Slashdot Mirror
Expect DVD Chip Price Wars
prostoalex writes "With more companies developing the chips for DVD players the price wars might ensue. According to this DigiTimes report, 'Boosted by rising shipments, the higher price of DVD player single-chips is likely to push up the average chip price to US$9.56 in the fourth quarter from US$8.58 in the first half. However, the increasing number of chip suppliers also implies that a new price war may soon develop'. The predictions of DVD chips sales slowing down add to the expectations for price wars."
OFFICIAL
TACO-SNOTTING
FAQ
By
J.
Wipo
Troll,
Esq.
, $Revision: 1.16 $
[This
article
attempts
to
document
a
vile
, ungodly
practice
that
runs
rampant
through
the
homosexual
geek
and
hacker
community,
a
practice
known
as
Taco-snotting,
or
simply
snotting.
Taco-snotting
is
something
that
few
geeks
dare
talk
about
in
free
or
open
conversation,
but
it
is
nonetheless
a
widely-practiced
and
dangerous
form
of
homosexuality.
If
you
or
anyone
you
know
has
ever
engaged
in
Taco-snotting,
please
get
professional
help
before
it
is
too
late.
ed.]
Why
do
I
keep
receiving
emails
from
an
individual
calling
himself
CmdrTaco?
You
have
been
receiving
unsolicited
mailings
from
a
certain
Robert
CmdrTaco
Malda,
owner
of
the
popular
technology
website
slashdot.org.
Actually,
its
not
a
very
popular
site
in
the
common
sense
of
the
word;
the
site
is
rife
with
pimply,
antisocial
geeks
and
hackers,
zit-faced
nerds,
communists,
dirty
GNU
hippies,
and
other
societal
rejects
and
outcasts.
Its
also
home
to
one
of
the
worlds
largest
suspected
pdophile
rings,
the
infamous
Slashdot
crew.
Whenever
Mr.
Malda
gets
bored
(and
who
wouldnt,
running
a
site
like
Slashdot
all
day),
he
roams
through
the
user
database,
penis
in
hand,
looking
for
people
who
might
enjoy
engaging
in
homosexual
activities
with
him.
How
he
determines
this
is
anyones
guess;
but
if
you
have
a
homosexual-sounding
nickname,
or
a
nick
with
a
letter
of
the
English
alphabet
in
it,
youre
a
potential
candidate.
This
time,
he
found
you.
Lucky
you.
Mr.
Malda
seems
to
be
speaking
in
some
sort
of
code.
Do
you
know
what
it
means?
CmdrTacos
code
language
is
relatively
easy
to
decipher.
This
pervert
prefers
to
speak
in
thinly-veiled
sexual
innuendo
(yes,
thats
right:
he
wants
you)
to
evade
the
watchful
eye
of
Slashdots
parent
corporation,
VA
Software.
Mr.
Maldas
Commander
is,
of
course,
his
penis:
a
small,
withered
little
thing
that
lives
in
his
pants
and
only
comes
out
in
the
presence
of
other
male
geeks
or
at
the
beck
and
call
of
Maldas
own
lubed-up
right
hand.
His
Taco
bells
are
the
shriveled
testicles
that
droop
beneath
his
Commander,
and
his
Taco
sauce
is
his
thin,
runny
semen.
It
should
be
more
than
obvious
to
you
now
what
he
means
if
he
asked
you
to
ring
his
Taco
bells
or
taste
his
gourmet
Taco
sauce.
I
would
also
guess
CmdrTaco asked
you to
engage
in
a
practice
known
as Taco-snotting
and,
if
he
was
in
a particularly
depraved mood
at
the
time,
a
circle-snot.
Good
Lord.
And,
yes,
he
did.
What
is
Taco-snotting?
Taco-snotting
is
the
term
used by
Robert
Malda
to
refer
to
the
depraved
act
of fellating
another
man
(homo-
or heterosexual;
CmdrTaco
is
rumoured
to
prefer raping
unwilling
victims),
then
blowing
the
semen out
his
nose
and
back
onto
the
face
and
body
of his
victim.
