Seconds = 49152 Hours
No, 2949120 Seconds = 49153 Minutes = 819 Hours.
But that's still a metric buttload of capacity for audio.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The reason they are planning on keeping the red laser format is because (1) red laser diodes are cheaper to make (2) they already make them, no factory refits required (3) If they did switch to blue laser they'd have to still include a red laser to read current dvds, which would be both technically combersome and more expensive.
There just isn't any convincing reason for them to give it up.
Then it's still feeding pixel data to the display driver, where it's in RAM, where it can be snooped.
Some of the early DVD decoder cards didn't place any RGB data on an AGP port or the PCI bus; they had their own display connector with a passthrough cable for the PC's video output, somewhat like what the first couple generations of Voodoo video cards did because 3dfx didn't yet have a VGA chip designed.
Or the DVD Forum could pressure Microsoft to introduce Secure DirectDraw in parallel to the current Secure Audio Path that only lets MS-signed codecs and MS-signed audio drivers touch DRM'd media. (Can NT apps running with admin privileges access arbitrary parts of RAM?)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have reservations about both the Blu-Ray and the proposed HD-DVD being standardized in the near future.
First, as many have stated, using a new compression algorithm with the exisitng stoage of DVDs can be both good and bad. It is definitely good studios, who already have the standard DVD mastering equipment, and for DVD player manufacturers, who have already developed the red-laser hardware. It is good for the consumer in that the new players would probably be pretty cheap. I think cheapness is key for the acceptance of HDTV technology. Currently the sets are very expensive, and with the limited number of HD broadcasts, there is little incentive to buy one. Of course supply and demand is at work here--if more people bought them, the price would go down. Therefore, affordable HD-DVD players would go a long way in making HDTV's more attractive and useful, which would make their price drop and increase their market presence. Hopefully we would then see more HD broadcasts.
The problem with using exisiting DVD storage for HD-DVD is that is probably going to be obsolete sooner... bad for the consumer. Plus, I question how good the new compression algorithms really are. HDTV will tend to make compression artifacts and defects all the more obvious... again bad for the consumer.
Blu-Ray has many benefits in that has a much higher capacity (100GB if I remember correctly), so it will probably have a longer lifetime in the consumer marketplace. And, the picture quality would undoubtedly be of higher quality because the compression ratios would be lower. However, I fear that it is too costly of a technology to be a standard today or the next year. It would be great 5 years down the road, but not now. My reasoning? Blue lasers are really not ready for prime time... They are difficult to manufacture and are still extremely expensive. DVD player manufacturers still probably have much work to do to develop a consumer-grade blue laser disc playing system. Furthermore, the disc manufacturers would have to completely retool. I can see the discs and players being very expensive for a long time. This could further delay HDTV's acceptance in the mass market.
If I had to pick a technology today, it would have to be Hollywood's HD-DVD format, because I think it is important to give consumers incentive to buy HDTV's. Unless the Blu-Ray format can be substantially cheapened in one year (unlikely), I say wait a few more years for Blu-Ray.
I think the real point here is that Hollywood COULD use this to make a product that is significantly more compelling than the shit I could download for free. If they were selling movies on 1080i DVDs I would need to download an 80gb file to get the same quality...and store said 80gb file...the fact is, I'd rather shell out $20 to buy it or $4 to rent it. Piracy solved through the free market. (of course, its cheaper to buy some congresspeople and legislate it all away instead)
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Current-model DVD players use their 650nm lasers to play CD-Rs which are written using 780nm lasers with no problem. It can't work the other way around -- a 780nm laser is too crude to accurately decode a DVD track, but there's no reason why a 405nm Blu-Ray laser shouldn't track and read a regular DVD or a CD. One caveat is that CDs and DVDs are made in such a way that in their native pressed media, the depth of the pits is 1/4 the wavelength of the light normally used. This allows the laser optics to use an interference effect to enhance the signal; typically a pit in a pressed CD produces a 90% swing in the signal voltage from the optical detector. On a modern CD-R that drops to 30% as there is no pit involved, just a discoloured area of dye (CD-R/Ws are worse, at anything down to 14%).
First-gen Blu-Ray layers will play Blu-Ray pressed discs perfectly, DVD and CD pressed discs very well, DVD-Rs and CD-Rs not so well and rewriteable CD and DVD discs will be problematic. The next gen players will be better, just as modern DVD players don't have a problem with CD-R/W VCDs unlike the early days.
Hollywood's biggest fear is not piracy... It's that someone will be able to create and distribute a popular feature film outside the studio system. That would be the beginning of the end of their monopoly on popular film and hence culture.
Like DVD, expect it to be extremely difficult to author a properly formatted and encrypted HD DVD (not ripped from an existing one)...
Yeah. I don't think I want to buy a DVD with this algorithm.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Good thing they weren't using 128kbps then. Hint: 32kB/s is 256kbps.
