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Windows Media 9 in Digital Theaters
SpamJunkie writes "Feel like watching new releases in 7.1 surround sound with full digital video? It's coming, not with MPEG 4 but with Windows Media 9. Microsoft announced it is bringing Windows Media 9 to 177 screens in Landmark Theaters."
Well reading the article, it seems like the movies are going to be compressed into some kind of MS proprietry format from now on at these digital theatres, but regardless of whatever quality I have seen these files in, MPEG has always seemed sharper & generally better all round.
No I wont make the usual 'is that BSOD supposed to be in the middle of that film' type gag, but I do find this quite a weird move. MPEG has always been, in my opinion at least, one of the more superior video formats. VideoCD uses MPEG, and doesn't DVD?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Remember when people used to cheer the THX Lucasfilm logo? That was before Phantom Menace. I hardly expect anyone to cheer the Microsoft logo, but after the first big public fiasco with Palladium, the jeers may come.
They don't care what tech is actually playing the movie. They just care about the movie. So, I am not sure what MS is trying to accomplish? Besides, now they will be competing with industry gaints that have been supplying to the theaters for decades.
It doesn't mention this but woulnd't this make the stuff easier to pirate? Just copy the movie off the hard drive, reencode to desired format, distribute.
WTF is right, but WTF are you talking about. Looking good? The big thing here is the infrastructure that this all represents. Being able to distribute and display completely digitally at a somewhat reasonable price is the news here. I guess MS should not attempt to move into any new markets or find new uses for their technology?
Given a static, known platform, I'll bet they can make it reliable. One of the biggest challenges for operating sytem reliability is that in the typical PC or server, the OS vendor has to try and make allowances for combinations of hardware and software that they have never even thought of. In this scenario, as long as the boxes are dedicated for the purpose of displaying digital video I'm sure they can figure out how to overcome any bugs that come up.
Having said that, it would be nice to see Red Hat or one of the other Linux distributions try to compete in this space. Certainly Linux does well in these sort of dedicated applications (e.g. Tivo).
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
I can't think of a single codec thats resolution limited. DIVX, X-Vid, MPEG-2.. all are capable of any resolution you want to throw at them.
Digital movies have been around for a while, they are sent to the theaters on like 12 DVD's and played back on TI DLP projectors. You've probably unwittingly sat in one and couldn't tell the difference. :)
The exciting aspect of digital video in movie theaters (regardless of whether the underlying technology is MS or not) is the flexibility that becomes available.
With digital projection, why not rent out a movie theater for a super bowl party? maybe we'll start seeing Monday night independent film festivals in suburban theaters? In theory, digital projection could open up all kinds of new possibilities for the theater industry.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
On the other hand, I can see how the DRM restrictions would be the number one reason why this is the format the distributors are looking at...
I mean, with film, it'd be pretty cost prohibitive and difficult to smuggle out thousands of feet of film to get a screen quality transfer done to export to the middle east to run on hundreds of screens over there.
On the other hand, if it's in MPEG4, you just bring in a firewire hard drive, copy the movie over, and not only can you send it off to wherever to run on actual movie screens with no money going to the distributors and movie makers, but you have a perfect quality thing to do black market mass duplicated DVD's with the same quality as the ones the studios will eventually release in six months within days of the movie coming to the theatre - not to mention real nice DIVX versions on Kazzaa.
Yeah, they'd never go for it. Without DRM, you will never get digital movies on any large scale. Won't happen.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Am I missing something? How are these unique to Windows? Last time I checked both Linux and OS X have screen savers, play MP3's, and have desktop sounds.
I think that would be because the WM9 file format supports 7.1 sound which Mpeg-2 doesn't.
Dunno about you but if I go to a movie and it crashes I'm gonna demand my money back at the least. I'd be really pissed if the movie locked up and even more so if I got a blue screen or similar error messages. It's bad enough at airport terminals and on POS devices.
One more way for Microsoft to lock up artist works in their own file formats. How long before studios decide to release Windows only DVD's rather than bother reencoding the movies?
Why was this needed? Couldn't studios have just mastered the movies to DVD and either mailed them to theatures or allowed the theature to download the movie if they had the bandwidth? Damn it costs about $2 to burn and mail a DVD. They couldn't afford that? Then the theature could use a fairly standard DVD player hooked to their projector and audio system. If the movie won't fit on DVD then split it over several discs and allow the theature to rip the DVD to a harddrive and playback.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Also, this is a company that is driven by conquests. They conquered the desktop. What now? You have to expand in order to keep your stock moving upward. It's never enough to stay big; you need to be bigger.
So as with Sidewalk, MSN, XBox, et. al., Microsoft is attacking Google and moving into the moviehouse business because to their way of thinking there is no other option.
For those of you who scoff at these latest attempts, remember that these guys have tremendously deep pockets. They can afford to pour money down a profitless hole for years, knowing that eventually they'll figure out how to market the product. Notice I said "market the product."
The best product doesn't always win. Microsoft's continued dominance is proof of that. Laugh at them all you want, but they're dangerous in almost any arena.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How often does the tape get chewed up in a modern projector. I go to the movies every other week, and in the past four years there have been two movies stopped due to projector failure. This isn't the ISS, people won't die if the projector needs to take a 5 minute break. And honestly, Windows XP does run very reliably and stably for the first two hours, and clearing a theartre takes a lot longer than rebooting XP (Windows 98, no. XP...).
Windows has been running for years in many display kiosks around town and info-screens at the airport. You know it's Windows, because NT will pop up every now and then with a bluish happy little screen. But these things are left on all of the time, all day. If all a machine had to do was boot, display a WM9 file, and reboot, XP should be fine.