Naturally,
a
long,
bubbly
stream of
milky-white
semen
is
left
on
CmdrTacos
face,
dribbling out
of
his
nose
and
down his
cheek:
hence
the
term, Taco-snotting.
And
if
thats not
bad
enough
A
circle-snot is
a
Taco-snotting circle-jerk,
another
practice
common
among
the
Slashdot
crew.
CmdrTaco,
CowboiKneel,
and
Homos
get
together
and
snot each
other
with
their
gooey, sticky
cum
spooging
their
jizz-snot
all
over
each
others faces
and
pasty,
white
bodies,
until theyre
covered
head
to
toe
with their
own
and
each
others man
juice.
This
vile,
ungodly
ritual
can go on for hours.
fp
This is good for us, the consumer right? Hopefully they are gonna be dropping prices on these babies so fast, somebody might be able to implement them in new places. I for one need a portable dvd player with no screen. I bought the Sony Glasstron a few years back and really want to be able to skip the in flight movie.
First Post! w00t! Well, I don't own a DVD player (seeing as how I don't even own a TV, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to have one), I'm not sure that this affects me at all, but it's definetly good for those in the market for DVD's. Of course, with all the DRM crap being put on the cd's (btw, last time I checked, security by obscurity is almost guaranteed to fail), it might not do you much good. Oh well.
oh my god is google.com [google.com] offline?
what next, the sky will fall?
oh yeah, ep (early post).
to the everyday Napster-Porn user?
This isn't going to change the end-user price - why do we care about this?
Reading this story, it seems the chips only make a few dollars/pounds difference to the price of a single player, so is this really that big a deal to a consumer? I think the players are pretty cheap anyway - it's the DVD disk box-sets that really hit the wallet!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Google hits related to communism
A price war will just mean that corporations will lower the standards in production practices, and probably layoff a bunch of people in the assembly plants to offset the rise in the price of chips. In the end, the price of dvd players and drives will drop.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Even for a troll, this is really really fucking stupid.
JonKatz,
I
wanted
to
do
this
in
this
most
potentially
embarassing
way
possible,
and
I
figured
doing
it
here
and
now,
in
front
of
a
quarter
of
a
million
strangers
was
as
good
a
way
as
any.
I
love
you
more
then
I
can
describe
within
the
limits
of
this
tiny
little
story.
We've
been
together
for
many
years
now,
and
I've
known
for
most
of
that
time
that
I
wanted
to
spend
my
life
with
you.
Enough
rambling.
Will
you
anally
rape
me?
Update
15
minutes
30
seconds
later:
Subj:
"Yes",
message
body:
"Dork.
You
made
me
cry.
:)"
Hazah!
I'm
getting
laid!
:)
JonKatz,
I
wanted
to
do
this
in
this
most
potentially
embarassing
way
possible,
and
I
figured
doing
it
here
and
now,
in
front
of
a
quarter
of
a
million
strangers
was
as
good
a
way
as
any.
I
love
you
more
then
I
can
describe
within
the
limits
of
this
tiny
little
story.
We've
been
together
for
many
years
now,
and
I've
known
for
most
of
that
time
that
I
wanted
to
spend
my
life
with
you.
Enough
rambling.
Will
you
anally
rape
me?
Update
15
minutes
30
seconds
later:
Subj:
"Yes",
message
body:
"Dork.
You
made
me
cry.
:)"
Hazah!
I'm
getting
laid!
:)
JonKatz,
I
wanted
to
do
this
in
this
most
potentially
embarassing
way
possible,
and
I
figured
doing
it
here
and
now,
in
front
of
a
quarter
of
a
million
strangers
was
as
good
a
way
as
any.
I
love
you
more
then
I
can
describe
within
the
limits
of
this
tiny
little
story.
