I don't know what deals farmers get but I do know that commercial and agricultural diesel is dyed green (in ROI) or red (in NI), to prevent the less taxed stuff from being sold and used in cars. You occasionally hear about the police conducting raids etc. I assume that since farming is a business that taxes on private motor vehicles are not necessarily applicable to SUVs used to conduct their business. I have no idea of the details though.
I have trouble believing that a 500Mhz PC device is going to manage it though the PSP can play 480p H264, so perhaps the CPU requirements aren't that great for playback. My experience of encoding H264 is that they're pretty horrific. I doubt this chip would be any use at all for PVR devices unless the H264 already arrived at the CPU encoded, e.g. it was extracted from a DVB-T signal or similar.
Did you forget to put your fraking brain in this morning certain componats require a certain level of power or they wont work or wil lfail potentialy in a dangerous way.
I'm so glad you pointed that out. I shall return my A rated washing machine immediately since clearly the only way it could have gotten that rating is if the engineers dangerously interfered with the power levels required by some of its components. Idiot.
Oops correction, my engine is 1.4L. I should have thought more carefully before saying 1.3L. My last car was 1.3.
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po
on
Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I mentioned 1.6L more as a way of showing that the scale goes up proportional with engine size. I have a 1.3L car (a Citroen C4 coupe) which has no trouble at all on Irish roads even with passengers. Naturally there are still luxury vehicles, SUVs on the roads, but the overall emphasis is generally on what Americans probably call compacts - hatchbacks, saloons and so on. Most of those are probably 1.6L or less with a lot of 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1 size engines. If you drive around in a 3L SUV in Ireland you're going to be raped by the tax man.
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po
on
Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ireland sets the rate of annual motor tax based on the size of the vehicle engine. Someone with a 1.6 litre engine pays over a hundred more euros than someone with a 1.3 litre engine. It's probably explains why SUVs are quite scarce in Ireland. Which isn't a bad thing at all.
Re:I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on po
on
Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Everyone pays for the power they consume, be it gasoline or electricity. Who cares?
Exactly. Who cares? People are generally selfish and sometimes you must do things that benefit people as a whole instead of individuals. If slapping a tax on the most energy consuming devices in some category causes people to buy the more efficient ones, that is a benefit to every one. If you still want to buy that device despite the tax then nobody is stopping you. But I guarantee that for everyone who does than many more will choose one which doesn't.
It does not mean either that you're getting a crappier machine as a result. While there is a relationship between CPU / GPU performance and power, I doubt it is a 1:1 mapping. Some processors and GPUs are going to deliver more operations per watt than others. Companies and consumers should be encouraged to favour the more efficient designs over the less efficient designs and a tax for the worst offenders in any class is one way of going about that.
To clarify, if the EU slapped a tax on the worst offending PCs, it might focus consumers and the industry on producing more efficient designs. Most domestic appliances such as fridges and dishwashers already get rated in the EU and it clearly does shape people's decisions.
I wish mainstream CPUs / GPUs would focus on power
on
Via Unveils 1-Watt x86 CPU
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I wish the EU would start rating PCs by their energy consumption, perhaps accompanied by an energy tax for the worst categories. The amount of power in a modern PC from CPUs & GPUs wasted as heat, fans etc. is just ridiculous.
Scientology probably acts as a placebo at lower levels. After all, if someone actually believes their personality test is real instead of the pseudo-science nonsense it is, or believes auditing is not more of the same, then they're probably deriving some benefit from it. Same as people receiving crystal therapy, ear candling etc. I doubt it works much more than that.
Indeed if one were to examine L Ron Hubbard's life it seems more far more likely to turn the user into a paranoid, stark raving lunatic.
The leaders might not believe a word of it, but you'd better believe that most of the cult does. If they didn't why even be a member of a scam which requires you to pay vast sums of money to hear bad science fiction, or to work your fingers to the bone for a pittance. If someone needs group validation for their life there are far better, healthier and cheaper ways of doing it.
PZ Meyers is a tough but fair cookie. If the book is as bad as he claims I really see no judge in the land sending it to trial. The case is going to get laughed out of court if it even gets that far.
