HD DVD Coming Very Soon

I actually tried to check this out... by repetty · 2003-04-10 21:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

"We're sorry. This Windows Media 9 Series content is only available to be viewed using Internet Explorer." ...but I guess I won't.

--Richard

Re:I actually tried to check this out... by j-pimp · 2003-04-10 22:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yeah, but some people do look through the source code. Even if we were to assume most people looking at other peopels source code are looking for exploitable security vulnerabilities, that would still eventually lead to the general public finding out about spyware type things. Also, though not for security reasons, I've read through source code for programs I installed on my computer. My reasons were to attempt to modify source code. Sometimes I did and sent in patches, sometimes I decided not to for several factors.

--
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by oliverthered · 2003-04-10 22:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Well, everything's compiled from source
and personally I've looked through and fixed
All of the USB core in the kernel, the ADSL driver for my modem, povray.
I've partly gone through Arson
and looked at lots of other source (including postgres)

So, I'm sure the ADSL software is spyware free the USB core looks ok too(if a bit badly documented and buggy)
and I've never found anything bad in povray.

--
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by ChadDa3mon · 2003-04-10 23:05 · Score: 3, Funny

I'm quite happy with Windows Media Player 9. It installs cleanly (no unpacking, scripts or stupid config-file tweaking), comes with the most common codecs and both recognizes and automatically downloads the rest.
On top of that, it sends all sorts of my information back to M$ for me. I'm sure it's used for making their products even better, never to spy on me.....
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by Paradise+Pete · 2003-04-10 23:22 · Score: 3, Insightful

The open source folk is happy to spout crap about the dangers of closed source all the while they're happily installing binaries from distribution CDs and ftp-sites. That's hypocrisy.
No it's not. If the source is available, then someone will see it. It doesn't have to be me or you. It's simply the fact that it *is* open and reviewable that makes the difference.
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by James_Duncan8181 · 2003-04-10 23:26 · Score: 4, Informative

Download the PrefBar at http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/.
Among other nice options such as killing all flash in a page :) it has a dropdown menu for what browser/OS you want to impersonate. And they must be doing well with it - as far as MS was concerned I was running XP/IE6 so the doors opened...

--
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by nutshell42 · 2003-04-11 00:27 · Score: 2, Informative

You have to stop your browser from forwarding you from the linked page to that "you don't have our stuff"-page - I could d/l the files with Konqueror which identifies as Konqueror
The .exe are self-extracting zip-archives and contain wmvs in in Windows Media 9 format - MPlayer can play them with the correct dshow-filter installed (available from the MPlayer-page)

--
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by telecaster · 2003-04-11 00:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm so sick of Microsoft...

I've had it.

I did the same thing I went to the link and "blammo", no can view. I'm using Mozilla 1.3b.

Here's my main issue with Microsoft, and my opinion comes from someone who's made a lot of money writing Windows code and who up until 2000, was someone who had mainly done ALL development on Microsoft platforms.

My main issue simply this: Microsoft is not the best anymore. Thier products are at best "mediocre". There was once a time where I felt that IE was a supperior browser, Outlook was the only mail client to use and that ASP/COM and ATL were the only solution for the server.

Those days are long gone.

The playing field has all changed because things have clearly gotten better in the open source realm.

Mozilla, in my opinion, is now a browser that is faster and more reliable than IE, and PHP with Apache is clearly a more secure and cost effective solution than ASP and IIS.

Microsoft has to wake-up, they are trying to "AOL everyone" into their little world on the desktop by restricting the user and making life difficult for the user who wants "choice" or is on the "fringe" and not running 100% microsoft products.

I don't really like to get into the MS vs. Linux thing because I like to solve problems by using the best solution available. But lately, I'm realizing that Microsoft is becoming a choice that I can't recommend. It's really now down to one single application that is holding people back from running another desktop: Office.
Once there is a viable mainstream office solution that "works" and is free. It's lights out in Redmond. I really can't think of anything else on the Desktop that is holding people back from using the Mac (which actually has Office but its like $500 dollars) or choosing Linux -- there is really nothing compelling about Windows anymore.
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by Cromac · 2003-04-11 03:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

I'm quite happy with Windows Media Player 9. It installs cleanly (no unpacking, scripts or stupid config-file tweaking), comes with the most common codecs and both recognizes and automatically downloads the rest.
It also can't be un-installed since they claim it's now part of the OS. I hope you like it because you're stuck with it until you format/reinstall.
Re:I actually tried to check this out... by Anonvmous+Coward · 2003-04-11 04:31 · Score: 4, Insightful

"I would be a lot less anti-Microsoft if they actually put forth any effort at all to be compatible and/or interoperate with other OSes. I too am sick to death of the, "if you want to do this you have to run Windows" crap."

