If you're willing to downgrade the resolution to 720p, and reduce yourself to one soundtrack, then a figure of 4-6G for MPEG4 compression is possible, indeed that's exactly how the download services are doing HD.
But storing at 1080p... nope. Movies on Blu-ray are generally stored, today, as VC-1 or MPEG4, both of which are considered roughly equal in quality/byte. Early Blu-ray discs used MPEG2, but once HD DVD proved the viability of both codecs, studios were quick to switch. The video stream coupled with a single audio stream is probably in the region of 10-15G for an average movie stored this way.
That said, hard disk capacity seems to be way larger on average in comparison to the source material than it was back when DVD came out. A typical DVD movie took up (and I guess still does) 4G, and back in 1998 that was the total capacity of many HDs that came with computers. By comparison, a 250G HD, which is the bottom end of disk sizes today, can store 15-20 full size 1080p movies compressed as VC-1 or MPEG4. And by the time they discontinue Blu-ray in 2010, I'd expect most people to turn their noses up at anything under 1T.
I don't know about the timings of the lawsuit, but this issue was raised long before January, I remember reading about it last December and wondering if it would tip the balance in the format war.
A more realistic scenario than "She's pissed because HD DVD lost" is that Toshiba probably licensed the technology.
Issues concerning the legitimacy of patents aside, Sony is not a US company, and as such might be able to ignore US law, but not if it wants to trade in the US. It is whether Sony can continue to import blue lasers into the US that's at issue here: if they continue to violate the patent without coming to an agreement with the patent holder, then they may be barred from importing blue lasers.
Nobody is proposing to prevent Sony from selling blue lasers in, say, Japan. This is exclusively about what Sony does in the US.
Others have pointed out that you're incorrect. I'm curious why you'd have believed this crap though: if HD DVD had been red-laser based, then HD DVD drives wouldn't have been any more expensive than DVD drives. It's doubtful it would have taken two years for a sub-$200 HD DVD player to appear (and the A3 was heavily subsidized), and virtually every manufacturer currently making DVD drives would have been able to - and therefore would have - jumped into the market almost right away.
There are ways red-laser media might have been practical - indeed, a format called HD-VMD is out that uses red laser technology, choosing to use massive numbers of layers and slightly more efficient bit encoding, to overcome the 4.7/9Gb limitations of DVD. And it'd be interesting to know if red laser media could have been more dense if they'd used the tricks with aperture that BD uses (that gave it the 60% advantage over HD DVD per layer.) But HD DVD didn't use any of these techniques. Had it done so, the media would have been more expensive, but the players would have been much, much, cheaper. We'd probably never have even seen a "war", it would have been game over in 2005, when Toshiba would have released a player much earlier than they eventually did, at a price that everyone could afford, followed quickly by Apex and numerous other entrants from the low cost consumer electronics industry.
The studios were pretty convinced that what was stopping people from buying HD disks was the fact that nobody wanted to buy a format that might lose support if it didn't win the format war. You buying a Blu-ray player today will simply bolster that view, they're certainly not going to think that people are buying them because they can finally copy Blu-ray discs, especially when the vast majority of Blu-ray discs became copyable when the original AACS hack came out (BD+ is not that common.)
There are a variety of reasons HD DVD was better from an end-consumer's standpoint, though not necessarily a studio's:
It was more affordable
It supported combo disks, meaning people buying movies could buy them safely in the knowledge they didn't have to upgrade every player in the house to HD DVD in order to play it
It supported non-encrypted discs, meaning smaller studios had access to the format without the need to pay AACS fees that would significantly increase the cost of the media, and also meaning free content was possible
It had everything two years ago that Blu-ray's BD Live and Profile 1.1 supports (but few Blu-ray players are capable of.) An HD A1 can do all the PIP, etc, features that are being announced today for future BD players
For encrypted discs, "managed copy" was a compulsory feature, allowing manufacturers to produce movie jukeboxes, systems to copy movies to hand held devices, etc, safely in the knowledge that no HD DVD disk could ever be pressed that wouldn't be able to be a part of such a system
There was one copy prevention system, AACS, which was a known quality and relatively uncomplicated. BD+ is a nightmare, several legitimate players have difficulty with it.