We've
been
together
for
many
years
now,
and
I've
known
for
most
of
that
time
that
I
wanted
to
spend
my
life
with
you.
Enough
rambling.
Will
you
anally
rape
me?
Update
15
minutes
30
seconds
later:
Subj:
"Yes",
message
body:
"Dork.
You
made
me
cry.
:)"
Hazah!
I'm
getting
laid!
:)
JonKatz,
I
wanted
to
do
this
in
this
most
potentially
embarassing
way
possible,
and
I
figured
doing
it
here
and
now,
in
front
of
a
quarter
of
a
million
strangers
was
as
good
a
way
as
any.
I
love
you
more
then
I
can
describe
within
the
limits
of
this
tiny
little
story.
We've
been
together
for
many
years
now,
and
I've
known
for
most
of
that
time
that
I
wanted
to
spend
my
life
with
you.
Enough
rambling.
Will
you
anally
rape
me?
Update
15
minutes
30
seconds
later:
Subj:
"Yes",
message
body:
"Dork.
You
made
me
cry.
:)"
Hazah!
I'm
getting
laid!
:)
...let me hear ya say: "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
By the time you add up the markups of the various stages in the manufacturing/distribution/retail chain, a few dollars in parts cost can translate into a substantial change in the retail price.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It had to happen eventually, the industry needs to get over it.
I don't have one because:
* Region coding - I object to it on principle, but there is also lack of information - for example, both Europe and Japan are region 2, but if I buy an NTSC disc from Japan, would it play on a European player? Also, does buying a code-free DVD player break the law where I live? I don't know, therefore I won't buy one
* Already have a laserdisc player - and a *lot* of laserdiscs. Sorry, but I'm not about to switch formats to gain, at most, a slight improvement. We're not talking HDTV here, we're talking primarily YUV component colourspace instead of PAL encoded composite colourspace.
* MPEG artifacts - analogue artifacts like dot crawl don't bother me much at all - they look natural now. Blocky digital artifacts bother me a lot, they jump out and scream, 'hello I am a compression artifact' at me, (not really, but you see what I mean).
* Sillyness - 'must watch' chapters on DVD, no, sorry, I'm not going to pay for that, forget it. 10 second copyright notice is possibly tollerable, but not adverts - no way.
* VHS is a lot better than it used to be - sorry, but it's true, in the early 80s, VHS was a terrible format, but modern machines are better than my 1970s U-Matic decks. It's not as good as laser, or DVD, but frankly, I don't cry my eyes out because I have to watch something on VHS.
* Watching fewer films now anyway - this is actually a major reason for not buying DVD. I am getting seriously bored of watching rubbish. The last film I saw at the cinema was Deep Impact - nothing has appealed to me since.
* Compressed audio - there was NO excuse for compressing the audio on DVD. I hate compressed audio, and don't want it. I want uncompressed, 2 or more channels of 48 Kbps 16-bit PCM, or nothing. It's bad enough that the cinemas are using these stupid compressed soundsystems, but don't let it invade the consumer market. Oh, you have. Another reason why I don't have a DVD player.
So, to sum up, I don't have a DVD player, and I don't want one.
For one half of the world, 'chips' are 'crisps', in other words sliced potatoes fried till they get hard and seasoned with spices, salt, peper, onions, or whatever. (I mean this)
For another half of the world (not necessarily mutually exclusive), chips are 'frenched fried potatoes', in other words 'fritten met frikandel en pikkels', in yet other words you cut them in prisms about 6mm x 6mm x the length of the potato, then you bake them twice in 180 C animal fat and serve them with mayo.
Call them ASICs or ICs or whatever the correct term is for what you vaguely meant, for heaven's sake ! We're nerds, we're not Joe Mainstream.
now that is quality comedy!
FYI, the royalties for DVD proprietary standard are much more than all chipmakers' profits, or the end product makers' profits for that matter.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
competition breeds lower prices. What a concept!
