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UK to Build Network of 150 Digital Cinemas
mikael writes "According to this article at the BBC, a network of 250 digital screens in 150 cinemas across the country is being planned. Each film is losslessly compressed from 1 Terabyte down to 100 Gigabytes and encrypted onto a portable hard disk drive with a key unique to each cinema, which is then delivered to the cinema. Each cinema projector will be capable of showing films at resolutions of 2048 x 1080 pixels. "The key benefit is the distribution and screening of documentaries, British and foreign language films, as making a digital copy is considerably cheaper than spending over £1500 pounds to make a copy of a single film". Other benefits include better picture quality and the ability to show more films each day." The UK Film Council has a brief overview of the project as well.
will a 100GB digital to DivX rip take?
All your Sybase are belong to us.
The Cinerama called, and would like to welcome them to the 21st century.
When you get evicted and live under some seats on the cinema floor.
A couple of hours after the projectionist has finished recompressing it as MPEG-4 (maybe H.264), and published the .torrent, I would imagine...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Does this mean I won't need my camcorder anymore?
Just as the movie gets really exciting, a Blue Screen of Death will show up.
as UK to Build Network of 150 Digital Cameras?
Does that mean all the pirates can just take that file and make it at normal dvd resoloution!
even if it is locked?
Damn this technology! They take more fun out of piracy every day!
-Primal_theory (now with 100% more bad karma!)
Boeing developed a system a few years back that included all of the required projection equipment and received the film via (encrypted) satellite transmission. The idea was to buy cheap unused satellite bandwidth (non-realtime delivery, so it doesn't matter if higher-priority traffic interrupts your transfer for a bit) and use that to deliver the films. I believe at the time they were talking about using about 40GB films. These were compressed with MPEG-2, and there was visible artefacting even on a plasma display (although less than there would be with a DVD) - although the film they picked to demo it was Ice Age, which is full of sharp colour changes and so hardly the best to demonstrate DCT-based video compression...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
What they don't say is that the screens will be tiny and all 150 "cinemas" are in the same building, so the resolution will be quite good actually.
;-)