I hear ya. It pisses me off I can't play Dreamcast games on my Playstation 2.

What's the point? by Travoltus · 2003-04-10 21:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

All the new media will have hardware copy prevention built in.

Being unable to even record your own media on these formats, will scare people away from accepting it. (Anyone remember the LASERDISC?)

(And no, this ain't intended as a troll.)

--
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!

Re:What's the point? by Patrik+Nordebo · 2003-04-10 21:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

Remember DVD? The video format that you couldn't record to that had unprecented consumer adoptment rates? That comes with a variety of copy prevention technology (encryption, Macrovision)? Doesn't seem to have hurt it much.
Re:What's the point? by cyrax777 · 2003-04-10 21:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

LD died for a couple reasons #1 was it cost to damn much a movie was about 50 bucks and one could buy the VHS for around 25-30.
Re:What's the point? by luzrek · 2003-04-10 21:43 · Score: 4, Informative

While DVDs are effectively the "mature" version of the laserdisk technology, they did offer consumers a substantial benefit over the VHS tapes which they replaced. Namely, you got all the DVD extras for not too much more money than the VHS tape. They also offered substantially better quality than VHS tapes, and longer shelf lives, and smaller storage areas, etc. While Laserdisks offered many of the same content extras as DVDs, they were prohibitively expensive and aquard to store and use. DVDs also came out at a time when the main use of the VCR was to watch prerecorded movies from the rental store. Laserdisks came out when the main use of the VCR was to record and watch television (early time-shifting).
That said, whatever is going to replace DVDs is going to have a couple of fairly high hurdles. First, there is already a huge base of DVD players out there, many of which aren't compatable with DVD-R,DVD-RW,DVD+R, and DVD+RW (one of the things holding off widespread acceptance of DVD-burning drives). It will have to be backwards compatable with existing technology, or offer substantially greater value so that everyone replaces their DVD players. I don't think that simply offering higher resolution without additional changes will be enough to get everyone to go out and buy a new DVD player. Maybe it would if everyone had televisions which displayed pictures in greater detail than DVDs support, and routinely watched broadcasts in said higher resolution.

--
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Re:What's the point? by oliverthered · 2003-04-10 21:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

and DVDs?
2 films on vhs = £5-£10,
2 films on DVD = £15-£60

--
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Re:What's the point? by shepd · 2003-04-10 22:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

>That comes with a variety of copy prevention technology (encryption, Macrovision)? Doesn't seem to have hurt it much.

Yes, but unlike its cousin that was stillborn (DiVX) the DVD format's encryption was optional. Also macrovision was removable almost from day 1, making analog copies (the only ones practical for a home user at the time) very possible. This also goes for region coding.

Because the encryption is totally seamless and invisible to the end user, the end user never cared. I have never heard of a single person, apart from people using unauthorized players, who has ever bought a DVD that was unable to play a disc, assuming their player follows all the standards, due to the encryption present for any reason whatsoever (apart from region coding, which is trivial to remove on most all players, and only effects a small segment of the population).

DRM, however, is intended to be obvious. DRM will not let the consumer do everything they want to without serious limits (physical, not legal) that they will almost surely encounter. That's what's the killer, and that's what made DiVX die, and it's why this format is another waste of someone's time and effort.

--
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Re:What's the point? by evilviper · 2003-04-10 23:19 · Score: 4, Insightful

Laser Discs died because:

most people didn't have TVs that were high-enough resolution that they could see VHS artifacts.

VHS was widely adopted before people realized the serious problems of VHS tapes.

Size was a problem. Ever gone to Blockbuster and brought back a single movie that weighed 10 lbs and had to have it's own seat?

Running time was limited. You had to get up half-way through a fairly short movie, to turn the disc over, or insert an entirely different disc.

VHS tapes are just more durable than discs. It was a serious deterant to audio CD adoption as well, but people (eventually) got used to the idea.

Higher prices than VHS.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:What's the point? by DrXym · 2003-04-10 23:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

I doubt DVD would have taken off nearly as well as it did if it weren't possible to circumvent the regional encoding and other hacks in it. I expect most of the early adopters, at least in Europe had region free players. So it was precisely because of the weak protection that it took off as well as it did. For all the moaning by the studios about decss and modchips, I bet their profits would be a fraction of what they are if the encryption and protection had been any good.

Now concerning this format, it has failure written all over it. HD televisions are few and far between (nowhere outside the US), no DVD player supports this format and few people are going to buy another player to support some marginally better picture quality. With few players, the number of discs is going to be nonexistant, the price of discs will be too high and the whole format is doomed. That's not even considering what deals with the devil that player makers would have to make to carry the format - royalities, running WinCE or whatever.