VA Software CEO/Founder Larry Augustin Dead at 39, Apparent Suicide
by ASSOCIATED PRESS
VA Software (LNUX) CEO, president and founder Larry Augustin was found dead in his home in Fremont, Calif. early this morning. The death was an apparent suicide, caused by a close-range shotgun blast to the face and head. He was 39 years old.
Police reports indicate that strewn about the room in which Augustin carried out his fate were empty cartons of ramen noodles and discount bulk oat bags. His house was bare of any furniture or furnishings of any worth, and his garage which once held several classic cars was emptied.
An autopsy revealed several thousand VA Software stock certificates, neatly rolled and bundled, in Augustin's rectum. Police are investigating how the
five-inch-wide bundle appeared in Augustin's lower intestine unlubricated without any sign of strain on his anal sphincter. Also discovered was an
abnormally high concentration of dye in Augustin's bloodstream, which was determined to be the main component of "ledger red" ink.
VA Software, which at different times has been called VA Linux Systems, VA Linux and VA Systems, has seen financial difficulties of late. Most likely to be soon delisted from NASDAQ, the company shares a struggle for profitability with many other dot-bomb era corporations whose business plans include the line "???" directly before "PROFIT !!". VA Software child companies, such as geek weblog Slashdot.org and Star Wars fan site Sourceforge have felt the pinch of the economic downturn.
Augustin is survived by his domestic partner and two adopted children.
OMG IS THIS TRUE!!!!!!!!!!?????
say it ain"t so taco
phucq the lizameness fiznilter
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Your comment looks too much like ascii art.
Source: CmdrTaco's personal experiences with UFOs
*SRU
fucktard moderators on crack couldn't spot a humorus post if it jumped off their monitor and proceeded to sadomize them
Like JonKatz I got my toy
but it's the porn 'o Napster
not a 15-year-old boy
1. Land on Mars
2. ???
3. Profit!
This troll post is licenced as GPL open source. You may modify it and make it a better troll post and then repost it, but you must include the original post with your modified version.
Yeah, how about the original thread here fools.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
WTF is an "illegal" comment? The website is on fire, everybody run for your lives!
Slashdot can kiss my shrunken monkey head.
Who buys the most players? Is it the US? Singapore? China? More importantly, are the major markets for players doing well financially?
I'd say that drops in chip prices are all well and good, but the bottom line is price is going to be dictated by both demand, and what the market can bear in terms of durable goods.
Does anyone remember what the computer makers predicted for this quarter and what actually happened? Sales didn't just stay flat, in many cases compared to projections they nosedived. Durable goods are just that. Durable. Long term. You can only buy so many. Unless there is a compelling reason to upgrade, most people don't.
So who IS the major "market" for the players? Anyone have any good links/data?
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
I'm less than excited. My last DVD player cost me $90. Yes, $90, new. How much cheaper can they get? Are they going to replace the increasingly poor prizes crackerjack boxes have had to resort to?
4Literature - Read, write, and discuss your favor
yeah, well, we amended it. get over it.
Christ, and I thought that by now everyone could afford to have one. How do you keep up with the news, then? Or are you one of those people who prefer not to watch news because they're too depressing?
I think one factor that not that many people talk about is the fact that the latest generation of graphics cards can do hardware acceleration at a pretty high level (at least both hardware motion compensation and Inverse Discrete Cosine Tranform) for decoding MPEG-2 video streams from DVD movies.
ATI has been doing this since their Rage 128 chipset arrived around 1999; nVidia's GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti also do this now, and Matrox's Parhelia board do it now, too.
In short, the market for seperate DVD decoding boards has pretty much vanished on the desktop and laptop computer market.
Never herad of one. Site is slashdotted. You just assume we all magically know what one of these is? Come on.
Either way I could care less, we're talking about 10 dollars here. Whoopee. I already have a DVD player anyways.
Joseph?
In the 60's, science magazines all over the world stated that by the year 2002 we would have met an alien race. Now it's the year 2002. No aliens, no blue babes running around seducing space captains, nothing!