The only real downside was the lower capacity, and with an HD DVD disk topping out at 30G (there had been a plan to increase that to 50G without increasing the price of the players by adding a third layer), capacity for an ordinary 1080p movie was never really an issue. I hear they had trouble fitting a lossless soundtrack on the Transformers HD DVD, one of the rare occasions the capacity was stretched, and there's some evidence that wasn't true either. My 2001 HD DVD has gorgeous quality, a DolbyHD lossless soundtrack, and a whole bunch of features, all on one single sided double layer disc.
Yeah, but he's a fool who's rolling around in cash.
BD+ was a con. It was always stupid, it causes problems for legitimate customers while ultimately being crackable just like every other DRM scheme. The purpose of the "ten years" statement wasn't to build his reputation, it was to ensure that the technology would be adopted by at least one major format, and for that adoption to be enough to push that format over the edge before the system was cracked.
Now it's too late. Blu-ray is the "format of choice", the studios can't reconsider the BD+less HD DVD even if they wanted to, so they're going to continue with Blu-ray and Blu-ray player makers are going to have to incorporate BD+ playback, paying the appropriate license fees, despite the fact everyone knows it's a turkey.
It's fraud, but nobody's ever going to punish the fraudsters for it. The current owners of BD+, Macrovision, got what they paid for, and Macrovision are blameless enough to not be a viable target for lawsuits from the manufacturers.
What I want to do is get an HD DVD burner (this is very hard BTW), a lot of blank media, and a Blu-ray drive, and then buy Blu-ray movies and convert them into HD DVDs. That way I'd really be sticking it to the man. Yeah. Wooo! You know it!
Erm. Ok. It's probably the stupidist idea ever, but what the hell.
The mandate is for population coverage not geographic coverage, which makes it considerably easier than you might think. Essentially you're talking about, in ten years, covering every main road in the US and every city and major population center outside of a city. And it doesn't even have to be high capacity coverage: if the emergency services are able to use the system, who can be expected to have relatively light requirements, the mandate is covered.
If you look at companies like Sprint PCS and T-Mobile, after ten years of operation (in T-Mobile's case including it's predecessors, obviously) they certainly were at that kind of level of coverage for the license areas they serve. Both operators had to overcome more physical hurdles than the 700MHz operators will have to - 1900MHz signals pass through buildings with much more difficulty than 700MHz signals do, and this affects both in-building and outside coverage. The real problem with most operators who have a reputation for less than perfect coverage has to do with a lack of licenses, due to the moronic PCS geographically based licensing system, where an operator could have licenses in one county but not in the next due to the luck of the draw. This, obviously, will not be an issue for a company with a national license.
You are being left to make up your own mind on the validity of the assertion. The statement - that the assertion is blatantly false - is a matter of fact, and it is correct journalism to report facts, especially if the story is that someone is lying.
There is no brainwashing going on. Slashdot is not inserting thoughts into your head via telepathy or any other suitable technology. You are being presented with facts about Time being, yet again, a bunch of spineless liars who mindlessly repeat Beltway talking points in order to appear "mainstream". You can make up your mind at any level, from determining that Time isn't a spineless beltway puppet despite the evidence to the contrary, to simple disbelief of the evidence if you're so inclined.
I have a brother in law who's a firefighter. The firefighters, police, paramedics, etc, exist in a tight-knit culture. If you're an anonymous stranger, you can expect to be (normally) fairly treated by the emergency services. If you're a friend of family in firefighting, law enforcement, or other emergency service, you can expect to be more than fairly treated. And I have a sister in law who's ex is currently avoiding the county in which my BiL lives, because he knows that, as someone who has been an (extreme) ass to the sister in law, he can expect to be pulled over and thrown in jail on trumped up charges if he dares cross the county line. Not that he wouldn't deserve it, but the law's the law, and I put respect for the law ahead of vigilante justice from those supposedly charged with upholding it.
Yes, it's kind of corrupt. And to be quite honest with you, I don't know how to reform it, the problem is endemic in the emergency services culture. You have to give law enforcement powers to ensure they can do their job. But people with power generally feel they need to use it when circumstances justify it, and those circumstances aren't always what liberal democrats would describe as justified, even when the people given that power have their hearts in the "right place".
And no, they don't always have their hearts in the right places. A friend, a Vietnam Vet in his fifties, was driving through Fort Pierce a few months ago, and his liver medication was giving him a reaction that was leading him to drive erratically. The cop followed him for half a mile with my friend failing to notice. He wasn't armed. He didn't give the appearance of being armed. At worst, you might think (as apparently the cop did) that he was drunk or had taken dope. The cop's response was to drag him out of the window, with my friend still seatbelted, and once my friend was out of the car, to beat the living shit out of him.
