"Does anyone know if current HD TVs are capable of playing HDCP DRMed content from Vista (or any other source)?"
Yes, for the most part. I know some people have had problems, but these are usually solvable by either returning the faulty hardware, or in some cases people are just running really long cables to front-projection units, and had to use shorter ones to ensure the handshaking was good enough.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are pretty minority products right now, but loads of people have DVD players that upscale over HDMI.
That's odd. The HDTVs I looked at, and certainly the one I eventually bought, have either VGA or DVI-I sockets, so you can hook up a PC straight to it.
If memory serves, the Dreamcast versions of both Quake III: Arena and Outtrigger support mouse/keyboard. It's not just the homebrew Quake that's open to you.
If it's against the license, distributing it is illegal. If you don't care about illegal distribution, you might as well be using pirated software.
By all means use Linux or BSD because they suit the job better. I kinda leapt to the conclusion that Vista would do just as well if you're claiming to be an archetypal "End User" who doesn't have to do anything serious with the box, as that's what I thought the initial post was implying.
Basically, because if you don't give two shits about what the license says, you're better off warezing a copy of Vista and being done with the whole nonsense. It's obeying the license restrictions that makes what you're doing legal.
I don't believe Blu-Ray will die due to that particularly quickly.
What I do see, however, is the standalone player manufacturers taking it in the backside from the PS3. The Samsung is generally regarded as not even doing as good a job at playing movies as the PS3, and yet costs twice as much. Most of the people I know with PS3s bought them as movie players for just this reason.
Blu-Ray may well take off, but if it does, it will be regarded as a PS3 Movie Disc, in the same way that they tried to do with UMD Movie Discs for the PSP.
There's also ease of manufacture, but that's a major, major win for HD-DVD, instead. It's essentially free for a DVD pressing plant, and the yields are almost as good as normal DVD. Meanwhile, everything I hear suggests that BD-50s are pretty much still test pressings at the Sony lab, with roughly 10% yields.
S-Video? Wow, welcome to '97. If you can't see the jaw-dropping difference between 480i in S-Video and 1080p in VGA or HDMI, then I dread to think what your display device is.
On every TV I've owned in the last decade, DVD at 480i in S-Video has been awful compared to DVD at 480i in Component (which you also mentioned as an option, admittedly). The jump to HD-DVD is incredible on a screen big enough and good enough to show it off. Far bigger than Laserdisc to DVD, certainly.
1) It will be a software player for Windows, or maybe OSX at a push.
2) ALL HD-DVD players, software or hardware, have a net connection - it's in the spec just like which codecs they need to handle and so on. So they can get updated ones too. The keyspace is huge.
Now, I don't believe that any more than you probably do. But my original point stands; assuming you need AV at all, surely these security changes mean you need a different solution?
Yes, if you're running a full Media Centre (XP Media Centre Edition would do my job just as well, but I can't be bothered to reformat and reinstall just for this, when I'm planning to move to Vista anyway just as soon as everything works) then you can stream MPEG2 video files as well as WMV ones. Which is nice, since converting to MPEG2 is a lot faster (and easier) than WMV9.
Sure, if you're doing these things professionally, WMV9 smacks the ancient MPEG2 format out of the park, but I'm prepared to trade some quality for actually getting to see what I've downloaded some time this evening.
The others I understand, and if Quickbooks in particular is broken I can't upgrade our machine (natch; I wanted the Media Centre stuff for my 360).
But why would you care that the XP version of an AV product doesn't work on Vista? Surely there are enough differences between the OSes that you'll need a new virus scan?
NASA actually remembers putting the landers there. It's pretty damn sure it did so. So spending millions of taxpayer dollars to put a camera in low orbit just to remind itself doesn't seem like a good idea.
The high-res pictures of Mars are giving us real scientifically interesting data, though. Getting pics of the rovers are just a nice bonus.
Well, World Of Warcraft is available on the Mac. It's quite disturbing how many people want that and nothing else anyway.
Re:More partisanship than facts
on
Plasma or LCD?
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· Score: 1
LCD's do suffer with black levels due to the backlight, yes, but most decent ones allow you to alter the brightness of them (certainly my Sony does, and on a per-input basis, too). They're normally right up in the shop, to give you that eye-searing bright image, but turning them right down gives you pretty good ones while still being bright enough for movie watching, and saves on the power-usage, too.