To me it sounds like cross between DiVX and laserdisc. Unpopular, unwanted, artificially hyped and ultimately doomed.
Re:What's the point? by James_Duncan8181 · 2003-04-10 23:35 · Score: 4, Interesting

As you and I live in the UK, we unfortunately have no fair rights. In fact the EUCD that is currently passing through Europe is actually harsher then the DMCA in some respects.
The EUCD prevents all copying of encrypted material, and the posession of hard/software that enables you to do so. It does allow national governemts a list of exceptions that they can sign up for, but the choice of which of these to implement is entirely up to that goverment (this kept Denmark and other more civilized countries on board). However the UK government has only signed up to two of these, and so we currently have a situation where not only DeCSS is illegal, but also general security research into CSS!
Just once, I really wish that the UK would avoid copying every infringement of civil libeties that happens across the pond...

--
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."

Anyone with a fast PC.... by warmcat · 2003-04-10 21:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

''Anyone with a fast PC will be able to watch T2 in high def...

AND Windows

screw them by justin_speers · 2003-04-10 21:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

Like some other posters have already pointed out, no IE, no "stunning samples".

Screw them, honestly. What arrogance. I hate their whole "all-Microsoft" strategy. Would I buy a Sony DVD player and expect it to only play CDs or DVDs from Sony? People would be outraged!

This is why I have a hard time seeing Microsoft expanding beyond the very limited PC market. That's why the whole "Trojan horse in the living room" X-Box strategy will never work. Microsoft has a stronghold over PC operating systems, and can mostly get away with stuff like this. But if they refuse to cooperate with other companies already in the living room with technology like this, they're only hurting themselves.

And since I can't see the "stunning samples" in Mozilla, I'm not so stunned.

Re:screw them by anarxia · 2003-04-10 22:12 · Score: 2, Interesting

This new format is not such a great idea now and it wont replace DVDs any time soon. The hardware players will be very expensive, judging from the processing power this new format requires. As for playing the videos on a PC (with Windows), 2GHz+ computers are the minority right now, so I doubt this format will become popular even as a computer-only video format in the next couple of years.
Re:screw them by nbrazil · 2003-04-10 22:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

Completely wrong. The CPU requirements here are for GENERAL PURPOSE processors. This is a far cry from the efficiency of a dedicated hardware codec. The first generation of x86 systems that could do good DVD playback in software were vastly more powerful in most ways than the chips in DVD players. Much more memory hungry, too, in that they had to run an application on a full feature OS rather than a tiny kernal pared down to just what was required for the intended task. A dedicated codec for playback of WM9 or comparable codec is going to be vastly cheaper in volume than the general purpose CPU needed to achieve the same playback in software. As it only needs to perform a very limited set of functions compared to a CPU for a desktop the requirements for transistor count and speed are immemnsely lower. There is no reason an entry level WM9 capable video player should retail for more than $250, barring features for the high home theater options. That price would drop rapidly if the sales reached any great volume.
Re:screw them by torre · 2003-04-10 22:42 · Score: 2, Insightful

Like some other posters have already pointed out, no IE, no "stunning samples". Screw them, honestly. What arrogance. I hate their whole "all-Microsoft" strategy. Would I buy a Sony DVD player and expect it to only play CDs or DVDs from Sony? People would be outraged!
Just want to point out your anger is a little premature and misdirected. The site itself, being Microsoft makes nice little popups that only support IE's DOM... no news there... however, you don't need IE to actually watch the clips, just windows media 9... you can actually download the files from the site if you want. Hence, its not the "All-Microsoft" strategy when it comes to the media itself. As it has been posted Microsoft is licensing all winmed 9 codes and information and a Linux port is on the way (don't know how well that will do however)....
I know its tempting to scream foul at every little bump Microsoft throws at you, hell, I do it myself sometimes, but like somebody else pointed out... they're not that evil all the time.
Re:screw them by James_Duncan8181 · 2003-04-10 23:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

Actually having faked my UA (thanks, Moz PrefBar) and looked at the video samples, they come in .exe format. Now I don't know about you but I am just a bit (!) dubious about running video files that are explicitly executable code.
And the reason that I am dubious about MS as a video supplier is that I am sure that they will work very hard to make sure that consumers can only run these files on Windows.
I also find it very noticable that MS formats are getting into a major DVD release as DRM is getting into MS software. An assisted lockout for MS in the OS arena if they can deliver a non-piratable system to Hollywood?