I think the big deal is being made because Microsoft is doing this to fuck up both formats. It really doesn't want Blu Ray or HD DVD to win the format war. It's only siding with HD DVD because in doing so draws out the battle even longer. The theory for Microsoft is that while Toshiba & Sony and their friends bleed each other dry, Microsoft can cleanup with download services and associated technologies such as codecs, DRM and mastering software.
I predict lawsuits out of this. There is no plausible technical reason that two studios would simply jump ship like that unless they were bribed. I could see them go neutral possibly, but completely switching at the same time? This is has anticompetitive behaviour written all over it.
People bitching about Flash because of ads is like people bitching about C because of viruses.
The main uses of Flash thus far have been:
Adverts. Almost every site has a flash ad or two
Promo sites for movies, games etc.
Video players. YouTube etc. A fairly recent phenomena
It's not hard to see why people hate Flash. Sure it might eventually herald an age of Rich Internet Applications with Flex etc. but it's no exaggeration to say that most user's experiences of it are overwhelmingly negative due to its association with adverts.
A fun fact about Flash is that it has things called shared objects which are just like cookies but managed entirely separately and stored in the user's app data folder, e.g. %APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects. Doubleclick and Google must bust a gut when they hear people saying they wipe their cookies because I bet they never think to wipe their shared objects. Sure you can eventually discover this panel to control them (a bit) but Adobe haven't fallen over themselves to make it easy to find or control these settings. It seems they know which side their bread is buttered on.
divx is MPEG-4 no?
There are plenty of codec libraries which can handle that, its hardly going to go the way of the dodo. MPEG-1 is still around, and playable after all and thats from the VCD era; around the early 1990s.
There is no single standard called MPEG-4. DiVX is an implementation of MPEG-4 Level 2 ASP. This is a very specific codec, on top of which DiVX has its own media container format. The container is how the data is stored as a file, and the container might interleave the data with other kinds of data. For example DiVX specifies extensions for subtitles and other things.
H264/AVC is MPEG-4 Level 10. It also has some different container formats, but more importantly it's an entirely different codec. Despite that, the two standards will share certain similarities might that allow some data to be preserved during conversion. I am wondering as someone not acquainted with the details if there is any feasibility to this.
But even considering DiVX as MPEG-4 ASP, it does not imply MPEG-4 ASP capable devices can read DiVX because the file format is independent of the encoding. At the very least a tool might be required to strip DiVX content out of it's proprietary container format. There is no guarantee that a device that supports even ASP is going to play DiVX movies.
On top of that MPEG-4 SP & ASP are becoming obsolete. They're stop-gaps who've run their course. Hardware has moved onto H264 yet people are left with ripped content in the old format. Most hardware does not support XVid / DiVX container formats. Sony, MS & Apple seem disinclined to support those formats, probably for accusations that they're supporting piracy, as well as hindering adoption of H264. If you have a device that only supports H264 you need to be able to convert files to H264.
When you transcode from one lossy format, into another there is no way that the quality of the image will be improved whatsoever.
data is thrown away, data that can not be recovered or magically made to appear out of thin air so that the image quality can be better. It would be better to re-encode from the original source where there is more data available for the codec to work on. Some perform better then others after all and may be able to compress more of the data then divx could without throwing some away.
No one ever said any different. I'm sure I could reencode all 30 movies I currently have in DiVX, if I have a spare month of time to do it. I'd just prefer not to if at all possible.
If you want as little data to be lost as possible when transcoding, then re-encode it into a format that is lossless (huffyuv?) or even to straight avi frames. The tradeoff is that the files become much much larger, and you will not gain any more quality then was in the original divx'd version.
I want to convert DiVX to H264, not some other format. I want to do this as losslessly as possible. I am wondering aloud if there is a way to convert data that does not involve (as much) encoding. Obviously I could just reencode them but I want to know if any data can be saved, speeding up conversion in the process. This is my question.
There isn't much point in converting xvid/divx/3ivx to h.264 (x264/vc) unless you're just aiming for a smaller file size; no, x264/h264 is for preserving the high quality of a video in a relatively low-size file format. Now that the flash player is getting h.264, I'm hoping it'll get something some might consider more important: mkv support and subtitle support. Ah well, here's to dreams.