And once you have a market that exists, that will probably very rapidly have cheap blank discs, recorders, PC recorders, etc does anyone seriously consider that "HD-DVD" (blurry MPEG-4 on DVD-9...) has any chance of surviving? I can stick 12 full DVD-9 movies to one Blu-Ray flipper without re-encoding, so its kinda no-brainer.
And if you read specs, people, you already know that both formats (Blu-Ray is already "ready", HD-DVD still under negotiations) will include support to older formats (VCD, SVCD, DVD).
Good article:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/document.php3?Doc=83
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/2641.cfmf m 0 2/02-0219E/ m
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/blu-ray.c
http://www.sony.co.jp/en/SonyInfo/News/Press/2002
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/hd-dvd.cf
http://www.dvdforum.org/forum.shtml
All this whining about red-laser DVDs not being sufficient is irrelevant. Anyone here taken 1080i HDTV mpeg2 transport stream and transcoded it to 9Mb/s MPEG4, raise your hands -- anyone else, sit down and shut up.
I know some people over on avsforum.com who did exactly that, except they used DiVX which is almost the same as MPEG4. The results were fantastic. For the most part it was not possible to distinguish between the original and the DiVX. With a commercial MPEG4 I am sure the results will be even better.
Other then brand-new copy-prevention schemes, and the whole having to buy it again thing, I look forward to Hi-Def DVDs.
If they are smart, they will also add anamorphic 2.35:1 and pan&scan tracks so that dumb people can buy the same discs as smart people and still be happy. (Yes, I know those two are part of the current DVD standard, but they aren't common enough in players for any publisher to use them.) And, if they are really smart, they will do double-sided discs - one side regular DVD and one side Hi-Def DVD. But when as the MPAA ever been smart?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
that they seriously revise the menu system.
If there's one thing I hate about DVD's it's the pointless menu system and extra footage, I would like to put the disc in, press the play button and not have to worry.
Merely owning a DVD player for the sole purpose of watching movies (and not owning a HDTV), I don't know much about the hardware deep down. What I do know though is, even if it happens to be just out of my own ignorance, the DVD format has been both a blessing and something I can't help feeling iffy about. When we first got our player 3-4 years ago, we were extremely happy with it and very satisfied... until The Matrix came to DVD, that is. The problem is that the player that was sold to us *did not* support dual-layer discs... we were very unhappy about this, seeing as we only owned the player for a mere six months. Frustrated, but thankful that Best Buy allowed us to exchange the player for a newer one without much fuss, we were back on track again. But my question is, as a consumer, why couldn't they wait for the dual layer technology to be implemented in all DVD players before they were released to begin with? And being aware of the existance of HDTV (as well as it's higher resolution and sound qualities), why couldn't they have supported that as well from day one? My greatest concern though is once HDTV is supported (along with the newer anti-piracy encryption and such), are the older DVD formats going to be dropped all together, forcing me to get yet another new player for all future DVD releases? The reason I'm comparing DVD to a video game console is because that's how my DVD experience is looking here. I realize that they are two completely different things, but what it comes down to in my mind is that DVD players don't need to render all the images in real-time 3D graphics like game consoles do (which grow more and more complicated all the time, thus why you seem to have to buy a new one every 3-5 years to play newer games), but merely display... well... pre-recorded movies. If it's going to be a more complicated movie with more special effects and such, it still uses standard video and audio outputs for its presentation to us. Laserdiscs and VHS tapes did this just fine for us (back in the day), and I don't exactly recall having to purchase new players for those medias while they were the standards. I don't exactly like buying new boxes, only to throw the outdated model into my closet never to be touched ever again. I think the time for change is just too soon, and once again very disappointing.
Agreed, the SVCD spec allows VBR. But most SVCDs that I've seen actually use CBR, or at least don't use VBR to a large enough extent to justify two passes.
It's that Hollywood wants more anti-pirating protection, requiring that every TV has a box on top to filter out pirated media. I don't get it, maybe they just want money because they want to be the ones who make that, but wouldn't that also mean we can't watch home videos?
i sure hope divx scales with respect to resolution ;)
aw no, there's a patent on the div-big algorithm... aargh!
free (as in mp3s) electronic music
The reason why they're going with the old red-ray instead of the new blue-ray is very simple:
Backwards compatibility.
The only way they can entice people to buy a new HD DVD player, is if it can play their old SD DVD's as well.
Now, of course one could conceivably build a player with both red and blue ray lenses, but sticking with red-ray only means manufacturing the players will be cheaper.
Cheaper players means faster implementation in the market place.
Don't forget, it's all about the Benjamins...
-- This sig for rent.
What is 'Xmas?' Is that the same as Xnakah or Xzaa? Is it a holiday near the 'X of July?' Or perhaps 'X day?'
Please.
This space for rent
I would love to see a consulting firm choose the standard. Perhaps film makers could have an input as well. They need to just pick a standard that can atleast meet that of the high end TV's out there now.