--
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Re:screw them by Rinikusu · 2003-04-11 00:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

Simple Solution, then:

Go write your own damn codec and distribute it however you please.

--
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai

Format mania by 6hill · 2003-04-10 21:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

So now there are two proposals for new blue-laser formats and one for an enhanced version of the current red-laser DVD, and then Microsoft adds its fingers to the pie with this new thing. I had hoped HD-DVD would not be another format debacle (Betamax/VHS, DVD-/+RW, etc.) but it seems it's going to be even worse than usual

My other worry is that the proposed HD-DVD standards are baby steps, too small to make upgrading for me cost-effective. Why add to the storage capacity of DVDs one magnitude, when you could wait two years and possibly (probably?) get a media format that will increase your storage capacity a thousandfold. Or as a pipe dream, eliminate overlapping media formats -- I'd have no need for DVDs if I could buy digital copies of what is now put on separate DVD disks, and store that content on my hard drive. Same for music CDs. It would save an awful lot of shelf space and eliminate the need to buy n separate players for n separate storage media. But of course, these things have always been geared to maximise company profits and not consumer satisfaction. Shame.

Nice to see innovation by KeyserDK · 2003-04-10 21:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

Before everyone bashes MS, let me be the first to say that this actually looks like a good and genuine innovation, nobody is pure evil :).

Now, there is an issue with regard to patents, if MS has any on this technology.

Can anyone shed light on patents policies in the DVD-forum?

--
still reading?

CRAP!!! by Flounder · 2003-04-10 21:46 · Score: 4, Funny

That'll make the THIRD copy of Terminator 2 on DVD that I must buy!! And I thought the previous Ultimate Edition would be it. Jeezus, Terminator 2 is turning into the Evil Dead series with so many versions available on DVD.

--

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova

Re:CRAP!!! by delus10n0 · 2003-04-11 09:57 · Score: 2, Insightful

Well, hopefully my AthlonXP 1.53GHz will be buff enough.

Sorry, it's not. My AthlonXP 1.8GHz chops up on some parts of the Microsoft demo videos, especially when chrominance is high (sun reflecting off the water, etc.)

I'm sure if you have a 2.0GHz processor (AMD or Intel) it'll run fine. And most likely there will be a hardware decoder available for this content, so no worries.

The quality is amazing though. I saved the superbowl ads for the Matrix and Terminator 3, and they were in 720i as well. Delicious.

--
Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Re:T2 in HDTV quality? How? by Max+Romantschuk · 2003-04-10 21:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

That's great and all, but how are they getting this quality? Was T2 filmed in digital?

Nope, I doubt it was. What they prabably are saying is that the analog masters have been retransferred into a digital format. Analog masters can have great quality and (in theory) infinite dynamic range. The resulting quality of the digital version is all about the conversion. With a better conversion a better digital version can be produced.

My guess, anyway.

--
.: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/

A big part of the equation missing by Samir+Gupta · 2003-04-10 21:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

There needs to be a standard for uncompressed digital video, so devices such as video game consoles, or DVD players that play new compressed formats like this MS thing can output a direct digital stream to the TV, without having to convert to analog first. In other words, a consumer electronics version of DVI, or (HD) SDI.

Currently, all consumer digital video standards involve compression, which is the natural choice, if your source is already compressed, such as a DVD or satellite stream. BUT, if you're generating video/graphics on the fly -- OR as in the HD-DVD scenario, if you've already decompressed your video from some proprietary codec, it's senseless to (re)compress on the fly (introducing lossiness) and then decompress it again in the set.

Until such a AV interconnect standard is finalized, this MS DVD initiative will remain the province of PCs only, and those with non-PC based home theatre setups (read: the vast majority) will be left out.

--
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.

Re:A big part of the equation missing by InsaneGeek · 2003-04-11 00:13 · Score: 4, Informative

Wow, everything you said is basically wrong. raw uncompressed video is a standard today. How did this get modded up to 5.

Uncompressed video is just that, it contains every pixel, it's location and the color for each one on the screen. No device has to have any intelligence, just turn on the pixel. That's how everything actually talks today after it get's uncompressed, so obviously everybody already knows how to talk uncompressed digital.

I'm guessing you didn't know that raw HDTV 1080i @60 runs at ~1.5gbs or around 187MB/sec or a TERABYTE for a 2 hour movie. Yup consumers are just ready to decompress from their *proprietary* codecs (interesting dig) and store uncompressed video. You're going to have an extremely difficult time just getting that performance off your PCI buss which normally maxes out at 166MB/sec, not even taking into consideration how many drives you'd need to write 187MB/sec.

