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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."
Wow.....blue screens that huge will be awesome to look at!!!!
There is no patch for stupidity
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Due to DRM restrictions, your eyes must be gouged out after the showing for reprocessing. That is all.
-Staff
The newly outfitted theaters will be able to screen films encoded digitally in Windows Media 9 Series, which enables high-resolution,theater-quality experiences with up to 7.1 channel surround sound. The network rollout is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Umm... shouldn't it go without saying that it's theatre quality if they're rolling it out?
WM9 is an implementation of MPEG-4, it's just a proprietary one. It uses the same I-frame and compressed p-frame concepts as mpeg-4. DIVX is another well-known implementation. Also X-Vid.
I guess you also never watched a DVD? That video is compressed with a lossy compression scheme, yet it still looks good. Why? Variable compression. Someone just didn't pop a tape into a tape player, hit play, then click the record button on a computer. There are actually people that go through and master these things over a period of weeks or months to make the video stream as small as possible while trying to make it as quality as possible. There are also all sorts of measurement and analysis tools applied to it along the way to remove scratches from the film transfer, and to make multiple streams of audio (for foreign languages, commentary tracks, and I've even seen some DVDs that not only support the AC3 digital surround, but will have a Dolby Prologic encoded stream.)
1. Screensaver kicks in
:)
2. Projectionist plays an MP3 and it blasts out of the speaker.
3. Projectionist forgets to turn off Windows desktop sounds
and so on......
"And just as Captain Picard ordered self destruct, the movie paused. A gray box appeared on the screen with the words 'A Windows Media Update is now available, would you like to download it now?"
"Derp de derp."
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."
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
Bullshit. Really. Apache is still beating IIS in market share and always has. The PS2 is still clobbering the X-Box. The PalmOS is still demolishing the PocketPC. WebTV has been toast for some time. Heck, the only places Microsoft *have* been successful are Windows (due to a desktop monopoly), Explorer (due to leveraging the previous monopoly to squash Netscape) and Office (due mostly to locked-in data formats). Outside of the narrowly-defined desktop realm, Microsoft is one vast litany of failures.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.