I've already exhausted every possibility on earth. Every single eligible woman has told me no, or commited suicide at the thought ( Who says arranged marriages work ), so I must look to the stars for sexual gratification, or wait for an entire year for a new group of women to become "leagal game".
In short, where is my martian porn? With the cancellation of Farscape, I'm not sure how much longer I can last!
A dollar price rise on something I may buy nine of in my entire life is about the least important news since Bill Gates' "losing" $11 billion in 2001.
WTF is an "illegal" comment?
Given that Slashdot's servers are located in the United States of America, where all reasonable political speech is permitted, an "illegal" comment generally contains one or more of libel, copyright infringement (as in this case), or enticement to commit copyright infringement or access control circumvention (such as a link to non-Pigdog DeCSS software). Giving the secret code for a level select on one of these DVD chips may be considered such an illegal comment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
analogue artifacts like dot crawl don't bother me much at all - they look natural now. Blocky digital artifacts bother me a lot, they jump out and scream, 'hello I am a compression artifact' at me, (not really, but you see what I mean).
Was the player set up correctly? I heard that one reason for people's negative reaction to DVD was that there is meant to be a *bit* of softening of the image.
That's the theory- I got a new PC with a DVD drive, and wanted a movie to test it out. I picked up a copy of 2001 for UKP 7.00 (US$10.50) and played it. My reaction?
Not impressed... jaggies and conspicuous compression all over the place. Tried another movie, was much more impressed, then went back to 2001. Seems the `softness' setting must have got checked somehow; for a small reduction in sharpness, the picture was vastly improved. Sure, you can still find artifacting if you look for it, but it's not noticable in the vast majority of cases- unless you're looking for it.
DVD isn't perfect, but it beats the heck out of VHS (well, PAL VHS anyway).
OTOH, I agree with you about movies sucking; most of them do. And you didn't mention the higher cost of the disks vs VHS, nor how fragile they seem to be.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Have you considered having sex with a member of your own sex?
I'm sure he has, but masturbation doesn't count unless he had a hand transplant from a woman.
Even if you were born heterosexual, you can still learn to appreciate all-male sex. I did. You just need a sensitive and understanding partner for your first time.
Note: This does not apply to masturbation. Most guys are neither sensitive or understanding (though some can put up a pretty convincing show), but they sure know how to please themselves.
I'm sure he has, but masturbation doesn't count unless he had a hand transplant from a woman.
Uh, hang on. I'm sorry, that's not true at all. Nor funny. What the fsck was I thinking?
Uh, hang on. I'm sorry, that's not true at all. Nor funny. What the fsck was I thinking?
If having your nose operated on is a "nose job", would having your hand operated on be a "hand job"?
$60 at Sears. It's not the hax0rable version but it plays DVDs. MP3 CD-Rs and JPG CD-Rs too. Kinda pissed it doesn't play VCD (Apex had a tussle with Philips and Philips pulled their CD-I/VCD license) but oh well, more for my PCs with DVD drives to have fun with.
At this rate, we will see DVD players in crackerjack boxes by 2005.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
And what about chips that support DVD-Audio? Jesus, how long has that format been just around the corner? As for me, I'm not buying a DVD standalone until it can play MPEG-4 and doesn't cost me much. If the established chip manufacturers are raising prices, maybe this will open a window for Sigma to get their better chips into consumer players. Hate them if you like for falsely taking credit for Xvid (I accepted their appology), but you still have to admit that MPEG-4 in the living room would rule! It's worth waiting for, in my opinion.
Take a look at the old, old days of thedigitalbits.com. Most companies held back from DVD to see what would happen (or backed DivX). Only Warner Bros and the various porn companies jumped on it quickly and at sell-through prices.
Warners was ridiculed in the business at the time but they have the last laugh so far.