Once situated in jail, my friend's clothes were taken from him and they mysteriously "disappeared", making it more difficult to use them as evidence (they were soaked in blood, and my friend's bodily injuries are consistent with that.) The cop didn't take the clothes. Give me an explanation for that that doesn't involve cultural protection and vindictiveness.
Yes, that's right, aside from the entirely different (and much higher) resolutions, the increased colour depth, the increased colour resolution, the digital instead of analog encoding, the availability of 5.1 audio, and the 23.976fps, 24fps, 30fps, 59.94fps, and 60fps frame rates for progressive video, and availability of progressive video, it's exactly the same as NTSC!
The joke being that almost all the Blu-ray players on the market right now are obsolete. BD Live has been part of the spec since November, but pretty much nothing supports it, and most Blu-ray players can't even be upgraded to support it. The PS3 is about the only safe bet right now.
Oh, and the other joke is that BD Live just brings Blu-ray up to (nearly) the same level as HD DVD. Yes, at the time WHV threw its weight behind Blu-ray, Blu-ray was both more expensive than HD DVD, and less powerful (capacity excepting.)
Great decision Hollywood. You went for the format that's out of most people's price range, that's unlikely to be in people's price range for a while, and which had less features (and thus less clear advantages over DVD) than HD DVD. In practice, I suspect you've doomed HD media to a niche, while the vast majority stick with DVD for movies they want to own, and PPV and the various download services for content they want to see in HD.
I'd say the opposite, most phones (well, most non-CDMA2000/IS-95 phones) are considerably more open than the iPhone. Every one of my unlocked GSM phones I've bought since 2002 is capable of running Java apps, without the need to sign them or any other such crap, and most of the locked phones are similarly capable.
For a "smartphone" (Jobs's description, not mine), it's considerably less flexible in terms of the software it can run than, say, my Motorola V635.
And I think people who complain about the price of the players and the movies forget about the price we paid for DVDs when they came out, or even worse with VCRs. When 25 years ago, a VCR costs around $500, and a prerecorded movie STARTED at $25, can we really complain about the price of HD Media?
Sure we can. VCRs took far longer than DVD to become ubiquitous, and part of their success was due to their multifunctional capabilities - people could record from the TV, and this was pretty much the only way to record shows. The high prices of pre-recorded VHS media meant that most people's VHS libraries were extremely small except for the home-taped component. Video rental stores took off because VHS media was ridiculously expensive: if we had the "$25 for a new release, $15 for a still-popular release, $10 for almost everything else" regime we have for DVD today, then I doubt the rental industry would have gotten the traction it needed to become successful.
BTW, yes, the slow boot-up time of the Toshiba is a downside to those players. I'm told by an Xbox HD DVD user that the latter has nothing like the same issues. Expect the same problem if Toshiba ever produces a Blu-ray player. Of course, you can do what all us Toshiba users do and leave the thing on all the time, though that does mean you don't get to enjoy the player's friendly "Welcome" and "Goodbye!" LED messages quite as often...
The catalog isn't that tiny, there's some real gems such as most of the major Kubrick films and the Blade Runner collection (which I ordered right after Christmas for $25. Wow. Most awesome DVD set I've ever had, until then it was the Criterion "Brazil" set but the Blade Runner DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray thing blows that away), and, on the other end of the scale, the only high-definition release thus far of the Matrix series. It's worth checking both Amazon.com and Amazon.de as the European releases covered a slightly different collection of movies to those in the US, due to differing distribution rights; and HD DVD is region free so this really is worth doing.
Yes, there are plenty of movies not available on HD DVD. But the catalog isn't "tiny", people were buying DVD players back when the available DVDs were nothing like as plentiful as HD DVD is today.
Yep, that's right, just like we had to pay an upgrade fee when we got the first version of iTunes with the iTMS, and then a year or so ago had to pay an upgrade fee for a version of iTunes that had a built-in movie store.
...wait a moment! We didn't have to do that at all!