Lastly you do realize that DVI is already in the consumer grade market, I've got one on my video card today. DVI dumps raw video out now, it's not doing any uncompression, etc just throws the bits around and very handily pass raw HDTV resolutions and greater (1600x1200, etc). Many people (enthusiasts) are using DVI inputs already (firewire tops out at 400MB) for digital through and through, all you need is a regular computer with DVI output and a display that has DVI inputs (DLP projector, plasma, LCD, etc). You might be complaining that DVI displays maybe more difficult to find, today they basically on displays that are digital through and through, most displays do analog output and don't have them (though they are out there).
Re:A big part of the equation missing by MoZ-RedShirt · 2003-04-11 01:18 · Score: 2, Informative

There is already such thing as DVI for Home Audio/Video Equipment: HDMI

The best thing in fact HDMI is DVI. At least on the electrical and protocol level. The only difference is the plug, but there are adapters.

So if your DVD Player has an HDMI out and your beamer has an DVI input and you have this mechanical converter it just works.
Only drawback is that HDMI contains hooks for crypting the video signal.

RedShirt

--
Microsft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!!

Great by Orlando · 2003-04-10 21:55 · Score: 5, Funny

Yet an other version of the LOTR to buy....

--
-= This is a self-referential sig =-

The URLs of the samples by inaeldi · 2003-04-10 21:56 · Score: 5, Informative

I don't know if these are static or not, but they seem to work.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/d/2/bd2ef 814-9577-4d2e-a79e-35615ac7b13f/liquid_1.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/d/2/bd2ef 814-9577-4d2e-a79e-35615ac7b13f/liquid_2.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/1/a/31a2e 752-a74c-4935-a85b-3f3143cb53af/indy.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/1/a/31a2e 752-a74c-4935-a85b-3f3143cb53af/pinball.exe http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/1/a/31a2e 752-a74c-4935-a85b-3f3143cb53af/snowboard.exe

Re:The URLs of the samples by inaeldi · 2003-04-10 22:05 · Score: 3, Informative

Oh, ok, the urls do work. For some reason when I posted them, it put a space in the path. You just have to get rid of the space.

Or Linux, or MacOSX.... by dalangalma · 2003-04-10 21:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

They're porting WMP9 to linux and MacOS. Nice try.

5-8 mbit? by daBass · 2003-04-10 22:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

My DVD player can show the current bitrate and 3-4 seems more like it. No wonder this miracle compression algorithm works miracles at 5-8!

Worry about bugs that cause problems elsewhere. by Futurepower(R) · 2003-04-10 22:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

Microsoft spying on you may not be the biggest issue. It is best to wait until all the bugs have been found before you install Microsoft software. As Steve Jobs said, "Microsoft eventually gets it right."

That's misleading. by tolan-b · 2003-04-10 22:22 · Score: 3, Informative

It is being ported, but the company that are doing it seem unlikely to release it as a consumer product. They already make LinDVD (the Linux version of WinDVD suprisingly). LinDVD is available to consumers as a standalone, it's only marketed to integrators making Linux appliances, and it's looking like the WMP port will be the same.

Just downloaded it.. by sivann · 2003-04-10 22:25 · Score: 3, Informative

I just got the video playing. I have a 1.7Ghz P4, the cpu goes to 100% and the frame rate is below 1 frame/3 seconds in wmplayer9/win2k. Besides that, the quality is very good, but there is nothing astonishing with it. The video is at 6MBps, and if you consider that most mpeg-4 and divx content is encoded at 900Kbits then I don't see the breakthrough. BTW video size is said by researchers in most video conferences in the field that is going to be reduced at most 100% in the next 10 years. So don't expect much from the future. As for the HD-DVD, 1080i is still low (but close) compared to 35mm film.

Spiros Ioannou
--
Image Video & Multimedia Systems Lab.
Department of Electrical & Computer Eng.
National Technical University of Athens

Re:Just downloaded it.. by torre · 2003-04-10 23:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Hi,
You've got your numbers wrong, first it's encoded @ 6Mb/s nor 6MB/s second the frame is 12 times larger than the average divx encode! 320x240 vs 1280 x 720.... So, here's the real math is Divx @ same ratio would be @ 10.546Mb/s vs 6Mb/s for winmed .... I think that's impressive.
for the record, I've encoded a lot ... and i mean a lot of video in a whole wack of formats, from mpeg1-4, winmed (from the shittiest to the newest), quicktime, real, divx, and i'm probably going to play with some more when i get some spare time. From experience, there is a difference.
Re:Just downloaded it.. by Sycraft-fu · 2003-04-11 01:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

You consparicy theorists are funny. The reason it takes to much power to decode is because there is so much that needs decoding! Try doing an equally large stream with DivX, you'll find the same thing. A 1.6 can decode a 640x480 WM9 stream just fine, but when you are trying for something that is 1280x720, well that's a whole different deal. Lots more data so lots more power needed.