I want to convert because the industry appears to be ignoring MPEG-4 SP/ASP and the implementations of it. For example my PS3 doesn't not support DiVX. While I could workaround this issue by firing up Linux, I'd prefer if there was a way to almost losslessly convert the format from one to the other. We all know that you could reencode the movie by decoding it one frame at a time and then reencoding it. But I am wondering if there is a way to strip the B/I frames and anything out of the data stream and save them straight into H264. Even if that means changing structures around. Not only would it mean a higher quality conversion, but it would be faster too and ideally suited for transcoding or conversion en masse.
I would call this "an overly optimistic projection by someone who doesn't follow the industry very deeply". Consider that right now it is very difficult to find DVD players that support even Divx and MPEG-2 playback in HD. Those 2 formats don't take much processing power. Given the extreme needs for processing power for H.264 decoding at 1080 resolutions, I would say that you're going to be waiting a while for this one.
Any entry level PC can manage HD output at 720p and probably higher. I really don't see the issue with a DVD player offering the same when the chances are it would be hardware assisted. Even a PSP can manage H264/AVC main at SD resolutions. We're already seeing HDMI equipped upscaling DVD players. Players that read and play H264 files cannot be that far behind. If Apple can flog an iTV which is basically an HD H264 playback device then cheaper devices are clearly not far off.
Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting
I want it because because DiVX was a good format but it's becoming obsolete. If it were possible to convert those files while preserving as much as possible of the data , e.g. B & I frames, the quality of the image might be better than completely re-encoding it. It would also be quicker to convert them, possibly even allowing the likes of Nero Home to transcode them on the fly. That is why I wondered aloud if you could produce a mostly lossless conversion.
Videolan, Nero Showtime and Quicktime do to my knowledge. So does the PS3.
The major confusion is that H264 is not just one standard but a loose collection of features bound up in "profiles". A player might support the H264 "main" profile, but not the "high" profile and so on. Then you've got MPEG-4 part 2 which is an earlier but unrelated stanard that DIVX / XVID are implementations of.
It's all quite confusing before even considering DRM and other implementation details. Still, the format is starting to see widespread adoption so the sooner all devices support it the better for everyone.
It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long. I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
I very much doubt the pretty clunky HD-DVD add-on has anything to do with this deal. MS could produce a BD drive just as easily. The reason they went with an HD-DVD drive is is probably the the same reason they're funding studios to switch formats - THEY DON'T WANT EITHER FORMAT TO WIN. They don't want Blu Ray to win and they don't want HD-DVD to win either. They want both formats to engage in some mutually assured destruction. If Blu Ray replaces DVD, then Microsoft's plans for download movies are seriously scuppered. After all, who is going to pay Microsoft a pile of money for a download which is inferior in quality to a Blu Ray disk, along with all the dodgy issues of ownership, playback on other devices etc. They're hoping by stringing out the format war as long as possible that people will get sick of the "confusion" and go download only. And Microsoft will be right there waiting to welcome them with open arms. The problem with that concept is Sony are likely to have their own download service too, as will Apple, as will Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster and everyone else. People are just switching a physical format war to a download format war which is even worse in my view.
This decision makes no business sense at all unless someone is lining their pockets with a lot of money to switch over. Certainly it can't be because HD-DVD is superior or anything else because it isn't. If Microsoft is behind the move, I predict lawsuits over this. If they're manipulating the HD format wars to prolong them so that their download service wins out, that would strike me as absolutely anti-competitive behaviour.
I'm sure git is wonderful in all sorts of change control related situations but Subversion is a great source control system too partly because it is so unremarkable - it just works. It has also got a great deal more cross-platform support and tools than git. Personally I use it as a distributed filing system because it has fantastic integration with Windows Explorer (via TortoiseSVN) so I can checkin files that I intend to share between machines (Linux & Windows).
People will find ways to remove those watermarks. The only impact will be on the people who still buy the stuff; those who share it online won't have any problems.
Watermarks can be invisible or imperceivable so they will have no impact on people who buy the stuff - unless they share them around. In normal use they would have no effect on listening / viewing. What a company would do if they caught you filesharing is an interesting question, but assuming you were law abiding you would be just fine. This is a far better solution than DRM that assumes your guilt by default and also massively complicates audio / video software & hardware. I wish for example the BBC iPlayer used watermarking since they could easily tie it to your TV licence but at the same time allow people great personal freedoms with the unencumbered files they had downloaded.