Some of the latest plasmas run rather cool, while some LCDs get surprisingly hot; just go round a TV shop near the end of the day and feel for yourself.
Power consumption is a real issue, I agree, but that way lies Global Warming arguments, and they're just no fun at all.
Welcome to Europe, where no-one wants to be unable to import films from the US.
With the new formats I expect it to be less of an issue eventually; at least we've lost PAL speedup now that our discs are 1080p/24 as well. But my US HD-DVD owning friends have now gone import crazy - HD-DVD's lack of region encoding is a huge bonus, and from a copy protection point kills at a stroke the need to bother with chipping for most people.
Although I've heard nothing other than rumours, I think Lions Gate at least are going to have to go dual format at CES, simply because all the (currently Blu-Ray exclusive) jewels in their US catalog keep coming out on HD-DVD through Canal+ and others in Europe and Japan. Once the money men start seeing the exclusivity is losing them money, I expect things to change.
The problem (at least here in the UK, I don't know the US that well) is that ever since LCD went huge there isn't such a thing as "high-end CRT" any more. Anything over about 24" is going to show geometry problems to some extent (dear GOD am I glad I don't have to worry about geometry or convergence now I've gone to LCD), and when you get to 32" 16/9 sets its a pretty serious issue.
Then there's the fact that the two of us nearly did ourselves serious injury taking my 32" CRT up the stairs. The 32" LCD that replaced it weighed 17kg. Including the packaging, which never made it up with the CRT, because that wouldn't have negotiated the corner.
For small sets, CRT is still unbeatable on value and image quality. But for the living room it's dead as a dead thing.
Re:Google is your friend
on
Plasma or LCD?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's generally a good write-up, though I'd quibble with their first bit. Plasma being manufactured at generally larger sizes than LCD isn't really a 'win' for Plasma.
Most people choose where they want a TV to go, and buy one that is the right size for the space, or smaller if they can't afford one that big. If you've got a 50" space to fill, then sure, Plasma is the winner. If it's 32" or lower, Plasma can't fit your needs. Overall, I think it's a fairly neutral thing - 40" seems to be the hotspot, and both are fine there.
I don't know the full details, no. But people who do (people who design these things) tell me that the copy protection listed in the AACS standards is pretty damn serious in comparison to the added level in BD+, that BD+ is a comparative piece of cake to break, that the legal ramifications of leaving a BD+ backdoor in your player are smaller (as we've seen with DVD player region encoding, no hardware manufacturer wants to make it any more than minimally challenging to bypass, because ease of chipping is a major sales feature) and that the technical advisory group told the head Blu-Ray group that it was a stupid feature that they shouldn't apply.
But they were desperate to sign Fox, and Fox said they wanted BD+. What Fox wants from the Blu-Ray group Fox gets, because they are the only chance it has of killing HD-DVD.
It's things like this, their use of MPEG2 rather than a decent modern codec that make me really, really want to see Blu-Ray die a painful death. Their comedic yield rates on 50Gb discs, which show no sign of improving soon, tell me that might actually happen, too.
Panasonic say: Buy Our TVs Film At 11.
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Panasonic are the best manufacturer of Plasma displays, bar just about none. Even those painfully expensive Bang & Olufsen plasmas are Panasonic panels with upgraded processing components and a nice box.
Meanwhile, their current range of LCDs aren't that great, and are generally considered to be, if anything, worse than their previous generation (they're cheaper to make, though). They're losing market share hand over fist to Sony right now.
Exactly how unbiased do you think a press release from them extolling the virtues of Plasma are going to be? Roughly as much as the one explaining why you should buy one of their Blu-Ray players, instead of Toshiba's HD-DVD, really.
Personally, I think both technologies have their place. Plasma really comes into its own at 50" and larger sizes, where LCD's finer dot-pitch is less of an issue, and you can't even get a decent-value plasma below 42" - the rare 37" ones are ludicrously overpriced in comparison to LCD. But Panasonic are definitely over-selling Plasma in their marketing.
BD+ won't help. All it does is perform some checks that are orders of magnitude easier to crack than the AACS encryption, and then allow Fox to brick your player if they don't like what they see.
But since everyone cracking movies will be running a PC rather than standalone hardware, there's nothing to brick; it's all software, and no pirate is going to write the suicide code anyway.
Personally, I think he's saying that he doesn't know how long it takes to download from a random member of the public's connection, rather than across the Sony office network. But I'm a cynic.