That's the whole thing about faster processors, they let us do cool new things that just weren't possable before in realtime. Any time you find a chip that is enough to do everything, someone will be able to develop an application to take advantage of all that new power.

The future in computers is things like high definition multimedia, good voice recognition and the like. All these things are going to need vastly more power than before, and fortunately chips that can supply it are comming out.

No, I don't think so by ThoreauHD · 2003-04-10 22:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

Media providers are waking up to the fact that Microsoft is going to screw them. No matter how good it is(and this ain't that good), is it worth it when you pay per client connect, per server connect, per play, per minute, per bandwidth compression size, per my foot in their asses...

It's not worth it. Set top boxes, microdevices, PVR, et. al are using linux now. They haven't even settled on a HDTV standard yet, not to mention the fact that only .5% of the population can view a DVD in HDTV quality.

I now give my Swamee prediction:

By the time we can actually see the difference, a better open compression will have emerged. Because most people will have access to the tech. As it is now, nobody does.

So, I wish Microsoft luck. I'm sure some companies will let greed drive them to use their spiffy crackable DRM.. until they realize they just lost all of their unborn children and future to them. But, it'll be fun to watch.

Not a Big Deal. What about Theora and Vorbis??? by evilviper · 2003-04-10 22:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

Is anyone surprised? MPEG4 provides the same quality as DVDs (MPEG2)in a tiny fraction of the space. It's very surprising that the MPAA chose to come out with DVD using MPEG2 instead of MPEG4, since MPEG4 was already established. The same disbelief goes for the HDTV standard. They broadcast MPEG2, when they could broadcast MPEG4 and do many times more with a fraction of the bandwidth.

In addition, I would suggest people take a good long look at VP3/Theora+Ogg Vorbis before accepting the Microsoft solution. VP3 provides better quality than MPEG4, and (like Vorbis) is completely free of patents, and the necessary software is already available under a BSD license.

--
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant

Re:German copyright laws by double_u_b · 2003-04-10 22:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

Then, how do you transfer your CD to MP3 player???

Well... by BJH · 2003-04-10 23:00 · Score: 2, Informative

The fact that the page pointed to is inaccessible from anything other than IE doesn't make me confident that this technology will be an open standard.

Ah well, I suppose if people want to sell their freedom for a T2 DVD, there's nothing I can do to stop them...

Even the Mac... by Midnight+Thunder · 2003-04-10 23:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

We have Internet Explorer here on the Mac, but that too is refused :( Maybe they should have said Windows Internet Explorer?

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Jumpstart the tartan drive.

It doesnt matter how good it is by Beautyon · 2003-04-10 23:10 · Score: 2, Insightful

Remember Betamax.

It doesnt matter how good your product is; the conditions for it spreading are more important than great technical capabilities and fantastic specs.

Now, if MS made the encoder and the players free, and made them free to incorporate into third party devices, then there might be a wildfire. This is simply not going to happen.

Nothing to see here; move along.

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ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi

The Next Big Thing by D.A.+Zollinger · 2003-04-10 23:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

I can't help but think this might be the next big thing. Although it took about 10 minutes to download the 2 minute "liquid" trailer, and my computer stuttered a little bit, it reminds me alot of the days when MP3s where first introduced, and the majority of the computers of the day were just barely able to play them (today they can be played in the background, and don't take up much comparable processing power at all).

Imagine if you will, when this becomes mainstream in the next year or two, and we are given a delivery medium that can offer this to us at "live viewing" delivery rates. With all of the media enhancements that modern computers and operating systems are focusing on, people may demand a lot more high quality content to be available to them. As well, with the FCC, broadcasters, content providers, and high definition television manufacturers all dragging their feet, they may find themselves missing out on a market that they once monopolized.

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I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...

Re:im confused. by Alan+Partridge · 2003-04-10 23:37 · Score: 2

It doesn't, but when I DO buy a DVD (probably once a month or so), I don't want to be beholden to MS to actually watch the thing.

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That was classic intercourse!

I'd rather have A Blue Laser by MonkeyDluffy · 2003-04-10 23:41 · Score: 2, Insightful

A blue laser DVD player will probably be cheaper than a DVD player with a 2.4Ghz P4 equivalent processor. And anything that adds to the marketplace confusion as far as the format for HD DVDs will slow the acceptance of it.

Any HD DVDs will have some sort of DRM that is far more secure than current DVDs. I would imagine that the entertainment industry will be leary of any Microsoft DRM technology that could make Microsoft the gatekeeper to an entire industry.

