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Stock Analysts Down on DIVX
rmcd sent us a link to a New York Times article that talks about
Circuit City is being financially hurt by DIVX.
Apparently they are really making a mess over there. So lets
get rid of divx, standardize on HDTV, and merge THX & Dolby.
That'll happen around the same time as the whole world agrees
on the same OS.
OK, this post has got to be from an anonymous coward, 'cause I predict it will generate a napalm barrage, not to mention the obligatory 'this guy must be a Circuit Shitty plant' comments.
I like DIVX. It was pretty easy to set up, the picture is excellent, and it has saved my wife and I countless hastle and coin dealing with Video Stores. Yea, I feel guilty about giving into the Big Brother aspects of it, but not too guilty, in my book Blockbuster and my cable company are much higher on the list of _Evil Companies that Should Die_ than CC could ever hope to be.
Yea, I don't get to play with multiple aspect ratios, blah, blah, but the picture is sharp and clear as hell on my Proscan. We head over to Circuit City every couple of weeks, buy a handful of discs for the price of one DVD, stick 'em in a drawer, and don't worry about them till we have a few spare hours to watch a movie. No muss, no fuss, and no on-going relationship with video rental store droids, "Hi, welcome to BallBuster, where would you like to be kicked today?"
Of course, if DIVX does go south, I can always use regular DVD. Btw, I have to say that Video 'Collecting' has to be the most pathetic activity ever. Unless we're talking about a genuine classic that you might want to watch again and again, like 2001, or something to pacify your kids I suposse, dropping $25 bucks on 'Armeggedon' or some other piece o' shit Hollywood offereing just so it can sit on your shelf, and you can impress you friends with your DD sound effects is lame, lame, lame. I suspect (beyond the very real privacy concerns) that a lot of the venom behind the DIVX attacks comes from people with more money than sense who went out and dropped major money on DVD discs.
I think I can hear those F-111s heading my way allready...
An enterprising gentleman built himself an Excel spreadsheet to help him compare prices on big screen TVs, then he loaded said spreadsheet onto a notebook computer and went shopping. When he got to Best Buy and started jotting down prices, the store manager called the cops and threw him out. The next day the same gentleman went back with a pad of paper and a pen, and was immediately thrown out, again, with more cops and an arrest this time. When he got to court, the judge threw out the case with lots of nasty words about Best Buy. Eventually said gentleman sued Best Buy, but that case got thrown out by the (different) judge too.
At the time Circuit City got a lot of good press by inviting said gentleman to spend as much time as he wanted comparison-pricing their TVs.
That said, while I may go to Circuit City to check prices, I'll never buy there ... I hate having to fend off the sales-critters.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
This was all old news to me, except for one point which I found very amusing: Circuit City owns a piece of Carmax, a used car dealership. I wonder if they sponsor some sort of employee exchange program among their salespeople...
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Jake
Beta was a better technology than VHS. That it was only a Sony technology killed it. DVDs in general use MacroVision to introduce nastiness in the picture quality if you try to copy it. There are ways to defeat this however. Sima for instance makes a MacroVision scrubber.
How can you talk about the advantages of DVD over DIVX and NOT mention privacy??
:) After the MP3 fiasco they'll never let the best technology win.. when bandwidth and storage get cheaper look for the MP3 wars to expand to video. Information wants to be free.... corporations want to control it.
This is MY big problem with DIVX... everything you watch with it goes to some soulless corporate database which will later be exploited.
It should be a crime for corporations to collect and sell information on you without your consent. It's a form of privacy theft borderline on stalking.
To put it another way, privacy is threatened enough without the TELEVISION WATCHING US!
Additionally, DIVX is very environmentally unfriendly. How can they cheer this on as "disposable movies"? It's bad enough that America Online sends unrequested CD software to people who don't even HAVE a computer... now we're going to throwaway movies after viewing? We ARE destroying ourselves... just keep consuming to keep your mind off it.
How do you copy DVD?? Using CDDA??
Good point about video collecting. You guys should take a look at "Widescreen Review", a magizine aimed at high end videophiles who purchase about $100,000 worth of equipment just so they can watch the latest Batman movie without having to walk their big fat asses down to the movie theater. Pretty funny read - all these big technical analyses of the color shift tonal qualities of some totally low brow movie running on top end hardware.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The whole Beta-was-better-than-VHS is a classic Internet legend. First of all, Beta (because of the smaller tape size), couldn't hold a 2 hour movie at SP speed. Eventually recitified, but killed Beta in the early rental market.