I have to admit that I doubt the "obscure accounting rule" explanation has ever been true. It certainly isn't true when Apple is pushing something they're making revenues from like a music, movie, and now software, store. But I don't think it's true for goodwill type freebies either. I think the truth is Apple is cheap. This is the same Apple that was charging $20 for "Quicktime Pro" for all those years. This is about revenue generation, not about accounting.
I think that would be true if it wasn't for the case that the Wii and Maemo versions are presumably from the same code base, and that even if they're not Flash playback on various other PCs I have (albeit all faster than the 800 VIA C3, but not necessarily as fast as the 2GHz Pentium mentioned by the GGP) is very smooth indeed.
I honestly think the issue is the interaction between the browser and the plug-in, not the efficiency of the plug-in's code. I don't think the plug-in "knows" how to efficiently access the screen.
From a "Can it work ok on iPhone" PoV, that's what matters. If the raw code Adobe has implemented can play flash smoothly on lower end hardware, then Jobs may be exaggerating the extent to which this is a problem with Flash's technology.
Chances are this has something to do with the X11 driver and the way Flash uses it, not Flash per-se. My Wii, which is a much poorer spec'd machine than your Pentium from the sounds of things, has no problems at all with Flash. Try the following:
Install MPlayer. Make sure you install the non-free plug-ins (the Windows DLLs and stuff.) Configure and test it to make sure it can play regular videos smoothly.
Go back to your webbrowser, and go to your favorite Flash video that "turns into a slideshow", and play the entire thing in your web browser (or, at least, wait for it to finish loading and hit the pause button)
With your web browser still open, open a terminal window, and type "mplayer -fs/tmp/Flash*"
The chances are that playback will be smooth as a baby's bottom. This, at least, is my experience on an 800MHz VIA C3 in my living room. "Slideshow" in the browser, "Smooth" when played with MPlayer. The problem isn't the Flash codec, it's something to do with the way Flash videos are pushed through the browser.
Now, my N800 with OS2008 does strain a little to play a Flash video perfectly smoothly, but on the other hand it's not a bad job and it's more than acceptable.
The CPU usage of Flash video isn't that great relatively speaking. It's just it's very easy to foul up playback.
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If you're willing to downgrade the resolution to 720p, and reduce yourself to one soundtrack, then a figure of 4-6G for MPEG4 compression is possible, indeed that's exactly how the download services are doing HD.
But storing at 1080p... nope. Movies on Blu-ray are generally stored, today, as VC-1 or MPEG4, both of which are considered roughly equal in quality/byte. Early Blu-ray discs used MPEG2, but once HD DVD proved the viability of both codecs, studios were quick to switch. The video stream coupled with a single audio stream is probably in the region of 10-15G for an average movie stored this way.
That said, hard disk capacity seems to be way larger on average in comparison to the source material than it was back when DVD came out. A typical DVD movie took up (and I guess still does) 4G, and back in 1998 that was the total capacity of many HDs that came with computers. By comparison, a 250G HD, which is the bottom end of disk sizes today, can store 15-20 full size 1080p movies compressed as VC-1 or MPEG4. And by the time they discontinue Blu-ray in 2010, I'd expect most people to turn their noses up at anything under 1T.
I don't know about the timings of the lawsuit, but this issue was raised long before January, I remember reading about it last December and wondering if it would tip the balance in the format war.
A more realistic scenario than "She's pissed because HD DVD lost" is that Toshiba probably licensed the technology.
Issues concerning the legitimacy of patents aside, Sony is not a US company, and as such might be able to ignore US law, but not if it wants to trade in the US. It is whether Sony can continue to import blue lasers into the US that's at issue here: if they continue to violate the patent without coming to an agreement with the patent holder, then they may be barred from importing blue lasers.
Nobody is proposing to prevent Sony from selling blue lasers in, say, Japan. This is exclusively about what Sony does in the US.
Others have pointed out that you're incorrect. I'm curious why you'd have believed this crap though: if HD DVD had been red-laser based, then HD DVD drives wouldn't have been any more expensive than DVD drives. It's doubtful it would have taken two years for a sub-$200 HD DVD player to appear (and the A3 was heavily subsidized), and virtually every manufacturer currently making DVD drives would have been able to - and therefore would have - jumped into the market almost right away.