Try making some MPEG2 and MPEG4 compressed movies yourself. In the extreme case, on MPEG4, if you don't compress the audio the audio will be 4 times the size of the compressed video! And this is only 44.1KHz stereo, not 5 or 6 channels.
I'm sorry, but uncompressed audio doesn't make sense on DVD. Perhaps in the future as we get even higher capacity formats it will.
You have to remember that DVDs actually store the same or less raw data than a LaserDisc, so of course it must be compressed.
You know, after rereading your post, you are incredibly misinformed or a troll.
DVD looks a lot better than LD (I have much experience with both) and that's before you take into account disk damage. You know what happens if you get any marks on an LD, you get those rainbow bars or white blips flying around your picture. DVD doesn't do that. So unlike the old days when I would rent an LD and see these glitches and have to worry to death about it warping if I left it in my car, with DVD the format is compact, cheap and damage resistant enough for the number of rental store to proliferate and STILL provide better quality than we had with LD. Oh, and renting VHS? Hmm, crinkled tapes and half-erased HiFi soundtracks detract from the experience for me.
Early DVDs did have huge compression artifacts, but things are pretty good now.
I agree that VHS has gone a long way, but if you look at the color rendition it still sucks next to your 70s uMatic decks. But I would agree the detail sharpness on SP VHS is comparable or better than old-tyme uMatic.
It's interesting watching the evolution of DVD in the marketplace since I was involved in it during its infancy. I wonder how long before the grip of the DVD Consortum "Gang of Ten" is finally broken.
The history of DVD offers an object lesson in old rivalaries, protectionism and national politics, battles which still rage on today. It's as if we're still fighting WWII.
The key battle seems to be between Japan and China. The Japanese missed the boat on Video CD, only to watch Philips and C-Cube walk away with the prize in China. By fostering SVCD (Chaoji) as a low-cost (and no-license) alternative to DVD, the Chinese seemed determined to hose Japan again. Under this pressure, the Japanese countered by - slowly - offering DVD technology transfers though joint ventures and though US trade bullying on 'piracy' (which we all know is more about market control than it is about copyright.)
The DVD format is about seven years old now. As prices continue to drop and worldwide DVD player demand slackens, I have to wonder how long that lucrative (and onerous) DVD licensing scheme is going to last.
As it stands now, I think it's possible to make a DVD player without a single component from an original DVD Consortium memmber. They have no value-add anymore.
The Consortium's hammerlock on DVD persists though Hollywood's dominance of content in that format. But, Hollywood is getting more competition from indigenous material - notably in huge markets like India and China - the very material that helped propel Video CD. With Hollywood's recent product becoming increasingly parochial and cliche', one has to wonder how long before its grip, too, is softened in the non-US markets.
One way for the Consortium to add value is to offer a meaningful technology upgrade to DVD. But, there's no reason that it has to come from a DVD Consortium member. What if, for example, China mastered and deployed blue laser technology and high-density disc pressing to go with it, giving them the lead in HD format? It could be Video CD and SVCD all over again.
Here's another scenario: what if a net-new standard-def format (say, MPEG-4 with HTML-based navigation) was developed somewhere and introduced in China, as an upgrade to SVCD? What if it used its own high-density media that could be manufactured on DVD production lines? I could see China threatening exactly that.
- dvd_tude
Is anyone aware of any players that feature this chip (or another) with Xvid/DivX/Mpeg-4 functionality enabled? That would be absolutely killer to be able to watch Xvid files on the TV instead of on my tiny little 21" monitor ;^)
Pinball, arcade video, tech and more: www.micsaund.com
Oh, don't worry. They're still getting plenty of ridicule, and they'll continue to do so until they stop selling DVDs in those god-awful crappy paper cases...and quit putting DVD layer-switches in the middle of critical scenes in their movies, or worse - disc flips. See "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" for a good idea of what I'm talking about. There was absolutely no reason Warner couldn't have put the whole movie on a single-layer single-sided disc. It's not like it had any special features or anything taking up the space.