But say a user wanted to remove a watermark - how are they going to strip them out without degrading the audio / video to such a point that no-one would want to watch it? Most watermarking tools insert identifiers all over the place and in different ways. Trying to remove them would be very difficult.
A real world counterpart would be microdots in car parts. Sure you could spend all day looking for those dots and maybe even find most of them. But you'd never know for sure you got them all. It just takes one to remain and you're done for.
The BBC is not a state monopoly. And you claim you've paid for the content, but how does the BBC know you've paid for that content? I already suggested a way that they could restrict content to people who are eligible for it - via their TV licence and watermarking. I also said that users should be able to do anything they like with it within reason. Everybody else can and should get lost.
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I don't know what deals farmers get but I do know that commercial and agricultural diesel is dyed green (in ROI) or red (in NI), to prevent the less taxed stuff from being sold and used in cars. You occasionally hear about the police conducting raids etc. I assume that since farming is a business that taxes on private motor vehicles are not necessarily applicable to SUVs used to conduct their business. I have no idea of the details though.
I have trouble believing that a 500Mhz PC device is going to manage it though the PSP can play 480p H264, so perhaps the CPU requirements aren't that great for playback. My experience of encoding H264 is that they're pretty horrific. I doubt this chip would be any use at all for PVR devices unless the H264 already arrived at the CPU encoded, e.g. it was extracted from a DVB-T signal or similar.
I'm so glad you pointed that out. I shall return my A rated washing machine immediately since clearly the only way it could have gotten that rating is if the engineers dangerously interfered with the power levels required by some of its components. Idiot.
Oops correction, my engine is 1.4L. I should have thought more carefully before saying 1.3L. My last car was 1.3.
I mentioned 1.6L more as a way of showing that the scale goes up proportional with engine size. I have a 1.3L car (a Citroen C4 coupe) which has no trouble at all on Irish roads even with passengers. Naturally there are still luxury vehicles, SUVs on the roads, but the overall emphasis is generally on what Americans probably call compacts - hatchbacks, saloons and so on. Most of those are probably 1.6L or less with a lot of 1.3, 1.2 and 1.1 size engines. If you drive around in a 3L SUV in Ireland you're going to be raped by the tax man.
Ireland sets the rate of annual motor tax based on the size of the vehicle engine. Someone with a 1.6 litre engine pays over a hundred more euros than someone with a 1.3 litre engine. It's probably explains why SUVs are quite scarce in Ireland. Which isn't a bad thing at all.
Exactly. Who cares? People are generally selfish and sometimes you must do things that benefit people as a whole instead of individuals. If slapping a tax on the most energy consuming devices in some category causes people to buy the more efficient ones, that is a benefit to every one. If you still want to buy that device despite the tax then nobody is stopping you. But I guarantee that for everyone who does than many more will choose one which doesn't.
It does not mean either that you're getting a crappier machine as a result. While there is a relationship between CPU / GPU performance and power, I doubt it is a 1:1 mapping. Some processors and GPUs are going to deliver more operations per watt than others. Companies and consumers should be encouraged to favour the more efficient designs over the less efficient designs and a tax for the worst offenders in any class is one way of going about that.
To clarify, if the EU slapped a tax on the worst offending PCs, it might focus consumers and the industry on producing more efficient designs. Most domestic appliances such as fridges and dishwashers already get rated in the EU and it clearly does shape people's decisions.
I wish the EU would start rating PCs by their energy consumption, perhaps accompanied by an energy tax for the worst categories. The amount of power in a modern PC from CPUs & GPUs wasted as heat, fans etc. is just ridiculous.
Scientology probably acts as a placebo at lower levels. After all, if someone actually believes their personality test is real instead of the pseudo-science nonsense it is, or believes auditing is not more of the same, then they're probably deriving some benefit from it. Same as people receiving crystal therapy, ear candling etc. I doubt it works much more than that. Indeed if one were to examine L Ron Hubbard's life it seems more far more likely to turn the user into a paranoid, stark raving lunatic.