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"Does anyone know if current HD TVs are capable of playing HDCP DRMed content from Vista (or any other source)?"
Yes, for the most part. I know some people have had problems, but these are usually solvable by either returning the faulty hardware, or in some cases people are just running really long cables to front-projection units, and had to use shorter ones to ensure the handshaking was good enough.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are pretty minority products right now, but loads of people have DVD players that upscale over HDMI.
That's odd. The HDTVs I looked at, and certainly the one I eventually bought, have either VGA or DVI-I sockets, so you can hook up a PC straight to it.
If memory serves, the Dreamcast versions of both Quake III: Arena and Outtrigger support mouse/keyboard. It's not just the homebrew Quake that's open to you.
If it's against the license, distributing it is illegal. If you don't care about illegal distribution, you might as well be using pirated software.
By all means use Linux or BSD because they suit the job better. I kinda leapt to the conclusion that Vista would do just as well if you're claiming to be an archetypal "End User" who doesn't have to do anything serious with the box, as that's what I thought the initial post was implying.
Basically, because if you don't give two shits about what the license says, you're better off warezing a copy of Vista and being done with the whole nonsense. It's obeying the license restrictions that makes what you're doing legal.
I don't believe Blu-Ray will die due to that particularly quickly.
What I do see, however, is the standalone player manufacturers taking it in the backside from the PS3. The Samsung is generally regarded as not even doing as good a job at playing movies as the PS3, and yet costs twice as much. Most of the people I know with PS3s bought them as movie players for just this reason.
Blu-Ray may well take off, but if it does, it will be regarded as a PS3 Movie Disc, in the same way that they tried to do with UMD Movie Discs for the PSP.
There's also ease of manufacture, but that's a major, major win for HD-DVD, instead. It's essentially free for a DVD pressing plant, and the yields are almost as good as normal DVD. Meanwhile, everything I hear suggests that BD-50s are pretty much still test pressings at the Sony lab, with roughly 10% yields.
S-Video? Wow, welcome to '97. If you can't see the jaw-dropping difference between 480i in S-Video and 1080p in VGA or HDMI, then I dread to think what your display device is.
On every TV I've owned in the last decade, DVD at 480i in S-Video has been awful compared to DVD at 480i in Component (which you also mentioned as an option, admittedly). The jump to HD-DVD is incredible on a screen big enough and good enough to show it off. Far bigger than Laserdisc to DVD, certainly.
1) It will be a software player for Windows, or maybe OSX at a push.
2) ALL HD-DVD players, software or hardware, have a net connection - it's in the spec just like which codecs they need to handle and so on. So they can get updated ones too. The keyspace is huge.
Now, I don't believe that any more than you probably do. But my original point stands; assuming you need AV at all, surely these security changes mean you need a different solution?
Yes, if you're running a full Media Centre (XP Media Centre Edition would do my job just as well, but I can't be bothered to reformat and reinstall just for this, when I'm planning to move to Vista anyway just as soon as everything works) then you can stream MPEG2 video files as well as WMV ones. Which is nice, since converting to MPEG2 is a lot faster (and easier) than WMV9.
Sure, if you're doing these things professionally, WMV9 smacks the ancient MPEG2 format out of the park, but I'm prepared to trade some quality for actually getting to see what I've downloaded some time this evening.
The others I understand, and if Quickbooks in particular is broken I can't upgrade our machine (natch; I wanted the Media Centre stuff for my 360).
But why would you care that the XP version of an AV product doesn't work on Vista? Surely there are enough differences between the OSes that you'll need a new virus scan?
NASA actually remembers putting the landers there. It's pretty damn sure it did so. So spending millions of taxpayer dollars to put a camera in low orbit just to remind itself doesn't seem like a good idea.
The high-res pictures of Mars are giving us real scientifically interesting data, though. Getting pics of the rovers are just a nice bonus.
Well, World Of Warcraft is available on the Mac. It's quite disturbing how many people want that and nothing else anyway.
LCD's do suffer with black levels due to the backlight, yes, but most decent ones allow you to alter the brightness of them (certainly my Sony does, and on a per-input basis, too). They're normally right up in the shop, to give you that eye-searing bright image, but turning them right down gives you pretty good ones while still being bright enough for movie watching, and saves on the power-usage, too.
It was a Sony 16:9 32" CRT, weighed about as much as you do. Not fun, when you've got two flights to carry it up.