Second, I doubt you could even tell the difference between a $400 1983 Beta machine from and a $400 1983 VHS machine. They both suck by the modern standard of a $100 1999 VHS machine. People just wanted to rent movies using the cheapest deck they could get, and that was VHS.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I've noticed that today whatever I post has a score of 2 automatically(watch this prove me wrong). You seem to have several 3s. What's going on?
There's just not enough information on a DVD to do that. In about 6 years, there will be HD-DVD or something like that, with a shorter wavelength laser and more information on the disc. They'll still play normal DVDs. Who has an HDTV anyway? The highest quality stuff you can see on that is the broadcast HDTV stuff (all six hours a week). Then I guess comes Satellite feed. Then DVD is the highest quality pre-recorded video source availible (I guess actual film might be better). It may not support HDTV yet (but anamorphic discs support at least the widscreen aspect), but it's the best thing out there to date.
The downside to LCDs is viewing angle and latency, which may smear the image where there's a lot of action. Or not - I don't know how well the latest LCDs handle this.
But hell, HDTV on a 17" CRT computer monitor would be fine - just sit closer to the damn screen.
I'd like to see a HDTV tuner with an SVGA output...
-- Alastair
That it (Beta) was only Sony was part of the problem. The main reason VHS won out over Beta (in home machines) was that VHS tapes had a longer recording time -- long enough to contain a full feature length movie, which Beta couldn't (except at lower resolution).
That rapidly led to more software being available for VHS than for Beta.
-- Alastair
Everyone seems to have commented on my first sentence only. May the flames begin.
Perhaps if I had worded it: If DVD was what it could be, it wouldn't blow, but as it stays with the technological and cultural shortcomings which are standard with Laserdisc which it closely emulates, it is nowhere near the fabulous technological advance it could be.
It is easily scratched, and the info on both sides makes it hard to handle compared to Minidiscs, which with the new 6 Gig format will prove very interesting.
but compared to what it could be, DVD blows.
I would have written all that, but I was at work.
I would also like to personally thank all who have emailed me flames for making Slashdot what it is today
Bitter.....
"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
Guys, DVD blows, but don't even get me started on Divx.
Hopefully this will sound as a warning to Divx distributors....
No one (who knows better) wants it, movie companies don't support it, video retal houses don't support, it has no extra features like DVD (a plus) and the hardware setup requires a credit card (?!?)
Go away soon Divx, you won't be missed
"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
Only in the case of Blade Runner did it bother me, but it bothered me a *lot* less than having to watch a Pan-n-Scan blurry bulky VHS tape with metal oxides flaking off of it...
Sure they might have come up with a solution that doesn't fit in notebook computers or on your bookshelf or in the palm of your hand. Every consumer product has tradeoffs. Complaining about DVD because of artifacting is like complaining about sex because of the wet spot.
I know my post on another topic was moderated up to five (I watched it go), and then somehow wound up back down at three; and another post on yet another topic seemed to go right to three and stick there, but not automatically.
That's one reason not to invest any money in a Divx player or a Divx disk. Why take a chance that they'll go belly up and you'll never be able to watch all those movies again?
Heh. Just remember, you can rent DVD's from a video store. There is no need to shell out the $25 bucks to buy something you'll only watch once.
The Divx v. DVD thing had been beaten to death, but let us summarize:
Advantages of Divx v. DVD:
-- Able to watch the limited number of movies available in Divx format only.
-- Do not have to return disks after renting them.
Advantages of DVD v. Divx:
-- PRIVACY. You don't need to let the DVD company know that you bought a disk. With Divx you'll be required to do that to get repeat views or to "purchase" the CD permanently.
-- Price. Divx is more expensive.
-- DVD does not tie up a phone line. Nor does it require a credit card to charge.
-- DVD is more popular and thus is likely to win the format war, making Divx disks obsolete. This is especially bad given that if you don't "own" the disk and Divx goes under, you can't watch any of your movies.
-- DVD is availble for computers. Divx is not.
-- The DVD people are not resorting to questionable "astroturf" campaigns to prop up sales.
I'm writing this off the top of my head and might have missed something, but this right here shows that DVD is the no brainer choice. I wonder how many of the people who bought Divx were unsophisticated consumers talked into it by a Circuit City sales person? I'd guess a lot of them. I bet that few people who know the issues are choosing Divx.
Just to clarify, what specific aspects of dealing with video stores do you find hateful?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
BTW, has anybody else here noticed exactly how unhelpful the Best Buy web site is? I mean, for Christ's sake, I've seen better sites churned out by 12 year olds using Hotdog....
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.