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Bill Gates Speaks Out Against Next-Gen DVDs
jZnat writes "Although we all know that Microsoft hates Blu-Ray, Bill Gates doesn't seem to like HD-DVD either. Primarily, it seems, because Mr. Gates believes media storage on hard drives is likely to be the default standard sooner rather than later. From the interview: 'Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [MPAA] got too much protection at the expense of consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.'"
that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use their full dual-layer storage capacities of 50GB and 30GB respectively. Now, the largest currently available 3.5" internal HDD is 500 GB. Presently that would mean a maximum of ~10 Blu-Ray movies or ~16 HD-DVD movies. This is not a lot considering I counted over 200 DVDs on my shelf, making over the 500GB alone.
Another mentioned problem is distribution. The largest "widely" available download speeds available from Verizon via FIOS (which I will admit is not that widely available), is 30 Mbps. Now assuming you get the peak download speeds, we are talking about downloading 400,000 Mb or 240,000 Mb depending on the media. This would result in download times of 3 to 4 hours for Blu-Ray type media and of 2 to 3 hours for HD-DVD Media. On the more standard 6 Mbps connection these times would be nearly 5x larger. I think I can get to Best Bu,y Circuit City, or some other store and home in about 30 minutes tops. You have to remember a great number of consumers still pay for convenience, even in DVD purchases.
I think the hard drive storage Bill is hoping for is a pipe dream, unless of course he is planning on HDDs becoming so cheap you can sell a movie on one and then just pop it into your "player" and let it go...but HDDs are so big, and they do come with a host of their own problems...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Ars Technica goes Inside Microsoft's decision to back HD DVD http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/mi crosoft-hd-dvd.ars
Bluray fires back
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050929/sfth060.html?.v =32
Microsoft Responds
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050929-5366 .html
No.
Specifically, the XP copy protection came after Ballmer took over the company.
When Gates was CEO, Microsoft products were intentionally very piracy friendly, because his goal was total universality, whether or not he got paid for it.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If you think that an actor's salary contributes to the overwhelming majority of the cost of production of a movie, you're very wrong.
I'm not even remotely involved in that business, and I know that just the *equipment* alone can probably run for a good few million, and let's not forget the cost of things like materials for costumes and props, as well at the cost of designing and building a set and the associated cost to use a space to film in. Also, add in the money that you have to pay the dozens of people who work behind the scenes, creating the costumes, designing the sets, ensuring that all of the equipment works safely and as flawlessly as possible. Stuntmen too, if you're using them. Don't forget about paying the people who write the scripts and screenplays. Also, factor in insurance and legal fees for everything.
Beyond that, you've got to pay people to do editing and post production work. Special effects cost money too, you have to pay the people who work magic with render farms, as well as for the cost of using the render farms. Finally, there's the cost involved in the promotion of a movie. Like it or not, ads for a movie are basically a fact of life, and these cost money.
But yeah, no doubt you can cut a small corner by using a no name actor over a big name actor.
http://cylan.deviantart.com/gallery/
You people act as if there isn't a way to remove DRM, heh.
There is no lawful way to remove DVD DRM in the country on whose soil Slashdot is hosted without spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to acquire the assets of the conglomerates that own the movie studios.
It shouldn't cost millions to make a movie. Personally, I don't know why you would pay an actor over a million dollars to act in a movie. It's not that hard of a job, and they don't need that much money. Perhaps if they paid the actors less, the movies would cost less to buy or see. You could say that having a person like Tom Cruise in a movie will sell it more, but that shouldn't be the case. He's actually not that great of an actor, and I couldn't care less who was in what movie. The person should fit the role.
Apparently you have no idea how much effort and how many people it takes to make a movie. Using unknown actors, I figured that a 110 minute long script I want to film will take about $1.5million to make. That's doing it as cheap as I can, while keeping production values akin to mainstream films.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
You have to remember that many people purchase DVDs for extra content as well. In this regard, the extra space will allow for movies to gain back for of the bitrate they sometimes have to sacrifice for the sake of extra features, while at the same time allowing extra features to get more space and quality.
With the advent of HDTV and high definition cameras becoming more prominent, we are not only talking about storing movies in high definition on a disc, but bonus features could be recorded and displayed in the same high definition as well. This would require the extra space, since using the MPEG-2 standard you are going to need more space for the improvement of video from the standard 480 lines to 720 or 1080.
There are several encodings that can be used for video, however, it is often the case in compression that the smaller you make something the more quality-loss you get. The idea is that you have to sample with a certain degree of frequency or your quality will go down. You then need to keep quality up by keeping the bit rates up as well. The idea of a higher bitrate for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is also taking into account the idea of pushing more DTS and Dolby tracks that contain 6.1 or 7.1 audio.
The idea is to plan for the future, and in this case blue laser technology was a logical and rather "simple" step compared to spending time researching and testing new encoding schemes. The idea was actually a simple one, take a laser with a smaller wavelength and we should be able to burn more data into a smaller space. While the design was obviously not THAT simple, it was logically a next step forward from the present technology.
Now on the assumption that the only revolutions in blue laser media storage will be more layers, it would be fairly safe to say that the next step will be improving encodings. Though I do not know the standards of the other approved encodings for Blu-Ray, I do believe they have better storage usage then the standard MPEG-2.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed