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Why Microsoft Hates Blu-ray
An anonymous reader writes "The private feud just became public. Apparently,
Gates yelled at Sony's CEO because the new copy protection Blu-ray has adopted would prevent players from streaming content to the Xbox 360. Since the PS3 will have Blu-ray support but the Xbox 360 only has a plain DVD drive, this means PS3 will be the only console that can play HD movies. Also, Paramount just announced support for Blu-ray and
Warner Brothers may also jump ship. Will VHS vs. Betamax turn out differently this time?"
PS3 won't be the "only" console that can play HD movies. Microsoft has previously announced that future versions of the 360 will have HD-DVD drives.The HD-DVD version of the 360 may be released to coincide with the PS3 launch for all we know.
ART on dA
Despite the rhetoric, Microsoft HAS to support whatever format wins. But if that format is Blu-ray, MS loses twice...
1. Xbox 360 will launch with only a DVD drive so it's not as attractive as the PS3
2. They have to pay patent royalties for Sony to make Windows Media play Blu-ray movies
Microsoft HATES paying royalties to other companies. How well does WMP support MPEG2 video? DVD? MPEG4? A: you have to get a 3rd party download to make those work so MS doesn't have to pay the MPEG LA. That's the whole reason they implemented VC-1, so they wouldn't ahve to pay for MPEG4 licensing.
Ok, to clairify Paramount is on board with BOTH formats. They are going to produce HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Like all production companies they will produce whichever product actually sells. Because frankly who cares if it's on an eight track as long as it sells and they keep margins to meet their profit expectations. According to Toshiba HD-DVD comes to market in Japan at the end of 2005. In terms of developement HD-DVD is well ahead of Blu-Ray according to Toshiba. HD-DVD is supposed to have better cost and productivity advantages over Blu-Ray. In addition it has greater proven capacity to date until Blu-Ray demonstrates a workable prototype of their higher capacity disks. So if HD-DVD comes out of the gates first and studios like Paramount and Warner Home Video start selling movies to consumers I find it hard to believe that other studios won't jump on board to sell their movies as well. When you sell gasoline, you could care less what car the consumer puts it in.
"Incompatibility keeping something from working on your platform?"
Oh, Blu-ray will work fine on the Windows platform, it's just that the format isn't designed to let you stream to trusted devices, only play locally on the one the disc's in - i.e. it's lock-in Sony DRM. HD DVD however can stream to trusted devices and keep its DRM intact.
In that respect MS is right - it's not an incompatibility with Windows, it's a potentially useful feature that Blu-ray won't allow you to do, for no good reason. It won't just stop Windows PCs streaming to X-boxes... it'll mean no streaming between devices, period. In my mind, this is a serious oversight done simply to promote Sony lock-in (which incidentally I consider to be worse than MS lock-in because it goes down to the hardware level).
For the record I bitch about the XD cards my camera takes all the time.
The Farewell Tour II
Although I do think Blu-Ray will win out in the end as Sony pushes a large number of Blu-Ray players into production with the PS3, meaning there will be a very large installed base of Blu-Ray players right off the bat. This will also help lower the price point for both the drives and the media as everything is ramped up into volume production.
And let's not forget, 200GB 8-layer discs. Yummy.
I hate Sony's content arm and related DRM crap as much as anybody. But Sony is big. And some parts of Sony do innovate. Even the much-hated here Minidisc, sure it's DRM, but you have to consider the times: 1991. It was the only portable, recordable digital media around. And the players were tiny. Next to them, any walkman or discman looked like the dinosaurs they were. It was not until iPod in 2001 that MD was dethroned in my view.
Also take a look at the subnotebook market. Put the two side by side - Sony and Dell. One is designed, but, dude, you're getting the other one.
Now, to address your boycott proposal. The fact is Sony makes more money from content than they do from hardware. So they are effectively subsidizing engineering R&D with content sales. Because content is more profitable, it gets more votes in the board room. This usually results in sabotaging their own products with DRM. Wired had a great feature called Civil War Inside Sony. I don't see how boycotting Sony's engineering products would help their engineers win that war.
If I remember correctly... MD never took off in the US because they never allowed it to be used as a digital storage medium. There was no way to stick an MD disc into a drive on your computer and use it, you were stuck using it as a glorified tape cassette in an external player. There was also the copy-protection nonsense (which is what really killed DAT).