The leaders might not believe a word of it, but you'd better believe that most of the cult does. If they didn't why even be a member of a scam which requires you to pay vast sums of money to hear bad science fiction, or to work your fingers to the bone for a pittance. If someone needs group validation for their life there are far better, healthier and cheaper ways of doing it.
PZ Meyers is a tough but fair cookie. If the book is as bad as he claims I really see no judge in the land sending it to trial. The case is going to get laughed out of court if it even gets that far.
Oops, I meant mostly lossless.
Hence the reason I said mostly lossy.
I predict lawsuits out of this. There is no plausible technical reason that two studios would simply jump ship like that unless they were bribed. I could see them go neutral possibly, but completely switching at the same time? This is has anticompetitive behaviour written all over it.
The main uses of Flash thus far have been:
It's not hard to see why people hate Flash. Sure it might eventually herald an age of Rich Internet Applications with Flex etc. but it's no exaggeration to say that most user's experiences of it are overwhelmingly negative due to its association with adverts.
A fun fact about Flash is that it has things called shared objects which are just like cookies but managed entirely separately and stored in the user's app data folder, e.g. %APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects. Doubleclick and Google must bust a gut when they hear people saying they wipe their cookies because I bet they never think to wipe their shared objects. Sure you can eventually discover this panel to control them (a bit) but Adobe haven't fallen over themselves to make it easy to find or control these settings. It seems they know which side their bread is buttered on.
There is no single standard called MPEG-4. DiVX is an implementation of MPEG-4 Level 2 ASP. This is a very specific codec, on top of which DiVX has its own media container format. The container is how the data is stored as a file, and the container might interleave the data with other kinds of data. For example DiVX specifies extensions for subtitles and other things.
H264/AVC is MPEG-4 Level 10. It also has some different container formats, but more importantly it's an entirely different codec. Despite that, the two standards will share certain similarities might that allow some data to be preserved during conversion. I am wondering as someone not acquainted with the details if there is any feasibility to this.
But even considering DiVX as MPEG-4 ASP, it does not imply MPEG-4 ASP capable devices can read DiVX because the file format is independent of the encoding. At the very least a tool might be required to strip DiVX content out of it's proprietary container format. There is no guarantee that a device that supports even ASP is going to play DiVX movies.
On top of that MPEG-4 SP & ASP are becoming obsolete. They're stop-gaps who've run their course. Hardware has moved onto H264 yet people are left with ripped content in the old format. Most hardware does not support XVid / DiVX container formats. Sony, MS & Apple seem disinclined to support those formats, probably for accusations that they're supporting piracy, as well as hindering adoption of H264. If you have a device that only supports H264 you need to be able to convert files to H264.
When you transcode from one lossy format, into another there is no way that the quality of the image will be improved whatsoever. data is thrown away, data that can not be recovered or magically made to appear out of thin air so that the image quality can be better. It would be better to re-encode from the original source where there is more data available for the codec to work on. Some perform better then others after all and may be able to compress more of the data then divx could without throwing some away.
No one ever said any different. I'm sure I could reencode all 30 movies I currently have in DiVX, if I have a spare month of time to do it. I'd just prefer not to if at all possible.
If you want as little data to be lost as possible when transcoding, then re-encode it into a format that is lossless (huffyuv?) or even to straight avi frames. The tradeoff is that the files become much much larger, and you will not gain any more quality then was in the original divx'd version.
I want to convert DiVX to H264, not some other format. I want to do this as losslessly as possible. I am wondering aloud if there is a way to convert data that does not involve (as much) encoding. Obviously I could just reencode them but I want to know if any data can be saved, speeding up conversion in the process. This is my question.
I want to convert because the industry appears to be ignoring MPEG-4 SP/ASP and the implementations of it. For example my PS3 doesn't not support DiVX. While I could workaround this issue by firing up Linux, I'd prefer if there was a way to almost losslessly convert the format from one to the other. We all know that you could reencode the movie by decoding it one frame at a time and then reencoding it. But I am wondering if there is a way to strip the B/I frames and anything out of the data stream and save them straight into H264. Even if that means changing structures around. Not only would it mean a higher quality conversion, but it would be faster too and ideally suited for transcoding or conversion en masse.
