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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."
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
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.
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
not really DVD ripping involves many steps first you have to deencode it (decss) then you have to rip the music out of it, then you have to frameserve it then you finally have to encode it to a lower bitrate. Although there are ways to just pipe a rip (http://www.vcdhelp.com/dvdbackup.htm) i have heard of peoples DVD drives messing up because they are reading constantly for like 14 hours. Storage space has become cheap, just do it the old fasioned way
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
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actually, there are a few reasons for this:
1) Blu-Ray hasn't come out yet.
3) Writable Blu-Ray hasn't come out yet and won't for a while.
3) Rewritable Blu-Ray hasn't come out yet and won't for even longer.
4) Even when rewritable Blu-Ray comes out, the media probably won't have nearly as many rewrite cyles as you would need to make a hard disk out of it, unless you want to replace it once a week. In fact, the use of a high-refresh rate application like virtual memory would make the disk overheat and fail very quickly.
5)Rewriting it will probably be too slow to be acceptable, especially if you want to use it for virtual memory.
6) By the time all these concerns are addressed, we will all be using 10TB holographic drives.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
It isn't bigger media that's the problem, it's faster media. Wider busses, faster record speeds, etc. Nobody wants to bother with a burn if it's going to take all day.
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
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.
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.