-MDL

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Happy meals fund terrorism

Re:T2 in HDTV quality? How? by No.+24601 · 2003-04-10 23:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

I would mention a important limitation to analog to digital transfer... one of the major one's being that the analog masters often suffer from film degradation. I mean this isn't always a problem assuming the reel is stored in, say, a vacuum :) Moreover, we have ways of cleaning up the picture before/after transfer but it's just not nearly as good as having native digital format.

Media Player 9 is NOT needed, play with others by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-11 00:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

By installing the VCM (video compression manager)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows media/9ser ies/codecs/vcm.aspx

I can play those demo videos in other players like BSplayer http://www.bsplayer.org/

(I don't even have media player 9 (or 7 or 8) installed, only 6.4)

Since the VCM codec is like 1k in size, it won't take long to reverse engineer (ahem! emulate), at least for playback.

Re:Not supported... by nutshell42 · 2003-04-11 00:07 · Score: 2, Interesting

AFAIS it is Windows Media 9 - of course it is supported by MPlayer:

Selected video codec: [wmv9dmo] vfm:dmo (Windows Media Video 9 DMO)

=

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Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage

steep system requirements by mufasio · 2003-04-11 00:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Although other system configurations may be able to playback this content, for an optimal experience we recommend at least a 2.4 GHz Intel or AMD Athlon XP 2100+ or higher processor and an AGP4x based NVIDIA or ATI video adapter card with at least 32 MB of RAM and the most recent OEM driver updates. The higher the data rate (in Mbps), the higher the resource requirement.

I don't see this catching on any time soon if it requires a 2.4GHz processor in order to experience the increase in quality. I'm frightened to see the system requirements for the upcoming windows 2003.

Why this isn't such a good thing by Chuck_McDevitt · 2003-04-11 00:38 · Score: 2, Interesting

Microsoft has done a great job on this compression algorithm, it definitely works better than MPEG4. But I really don't want to see red laser disks become the standard HD DVD, and I don't want to see format wars. Even with the best compression, red laser disks just don't have enough bandwidth. Sure, you can do 720p, and it looks pretty good, but it has far more artifacts than HDTV. Do we really want an HD DVD format that isn't as good a picture as TV? Blue laser disks have plenty of space. It's easy to put an MPEG2 compresses 720p or 1080p24 movie on a disk, without overdoing the compression. Right now, Sony's Blue-Ray seems like the most likely to be a standard for this. And it records as well as plays. And with better compression algorithms, you could fit even higher res movies on a blue laser disk (1080p60? 2160p24?) in the future. Format wars are a bad thing. Support one and only one HD DVD format. And if you want that to be the best, it needs to be blue laser.

.EXE downloads by Andy+Dodd · 2003-04-11 01:00 · Score: 2, Informative

Many .EXE files that encapsulate media files are self-extracting ZIPs. Under Linux, try "unzip foo.exe".

Believe it or not this will work on a pretty good percentage of EXEs that are self-extracting archives. (Although that percentage seems to be slowly decreasing.)

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retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?

Innovation my arse. by Andy+Dodd · 2003-04-11 01:06 · Score: 4, Informative

WM9 is nothing more than a hacked-up version of MPEG-4. Its only apparent advantage is that the default WM9 encoder is a bit more flexible/less picky as far as bitrate control than other MPEG-4 implementations (XviD/DivX). Yes, DivX is a bit of a hacked-up version of MPEG-4 itself, but less so and the format is much more open. (See XviD).

For a while I believed that WM9 was superior to DivX for encoding home movies, although I had a feeling that there was something weird going on as I'd gotten much better results in the past. It turns out that the RC defaults of DivX 5.0.x aren't good for converting homemade DV video shot in low light. Once I started doing two-pass encoding in DivX, I could no longer tell the difference between WM9 and DivX. (Note: two-pass encoding did not benefit at all in WM9.)

So for one-pass encoding, WM9 is superior. For two-pass encoding, WM9 gains nothing and DivX catches up in quality.

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retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?

Re:Not a Big Deal. What about Theora and Vorbis??? by x+mani+x · 2003-04-11 01:06 · Score: 2, Interesting

As a MS employee from the WM9 team stated, MS holds many MPEG-4 patents and played a large role in developing the technology several years ago. In fact they built on the knowledge from MPEG-4 to develop this new codec. They feel this new codec is demonstrably better than MPEG-4, and encourage people to do their own tests and make qualitative and quantitative comparisons, as of course they are biased having developed the codec.

Reading AVSForum posts, some of the authorities on that site have done their own tests and seem to agree with the MS guys. Looks to me like the WM9 codec is almost a big a step over MPEG-4 as MPEG-2 was to MPEG-4.