Any entry level PC can manage HD output at 720p and probably higher. I really don't see the issue with a DVD player offering the same when the chances are it would be hardware assisted. Even a PSP can manage H264/AVC main at SD resolutions. We're already seeing HDMI equipped upscaling DVD players. Players that read and play H264 files cannot be that far behind. If Apple can flog an iTV which is basically an HD H264 playback device then cheaper devices are clearly not far off.
Why would you want to do this? Converting between lossy formats doesn't make anything better. There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264. The best conversion would entail some loss, even if it's difficult to see. If you understand this analogy, what you are suggesting
I want it because because DiVX was a good format but it's becoming obsolete. If it were possible to convert those files while preserving as much as possible of the data , e.g. B & I frames, the quality of the image might be better than completely re-encoding it. It would also be quicker to convert them, possibly even allowing the likes of Nero Home to transcode them on the fly. That is why I wondered aloud if you could produce a mostly lossless conversion.
The major confusion is that H264 is not just one standard but a loose collection of features bound up in "profiles". A player might support the H264 "main" profile, but not the "high" profile and so on. Then you've got MPEG-4 part 2 which is an earlier but unrelated stanard that DIVX / XVID are implementations of.
It's all quite confusing before even considering DRM and other implementation details. Still, the format is starting to see widespread adoption so the sooner all devices support it the better for everyone.
It will be a pain for people with lots of DIVX content, but this appears to be the way industry is going and no doubt we'll see DVD players with HD H264 support before long. I wonder if there is a mostly lossless way to convert DIVX content into H264, since they may differ but they must share similarities too.
I very much doubt the pretty clunky HD-DVD add-on has anything to do with this deal. MS could produce a BD drive just as easily. The reason they went with an HD-DVD drive is is probably the the same reason they're funding studios to switch formats - THEY DON'T WANT EITHER FORMAT TO WIN. They don't want Blu Ray to win and they don't want HD-DVD to win either. They want both formats to engage in some mutually assured destruction. If Blu Ray replaces DVD, then Microsoft's plans for download movies are seriously scuppered. After all, who is going to pay Microsoft a pile of money for a download which is inferior in quality to a Blu Ray disk, along with all the dodgy issues of ownership, playback on other devices etc. They're hoping by stringing out the format war as long as possible that people will get sick of the "confusion" and go download only. And Microsoft will be right there waiting to welcome them with open arms. The problem with that concept is Sony are likely to have their own download service too, as will Apple, as will Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster and everyone else. People are just switching a physical format war to a download format war which is even worse in my view.
This decision makes no business sense at all unless someone is lining their pockets with a lot of money to switch over. Certainly it can't be because HD-DVD is superior or anything else because it isn't. If Microsoft is behind the move, I predict lawsuits over this. If they're manipulating the HD format wars to prolong them so that their download service wins out, that would strike me as absolutely anti-competitive behaviour.
I'm sure git is wonderful in all sorts of change control related situations but Subversion is a great source control system too partly because it is so unremarkable - it just works. It has also got a great deal more cross-platform support and tools than git. Personally I use it as a distributed filing system because it has fantastic integration with Windows Explorer (via TortoiseSVN) so I can checkin files that I intend to share between machines (Linux & Windows).
Watermarks can be invisible or imperceivable so they will have no impact on people who buy the stuff - unless they share them around. In normal use they would have no effect on listening / viewing. What a company would do if they caught you filesharing is an interesting question, but assuming you were law abiding you would be just fine. This is a far better solution than DRM that assumes your guilt by default and also massively complicates audio / video software & hardware. I wish for example the BBC iPlayer used watermarking since they could easily tie it to your TV licence but at the same time allow people great personal freedoms with the unencumbered files they had downloaded.
But say a user wanted to remove a watermark - how are they going to strip them out without degrading the audio / video to such a point that no-one would want to watch it? Most watermarking tools insert identifiers all over the place and in different ways. Trying to remove them would be very difficult.
A real world counterpart would be microdots in car parts. Sure you could spend all day looking for those dots and maybe even find most of them. But you'd never know for sure you got them all. It just takes one to remain and you're done for.
The BBC is not a state monopoly. And you claim you've paid for the content, but how does the BBC know you've paid for that content? I already suggested a way that they could restrict content to people who are eligible for it - via their TV licence and watermarking. I also said that users should be able to do anything they like with it within reason. Everybody else can and should get lost.