Fate of High-Def DVD up to Microsoft?

BlackMesaResearchFac writes "EE Times is reporting that Microsoft may have chosen a side in the ongoing optical disk war. From the article: 'several industry sources last week told EE Times that Microsoft is muscling into the optical-disk fray by leveraging its operating-system clout to bundle HD-DVD within Vista, the company's next-generation OS. There is also talk that the software giant may be planning to offer cash incentives -- in the form "coupons" -- to system vendors or retailers if they agree to support HD-DVD. Such coupons would provide "credits" or "memos" for each PC that is sold with HD-DVD inside.'"

Comments

Or that much harder to crack?

[ImaLamer]

It effectively attempts to curb Sony's console dominance by making Blu-Ray next to worthless.

It seems to me that if Sony goes with Blu-Ray and all the PC's out in the wild won't have it, it will be harder to copy their games. Mod chips always come out, encryption is cracked, but not being able to produce discs with the proper format/standard will halt copying efforts.

Of course it isn't the end all solution to piracy. Every SEGA Dreamcast game out has been copied and distributed, but you had to download the game (1+ Gigabyte) through a serial cable first. Using a proprietary technology kept people from renting games just to copy them. Assuming that the PS3 doesn't allow you to rip a game and upload it through the controller/USB/Firewire ports and that you can't fit a PS3 game on a DVD-R then they have got a winner.

Just imagine it another way: Protocol dead zones.

I had to create an network for a school that kept teacher's workstation and servers separate from the rest of the network. No student was allowed to even attempt a log in. The easiest way to do this was to use Novell Netware 6 (eDirectory) and IPX/SPX for all teacher/back-end communications. No student workstations were supplied with the drivers to use IPX (no student could install drivers, software, etc). Even if they had a rouge Linux install with IPX ready to go, let's say, the switch had IPX/SPX routing disabled for those ports. The only switch ports that would transmit IPX were the ones we told it to (of course all switches are kept in locked cabinets and so forth).

Same theory here for Blu-Ray. If the only place it is ever seen is the PS3 then Microsoft helped the PS3 become more "pirate-proof". (Of course, it could be argued that no PS3 game piracy may hurt Sony and so forth...)

Besides, who is the consumer electronics giant here, Sony or Microsoft?