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SDMI as Dead As DivX

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the say-bye-bye dept.

Anonymous Cowpie writes "Rival predicts death for SDMI - Bob Kohn, chairman of EMusic, says SDMI's new spec won't dislodge MP3. He also says "In a year's time, the SDMI standard will suffer the same demise as Divx. The standard war is over today."" Fine by me. Wouldn't have had SDMI on Linux for years anyway, and my MP3 collection isn't going anywhere.

4 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. To clear up some things by MindStalker · · Score: 3

    It seems many people have a misconception of what SDMI is..
    From what I've figure out SDMI is more of a watermarking technology, meaning all new CD's and online music will be watermarked with SDMI (note there is a difference between this and encrypting of scrambling (spelling?) old CD players will be able to play this SDMI music (though if you play it backwards and really slowly you will hear a voice in the backgroud saying "do noot copy.. or satin will have your soul" accually this is fairly accuarate except its a binary message for the computer to read instead of you). Even if Ripped from CD to MP3 this watermark will most likly still be there. The important difference comes in the players. The players that support watermarking /SDMI will follow the rules and will only play first generation copies or something like that (I kinda forget how these rules work or how they are digitally enforced). Now somehow the RIAA has got to force all players to support the SDMI standard, which they may just do, suppositivly the new RIO'S will use SDMI as will most other players, possibly even winamp. So if we want to fight this initiative we need to start using and supporting players that do not care about SDMI, most of these will oviously be linux/free(not beer nessesarly)/GPL software.

  2. problem: by ywwg · · Score: 3

    corporations don't support mp3 like they did for DVD. Thus, SDMI has no _real_ entrenched competitor. Also, even DVD had Macrovision, and basic encryption, so studios could rest easy that no one would hax0r (crax0r?) filez off of dvds and post them. mp3 has no such feature. I think SDMI will win, but they will learn from divx's mistake.

    (first?)

  3. Head of SDMI is against privacy?? by KlomDark · · Score: 5
    This also scares me. In a Wired interview, Leonardo Chiariglione, the head of the SDMI initiate, said:

    "Why all of sudden has the United States become so concerned with privacy? Privacy was never a concern before the Web."

    We have always been concerned about privacy. It is more along the lines of "Why are there suddenly so many privacy invasions and disregard for everyones basic want for privacy?"

  4. 90% of customers would choose piracy by MS · · Score: 3
    Once upon a time...
    ...we copied from vinyl to tape. Sacrifying quality, yes. Sometimes we even copied from tape to tape, sacrifuying even more quality. But we owned more hits on tape than on vinyl. Then came the CDs. And we copied them to tape. The quality was better than from vinyl or tape as source. We copied a lot. Then there came MP3 and we copied from CDs to harddisk. Quality was excellent. Then we copied from harddisk to harddisk. It was cheap and fast. It's quite a few months now, I don't buy CDs!

    make digital distribution disapppear?
    How?

    As long as I can hear music, I may also be able to digitise it, and hence save it in MP3 Format on my harddisk. There's no technical possibility to avoid that someone will distribute this new song in MP3 format.

    No, guys, there's no way back.
    All other formats will die, as no one will want to use them (besides the distributors, but we are the ones, who actually listen to the music). Long live MP3.

    Markus