Honestly, I'd expect fewer people will be dissappointed with the projection than with the content when the next digitally-projected Star Wars comes out.
The ______ Agenda
Microsoft today: "Hey kid! Over here. Try this stuff. The first hit is free!"
Slashdot posting 5 years from now: "I run a small studio. I'm not happy about the new Microsoft media licensing either, especially the royalty-per-view terms. But we've invested so much in Microsoft software, equipment and training that we just can't afford to switch. We've decided to suck up and pay. Plus, with the exclusive deal Microsoft has with all the theater chains, we just can't use any other format. It's industry standard. I wish there was another viable solution, but this is the only game in town."
Neither Linux or OSX tries to port a built-in media player full of bugs and artifacts to the movie theater screen .
Landmark is a chain of mostly "art-house" theaters that show a pretty eclectic fare. I think this is a really great announcement, because it means a much lower distribution cost for a lot of films that otherwise would go without screenings. This will lead to more choices at their theaters, since you won't have the huge costs of dealing with film spools and prints. Films that currently only play a week or two because the print has to go to the next city can have longer runs, and its easier to play repertoire films due to no shipping costs.
I'm looking forward to see how this works at Austin's Dobie Theater. At South by Southwest 2002 and 2003, lots of the festival films were screened using digital projection, and I thought it worked pretty well, with the biggest problem being the limited resolution of the DV source.
how it's a monopoly (which, it isn't)
Actually, it is. I'm going to be putting together a computer for my sister soon. I'll give you two guesses to tell me what operating systems she can choose from, and I'll give you one guess as to which operating system is the only one she really can choose. Here's a hint: she doesn't have the money for a Mac. I'd also give you a guess about her word processor, but it isn't worth it.
I don't have to fuck about for hours installing this and that, having the right hardware...
I say the same things about Solaris and Mac OS X relative to Windows.
The movie goer does not care how the movie is projected, how it gets to the cinema, or whatever.
I'd bet there will be a two-minute preview hammering into the minds of the audience how great WM9-based movies are. I'd also not be suprised if there are borderline-subliminal messages in that preview to gain even better penetration.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I wonder how the projectionist would do when the "Would you like to upgrade to QuickTime Pro" message comes onto the screen at the beginning of each movie.
I suppose they would have to install some sort of pointing device.
I would imagine that most Linux servers set up to stream video do not have such things. If they did, then someone should get a boot to the head. On Windows, however, even servers are designed to work like desktop systems, and there is no option to do otherwise.
I've been to 3 movies in my life that crashed. We got free tickets at 2 (the other was free already, a school field trip) and were allowed to finish the movies when they got back up and running.
shit happens in analog, too.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Slashdot posting 5 years from now: "I run a small studio. I'm not happy about the new Microsoft media licensing either, especially the royalty-per-view terms. But we've invested so much in Microsoft software, equipment and training that we just can't afford to switch. We've decided to suck up and pay. Plus, with the exclusive deal Microsoft has with all the theater chains, we just can't use any other format. It's industry standard. I wish there was another viable solution, but this is the only game in town."
Gads, but I wish I had a mod point handy. This is precisely the problem, and I can't understand why it keeps being dismissed as ``Microsoft bashing.'' (Usually by people who have a Score:3 post who, at some point lament ``I'm sure I'll be modded to Hell for saying this, but...'')
The progression is obvious and has been seen a number of times already: Microsoft behaves in a seemingly generous manner (in this case, setting up low-cost digital projection systems so smaller film producers have a shot at distribution; previously, it was giving away a web browser), gets a whole lot of people using one of their proprietary formats, manages to lock out other formats thereby, and then starts jacking up licensing fees once they're the only game in town.
``And you fall for it every single time.''
--Angelus
Unfortunately you already have an incredible quality digital master you could transcode very well due to its absurd bitrate, so even just analog sampling would yield an HDTV-quality source after cleanup, and there is no DRM way to close the analog hole whatsoever if the projectionist wishes to leak the film.
Moreover you could get access to the source by cracking the DRM, and the DRM would have to rely on something not easily duplicated (i.e., TCPA or a dongle containing a key) which, given the state of most DRM implementations - and the speed at which the data would have to be decrypted on top of being decoded, taking a lot of bus bandwidth at such high data rates - would be weak.
Except for their peripherals department, which makes very good mice, keyboards, and cool joysticks. Give credit where it's due. (note: the x-box controller does NOT fit into the above category :op )
I'm actually in the process of designing a digital cinema system along these lines, so here's a few comments
Everyone is focusing on the codec being the quality limitation, but that's not true. In fact, the projector is the biggest deal. There are plenty of modern codecs that can give you visually lossless quality if you throw enough bits at them. The issue with codecs is getting compression efficiency up so that transmission and storage is cheaper, and keeping decode complexity down so you don't need to have expensive hardware in the projector. The WM9 system is pretty much a high end (but not the highest end) Dell workstation, strapped to a cart with XLR audio out, a control pad, and a big data projector on the top. All off the shelf parts, which makes implementation cheap, and upgrading the computer very cheap. But those are nice things to have, but not strictly required for digital projection.
But we could do the same thing with MPEG-4, or other formats. WM9 has a more mature DRM solution and some other advantages, but it is absolutely possible to use another format.
The big limit is in having a projector that is bright enough to fill the room, with a dark black, and high resolution. Moore's law gives us improvements in compression faster than we get improvements in projection, so the big photon cannon will be the true limit on quality for a while.
My video compression blog
the desktop too? Because that ain't needed.