Some of the latest plasmas run rather cool, while some LCDs get surprisingly hot; just go round a TV shop near the end of the day and feel for yourself.
Power consumption is a real issue, I agree, but that way lies Global Warming arguments, and they're just no fun at all.
Welcome to Europe, where no-one wants to be unable to import films from the US.
With the new formats I expect it to be less of an issue eventually; at least we've lost PAL speedup now that our discs are 1080p/24 as well. But my US HD-DVD owning friends have now gone import crazy - HD-DVD's lack of region encoding is a huge bonus, and from a copy protection point kills at a stroke the need to bother with chipping for most people.
Although I've heard nothing other than rumours, I think Lions Gate at least are going to have to go dual format at CES, simply because all the (currently Blu-Ray exclusive) jewels in their US catalog keep coming out on HD-DVD through Canal+ and others in Europe and Japan. Once the money men start seeing the exclusivity is losing them money, I expect things to change.
The problem (at least here in the UK, I don't know the US that well) is that ever since LCD went huge there isn't such a thing as "high-end CRT" any more. Anything over about 24" is going to show geometry problems to some extent (dear GOD am I glad I don't have to worry about geometry or convergence now I've gone to LCD), and when you get to 32" 16/9 sets its a pretty serious issue.
Then there's the fact that the two of us nearly did ourselves serious injury taking my 32" CRT up the stairs. The 32" LCD that replaced it weighed 17kg. Including the packaging, which never made it up with the CRT, because that wouldn't have negotiated the corner.
For small sets, CRT is still unbeatable on value and image quality. But for the living room it's dead as a dead thing.
That's generally a good write-up, though I'd quibble with their first bit. Plasma being manufactured at generally larger sizes than LCD isn't really a 'win' for Plasma.
Most people choose where they want a TV to go, and buy one that is the right size for the space, or smaller if they can't afford one that big. If you've got a 50" space to fill, then sure, Plasma is the winner. If it's 32" or lower, Plasma can't fit your needs. Overall, I think it's a fairly neutral thing - 40" seems to be the hotspot, and both are fine there.
I don't know the full details, no. But people who do (people who design these things) tell me that the copy protection listed in the AACS standards is pretty damn serious in comparison to the added level in BD+, that BD+ is a comparative piece of cake to break, that the legal ramifications of leaving a BD+ backdoor in your player are smaller (as we've seen with DVD player region encoding, no hardware manufacturer wants to make it any more than minimally challenging to bypass, because ease of chipping is a major sales feature) and that the technical advisory group told the head Blu-Ray group that it was a stupid feature that they shouldn't apply.
But they were desperate to sign Fox, and Fox said they wanted BD+. What Fox wants from the Blu-Ray group Fox gets, because they are the only chance it has of killing HD-DVD.
It's things like this, their use of MPEG2 rather than a decent modern codec that make me really, really want to see Blu-Ray die a painful death. Their comedic yield rates on 50Gb discs, which show no sign of improving soon, tell me that might actually happen, too.
Panasonic are the best manufacturer of Plasma displays, bar just about none. Even those painfully expensive Bang & Olufsen plasmas are Panasonic panels with upgraded processing components and a nice box.
Meanwhile, their current range of LCDs aren't that great, and are generally considered to be, if anything, worse than their previous generation (they're cheaper to make, though). They're losing market share hand over fist to Sony right now.
Exactly how unbiased do you think a press release from them extolling the virtues of Plasma are going to be? Roughly as much as the one explaining why you should buy one of their Blu-Ray players, instead of Toshiba's HD-DVD, really.
Personally, I think both technologies have their place. Plasma really comes into its own at 50" and larger sizes, where LCD's finer dot-pitch is less of an issue, and you can't even get a decent-value plasma below 42" - the rare 37" ones are ludicrously overpriced in comparison to LCD. But Panasonic are definitely over-selling Plasma in their marketing.
BD+ won't help. All it does is perform some checks that are orders of magnitude easier to crack than the AACS encryption, and then allow Fox to brick your player if they don't like what they see.
But since everyone cracking movies will be running a PC rather than standalone hardware, there's nothing to brick; it's all software, and no pirate is going to write the suicide code anyway.
Lacklustre sales of the hardware?
I'll give you that they're not completely phenomenal, but they're good enough that they fly off the shelves at the rate they can manufacture them.
Personally, I think he's saying that he doesn't know how long it takes to download from a random member of the public's connection, rather than across the Sony office network. But I'm a cynic.