There are ways red-laser media might have been practical - indeed, a format called HD-VMD is out that uses red laser technology, choosing to use massive numbers of layers and slightly more efficient bit encoding, to overcome the 4.7/9Gb limitations of DVD. And it'd be interesting to know if red laser media could have been more dense if they'd used the tricks with aperture that BD uses (that gave it the 60% advantage over HD DVD per layer.) But HD DVD didn't use any of these techniques. Had it done so, the media would have been more expensive, but the players would have been much, much, cheaper. We'd probably never have even seen a "war", it would have been game over in 2005, when Toshiba would have released a player much earlier than they eventually did, at a price that everyone could afford, followed quickly by Apex and numerous other entrants from the low cost consumer electronics industry.
Instead we got a blue laser war. Yealch.
The studios were pretty convinced that what was stopping people from buying HD disks was the fact that nobody wanted to buy a format that might lose support if it didn't win the format war. You buying a Blu-ray player today will simply bolster that view, they're certainly not going to think that people are buying them because they can finally copy Blu-ray discs, especially when the vast majority of Blu-ray discs became copyable when the original AACS hack came out (BD+ is not that common.)
I read about this going on well before January. I suspect Toshiba actually licensed the technology or something similar.
There are a variety of reasons HD DVD was better from an end-consumer's standpoint, though not necessarily a studio's:
The only real downside was the lower capacity, and with an HD DVD disk topping out at 30G (there had been a plan to increase that to 50G without increasing the price of the players by adding a third layer), capacity for an ordinary 1080p movie was never really an issue. I hear they had trouble fitting a lossless soundtrack on the Transformers HD DVD, one of the rare occasions the capacity was stretched, and there's some evidence that wasn't true either. My 2001 HD DVD has gorgeous quality, a DolbyHD lossless soundtrack, and a whole bunch of features, all on one single sided double layer disc.
Yeah, but he's a fool who's rolling around in cash.
BD+ was a con. It was always stupid, it causes problems for legitimate customers while ultimately being crackable just like every other DRM scheme. The purpose of the "ten years" statement wasn't to build his reputation, it was to ensure that the technology would be adopted by at least one major format, and for that adoption to be enough to push that format over the edge before the system was cracked.
Now it's too late. Blu-ray is the "format of choice", the studios can't reconsider the BD+less HD DVD even if they wanted to, so they're going to continue with Blu-ray and Blu-ray player makers are going to have to incorporate BD+ playback, paying the appropriate license fees, despite the fact everyone knows it's a turkey.
It's fraud, but nobody's ever going to punish the fraudsters for it. The current owners of BD+, Macrovision, got what they paid for, and Macrovision are blameless enough to not be a viable target for lawsuits from the manufacturers.
Ha ha.
What I want to do is get an HD DVD burner (this is very hard BTW), a lot of blank media, and a Blu-ray drive, and then buy Blu-ray movies and convert them into HD DVDs. That way I'd really be sticking it to the man. Yeah. Wooo! You know it!
Erm. Ok. It's probably the stupidist idea ever, but what the hell.
The mandate is for population coverage not geographic coverage, which makes it considerably easier than you might think. Essentially you're talking about, in ten years, covering every main road in the US and every city and major population center outside of a city. And it doesn't even have to be high capacity coverage: if the emergency services are able to use the system, who can be expected to have relatively light requirements, the mandate is covered.
If you look at companies like Sprint PCS and T-Mobile, after ten years of operation (in T-Mobile's case including it's predecessors, obviously) they certainly were at that kind of level of coverage for the license areas they serve. Both operators had to overcome more physical hurdles than the 700MHz operators will have to - 1900MHz signals pass through buildings with much more difficulty than 700MHz signals do, and this affects both in-building and outside coverage. The real problem with most operators who have a reputation for less than perfect coverage has to do with a lack of licenses, due to the moronic PCS geographically based licensing system, where an operator could have licenses in one county but not in the next due to the luck of the draw. This, obviously, will not be an issue for a company with a national license.
The iPhone has a java engine?
You are being left to make up your own mind on the validity of the assertion. The statement - that the assertion is blatantly false - is a matter of fact, and it is correct journalism to report facts, especially if the story is that someone is lying.
There is no brainwashing going on. Slashdot is not inserting thoughts into your head via telepathy or any other suitable technology. You are being presented with facts about Time being, yet again, a bunch of spineless liars who mindlessly repeat Beltway talking points in order to appear "mainstream". You can make up your mind at any level, from determining that Time isn't a spineless beltway puppet despite the evidence to the contrary, to simple disbelief of the evidence if you're so inclined.
