Slashdot Mirror
HD DVD Coming Very Soon
x mani x writes "While the DVD Forum continues quibbling over a new blue-laser based HD-DVD standard, it looks like Microsoft has been busy developing a new video compression method that can show high quality HD video at bitrates similar to current DVD's (between 5-8mbps). Proof, you say? Check out some stunning samples of this cutting edge technology. Myself and many others have watched it and most of us feel this is significantly better looking than MPEG-4/DivX HD video of the same bitrate. This technology is causing some excitement, as the T2: Extreme Edition DVD package will include a DVD containing T2 in HD, compressed with this technology. Anyone with a fast PC will be able to watch T2 in high def, no pricey blue laser player required."
"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
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!
AND Windows
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.
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.
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?
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
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
Yet an other version of the LOTR to buy....
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
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
They're porting WMP9 to linux and MacOS. Nice try.
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!
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.
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
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...
.5% of the population can view a DVD in HDTV quality.
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
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.
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
We have Internet Explorer here on the Mac, but that too is refused :( Maybe they should have said Windows Internet Explorer?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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).
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"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.
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".
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
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.