The first crack was they identified the algorithm and *one* key that was left in the open.
Then someone analyzed the hash-algorith it used.. (The disk stores a 'one way hash' of the correct key.) They noticed that the hash algorithm leaked about 16 bits of the 40 bit key. So, instead of requiring a few days to try a trillion keys, they only need check a few ten million, and any disc can be broken in a few seconds.
40 bits is still too few to be hard to crack, but the real flaw was that they had a crap algorithm. Without the algorithm.flaws, it'd take a day or two to crack a disc. (Assuming that the algorithm was public. Most of their security was in the secret algorithm)
one of the resons I don't like the cinima is that the refresh rate isn't high enough for the screen size.
When ther's 'fast action' on the screen evrything flickers, around 4x the number of frames per second would be required to give a reasonable viewing experiance.
The other reason, is that there aren't that many good films around.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The other posts in reply to you did raise some correct points: no writers are available so far, you can't rewrite an optical rewriteable medium forever, rewriteing is slow, and maximum transfer rate is slower on current optical drives. However the main reason you can't replace your hard drives with rewriteable optical drives is access time.
Optical drives today have an average access time of about 80 ms. So in one second you can do about 12 random accesses. A good consumer grade hard drive has an access time of 10 ms. 100 random accesses per second. A good server grade hard drive, 5 ms, 200 random accesses per second. (The server drive will be able to squeeze in more than 200 accesses if it has a big queue of requests it can reorder for efficiency.)
Most file accesses are small relative to the max transfer rate of today's HDDs and interfaces-a 20kb read completes in < 1 ms. The dominating number that limits disk performance is access time. You would be running a factor of 10x slower if you replaced your HDDs with rewriteable optical drives.
They want to sell the DVD's after the theatre release. Due to the cost of a film print, the prints get sent to other markets after they were shown in the USA. They don't want the USA DVD's in the other country competing with the local movie house opening night.
The truth shall set you free!
Have you tried comparing it? I haven't, but I certainly haven't seen anything from MS that does as good a job as FFMPEG's MPEG-4 implementation (ffmpeg.sourceforge.net) or DivX ;-).
And what is the status of H26.L (I think it's called). It's supposed to be the next-generation post-mpeg-4 codec, but I have not found much information on it.
/ Peter Schuller
--
peter.schuller@infidyne.com
http://www.scode.org
debuggers like IDA can [see raw RAM].
That doesn't matter if you get a dialog box:
The document "Debbie Does Dallas.wmv" could not be opened, because the Secure Video Path could not be opened, because a machine level debugger is running.
Will I retire or break 10K?
[insert witty comment here]
Resolution is not about bandwith, it is about compression. Heck, you could get 1080p with mpeg2@10mbits/sec, it wouldnt look good but thats a different matter.
Ok, so we have consumers getting screwed because:
The hardware they buy will be obsolete in a short time (at least for new media) and a lesser standard will be adopted due to corporate interests.
Are you sure we're talking about Movies/HDTV and not PC games?
Believe it or not a lot of people think they already spend way too much time in front of the box watching adds and crappy programs.
For most of what TV has to offer HDTV is of strictly zero use. Who wants to see talk show hosts in such high definition that you start noticing the hair in their nose?
DVDs are a different matter. As many have noticed, they are very popular now and it is worth getting a large set to view them better.
A PAL TV can often display an NTSC signal. (More accurately, PAL TVs are often made to sort-of accomodate NTSC. Someone who knows more about PAL than I do (I'm American) can fill in details.) However, an NTSC TV can't do much of anything entertaining with a PAL signal.
There's probably not a lot of DVD overlap between these two markets.
Wow.... does this mean that one day the amount of bandwidth used in downloading a movie will exceed the amount of bandwidth used for actually searching for the thing on gnutella?
-------
Incite and flee.
you could do something silly like reducing your RAM to 32 megs and then putting your swap file on one of those "two IDE cable" disks
Microsoft Windows Palladium Edition will have an encrypted swap file.
Will I retire or break 10K?
output the video to a low resolution flat panel, and use a very high resolution digital video camera to re-record it.
<speculation>
Palladium has that covered too, with subliminal watermarks that survive a conversion to analog and back to digital. In addition, the sale of digital video cameras will be permitted only to those people who have a legitimate reason to own one (scientific research, motion picture production, etc). Just like driving a car or practicing medicine or law, owning or using a digital camcorder will require a license from a government.
</speculation>
Unless Americans get the DMCA repealed NOW, who knows how many more restrictions the movie industry is going to demand, some of which fly directly in the face of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's not enough that every DVD now comes in the regular, extended, driector's, special, collectors and ultimate editions (each released two weeks after you bought the last version), now they are going to create a new format with another 6 versions (inevitably)?
How many copies of The Matrix do I really need?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
When Sony has to choose between selling their personal electronics (which they have the best brand recognition for) and questionable copy protection for their crappy movies, I'm betting that Sony will be on *our* side.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.