Which is a real shame, because it's a very nice size with decent capacity. It could have easily been an Iomega ZIP killer. Even today, their 1GB disc capacity would be decent enough to stay competitive as a medium in a sneakernet network.
Sony has a big problem of being their own worst enemy. The consumer electronics side comes up with good products, which then get shackled with restrictions due to the music and movie side of the business playing luddite.
Sony's track record is actually suprising good. They are responsible for two of the most popular format in history. The 3.5" floppy disk and the CD-ROM (which they worked on with Phillips). Also the Audio cassette of was made by Phillips but it was Sony who made it popular with the walkman and by convincing Phillips to license it for free. Blu-ray is another Sony/Phillips format.
If you look at the history of Format Wars you usually see the same players, Betamax(Sony) vs VHS(Matsushita), MemoryStick(Sony) vs SD(Matsushita/Toshiba/Sandisk), MMCD (Sony/Phillips/etc) vs Super Densisty Disk(Matsushita/Toshiba/etc), DVD-Audio(Toshiba/Matsushita) vs SACD(Sony/Phillips), Blu-ray(Sony/Phlllips/Matsushita/etc) vs HD-DVD(Toshiba etc).
No one company wins all the time, sometimes they both lose (like in SACD vs DVD-Audio), and sometimes an uneasy compromise is met (like in MMCD and Super Density Disk becoming DVDs), and sometimes they both kinda win(like in DVD-RW vs DVD+RW), but it always comes down to which tech giant, usually Japanese, you want to be paying royalities to.
Very few words have their origins "in English." Most English words were borrowed from Anglo-Saxon, German, French, and a bunch of other languages.
After all, I am strangely colored.
You clearly didn't read the article that this discussion is about. Since this very issue is addresed in detail and you are misinformed.
First off, Blu-ray itself allows for streaming between devices, what may not allow for it is the DRM that was put in place to get 20th Century Fox support of Blu-ray (Not "Sony's DRM"). The safeguards in question was developed for Fox by San Francisco's Cryptography Research.
As far as streaming between devices, it seems that decision on that hasn't been made up and it's to early to say either way:
Quote from article:
"Andy Parsons, a Blu-ray spokesman, says the Cryptography technology does not block content from being moved around a network, but the association has yet to finalize details of whether it will allow for managed copying of the disk as Microsoft demands."
Actually, the creators of the GIF format have repeatedly stated that the correct pronunciation is, in fact, "jif" with a soft "g". See here: http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/
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Xbox 360 only has a plain DVD drive, this means PS3 will be the only console that can play HD movies
The XBOX 360 plays HD just fine - as MOST Studios have already backed and plan to distribute HD DVD Content on regular DVDs using WMV format, just like the "T2 Extreme Edition" that was released two years or more ago.
Using WMV HD capable compression capabilities, most studios have commited to providing HD Content on Regular DVDs using the Windows HD Media format.
This is why the XBox 360 didn't need a HD-DVD player, and will actually help to promote the basic DVD using more advanced compression techniques than the VERY AGED MPEG2 format.
Goto: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia if you want to see what 5.1 or BETTER and High Definition Video that will easily fit on a dual layer standard DVD looks like.
Additionally, does anyone not see the irony? Microsoft doesn't like BlueRay because of the 'additional' content restrictions - and yet people here are like "Yeah Sony, you are making it easier to lock our movies!". WTF?
This story is not only FUD, but makes assumptions based on CRAP information.
Slashdot editors and contributors, do you even fact check or monitor each other? Your commentary and news is turning into the laughing joke of the internet.
I've only ever heard gif pronounced with a hard G here in the UK over the last ten or so years, so it may very well be a regional thing. At the time I started using it, it was inconceivable that you would pronounce it JIFF, because .jif was (and, I believe, still is) a valid extension for a form of JPEG image (JPEG/JIFF), and no one would have a clue which you were talking about.
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The JPEG file format's original file extension was .jif back when it was called "Jeff's Image Format". I can't make myself calls GIFs "jif" for this reason.
I don't believe the very existence of the term "intellectual property" can be justified
That's because you're a typical deluded zealot, drunk on the Slashdot Kool-Aid(tm), who has never worked hard to create your own intellectual property of value.