Instead of posting assertions, why dont you do your own tests and make your own conclusion. This is Slashdot right? I'm sure you, and nearly everyone else here, have the know-how to encode video with competing codecs and make your own comparisons. Just a thought, before everyone gets on their anti-MS high horse.

Oops, forgot by Andy+Dodd · 2003-04-11 01:34 · Score: 2, Informative

Both of those were at 4 Mbits/sec video bitrate. (Approx. 20-22 minutes of video on a 700M CD.)

At 2 Mbits/sec (Twice the length on the same CD), both start to show artifacting, I'd say about equally.

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retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?

Re:Initial two first thoughts on the matter ... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-04-11 02:03 · Score: 2, Insightful

How in the hell is THIS anticompetitive?
Its proprietary no doubt, but not anti-competitive.

They require you to use their browser and media player for THEIR format??

They have done plenty of anti-competitive things, but this isn't one of them.

Slashdotters love to shout FUD!, then they spread so much of it themselves.

Myself... by AyeRoxor! · 2003-04-11 02:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

"Myself and many others have watched it."

So you mean to say that you are comfortable with the sentence "Myself have watched it." ?!?!?!?

The sentence is "I have watched it." and therefore your sentence should be "I and many others have watched it."

To educated people, your sentence looks like you're saying "Myself have watched it, and others have watched it." and you just look like a farking retard.

Please, people. Dont use "myself" to refer to yourself as the direct object in a sentence. You don't look intelligent. You look like a fucking buffoon. This probably goes for anything else you do to try to look intelligent.

Re:This just proves... by ryanwright · 2003-04-11 03:33 · Score: 5, Informative

This just proves that Microsoft are full of shit when they say you must use IE - if all that is required is a differetn user-agent string, then they are simply censoring browsers. Not surprising of course.

Oh, but it gets worse than that: Way back when most people were using Windows 98, and right around the beginning of the anti-trust trial, I had set my father's PC up with Windows 98 Lite (thus totally stripping Internet Explorer out). The PC had limited system resources and removing IE resulted in a considerable performance increase.

He bought a new game which required a newer version of DirectX, and it wasn't included on the game CD. So I hopped onto Microsoft's site (with Netscape) to download it.

No dice. They wouldn't let me have it. Said it required Exploder. I ran home, downloaded it from my spare PC with IE, brought it over on CDR and guess what? No problems. It worked flawlessly. Here was a legitimate customer of theirs who wanted support for the product he had purchased, and the fuckers wouldn't let him have it because he wasn't using their browser. They're like little kids on a playground: "No! You can't play with my toys unless you say you're my best friend and stop being friends with Tommy!"

I only wish I could have testified during the trial about this - as well as the "We can't remove IE, it's tied to the OS" shit, when everyone and their dog was running Windows 98 with no trace of IE thanks to a 30kb script (98 Lite).

Microsoft could be a great company if they'd stop all this childish bullshit. Their products are, more often than not, great - other than these unnecessary "features".

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-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig

How about making the next DVD standard extensible? by Xeger · 2003-04-11 04:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

I see plenty of folks squawking about how red laser DVDs are untenable in the long run, regardless of the compression technology you use. The consensus among these naysayers seems to be: forget about trying to improve DVD, it's old and busted; wait for the new hotness of HD-DVD which will rock your socks.

But guess what? In ten years, HD-DVD will be old hat too. Blue lasers or no, the compression algorithms defined in the standard will pale in comparison to whatever advanced video compression is available at the time. This is an unfortunate side-effect of progress -- we're so damned clever in the last 50 years that we keep shooting ourselves in the foot technologically.

There is a sane answer: for the next generation of DVD, instead of locking ourselves into a single compression format from the beginning, why not design the standard to be extensible? The existing DVD standard already has a virtual machine instruction set for describing the interaction of menus and video segments. Why not take this idea a whole lot further and implement a domain-specific bytecode language that handles complex graphical operations, and is sufficiently powerful to code decompression algorithms?

Since the language is specific to video decompression, vendors' DVD players could efficiently compile the bytecodes to whatever internal instruction set they use. This way, when you pop a blue-laser DVD into the drive, it will come with instructions on how to decode it. The format of the file containing the video and audio streams can be specified in the standard, but their content is left up to the DVD producer.

Re:Um, kinda shitty. by delus10n0 · 2003-04-11 10:08 · Score: 2, Funny

Either your eyes are shot, your monitor is broken, or you're just plain retarded. Take your pick. I'll even let you choose all three if you want.

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Not All Who Wander Are Lost

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