I have a brother in law who's a firefighter. The firefighters, police, paramedics, etc, exist in a tight-knit culture. If you're an anonymous stranger, you can expect to be (normally) fairly treated by the emergency services. If you're a friend of family in firefighting, law enforcement, or other emergency service, you can expect to be more than fairly treated. And I have a sister in law who's ex is currently avoiding the county in which my BiL lives, because he knows that, as someone who has been an (extreme) ass to the sister in law, he can expect to be pulled over and thrown in jail on trumped up charges if he dares cross the county line. Not that he wouldn't deserve it, but the law's the law, and I put respect for the law ahead of vigilante justice from those supposedly charged with upholding it.
Yes, it's kind of corrupt. And to be quite honest with you, I don't know how to reform it, the problem is endemic in the emergency services culture. You have to give law enforcement powers to ensure they can do their job. But people with power generally feel they need to use it when circumstances justify it, and those circumstances aren't always what liberal democrats would describe as justified, even when the people given that power have their hearts in the "right place".
And no, they don't always have their hearts in the right places. A friend, a Vietnam Vet in his fifties, was driving through Fort Pierce a few months ago, and his liver medication was giving him a reaction that was leading him to drive erratically. The cop followed him for half a mile with my friend failing to notice. He wasn't armed. He didn't give the appearance of being armed. At worst, you might think (as apparently the cop did) that he was drunk or had taken dope. The cop's response was to drag him out of the window, with my friend still seatbelted, and once my friend was out of the car, to beat the living shit out of him.
Once situated in jail, my friend's clothes were taken from him and they mysteriously "disappeared", making it more difficult to use them as evidence (they were soaked in blood, and my friend's bodily injuries are consistent with that.) The cop didn't take the clothes. Give me an explanation for that that doesn't involve cultural protection and vindictiveness.
Yes, that's right, aside from the entirely different (and much higher) resolutions, the increased colour depth, the increased colour resolution, the digital instead of analog encoding, the availability of 5.1 audio, and the 23.976fps, 24fps, 30fps, 59.94fps, and 60fps frame rates for progressive video, and availability of progressive video, it's exactly the same as NTSC!
So what you're saying is that 60fps is a little hard on the eyes, but 50 hurts? ;)
Quite, and we should boycott the NRA for not defending Amendments 1, and 3-infinity.
Seriously, unless you're opposed to the first, third, fourth, etc, amendments, there's no good reason to boycott the ACLU.
The joke being that almost all the Blu-ray players on the market right now are obsolete. BD Live has been part of the spec since November, but pretty much nothing supports it, and most Blu-ray players can't even be upgraded to support it. The PS3 is about the only safe bet right now.
Oh, and the other joke is that BD Live just brings Blu-ray up to (nearly) the same level as HD DVD. Yes, at the time WHV threw its weight behind Blu-ray, Blu-ray was both more expensive than HD DVD, and less powerful (capacity excepting.)
Great decision Hollywood. You went for the format that's out of most people's price range, that's unlikely to be in people's price range for a while, and which had less features (and thus less clear advantages over DVD) than HD DVD. In practice, I suspect you've doomed HD media to a niche, while the vast majority stick with DVD for movies they want to own, and PPV and the various download services for content they want to see in HD.
I still find the decision incomprehensible.
I'd say the opposite, most phones (well, most non-CDMA2000/IS-95 phones) are considerably more open than the iPhone. Every one of my unlocked GSM phones I've bought since 2002 is capable of running Java apps, without the need to sign them or any other such crap, and most of the locked phones are similarly capable.
For a "smartphone" (Jobs's description, not mine), it's considerably less flexible in terms of the software it can run than, say, my Motorola V635.
Bollocks. "Global Cooling panic" is a myth, it's debunked virtually every time it's mentioned and yet it still keeps getting repeated as fact.
Sure we can. VCRs took far longer than DVD to become ubiquitous, and part of their success was due to their multifunctional capabilities - people could record from the TV, and this was pretty much the only way to record shows. The high prices of pre-recorded VHS media meant that most people's VHS libraries were extremely small except for the home-taped component. Video rental stores took off because VHS media was ridiculously expensive: if we had the "$25 for a new release, $15 for a still-popular release, $10 for almost everything else" regime we have for DVD today, then I doubt the rental industry would have gotten the traction it needed to become successful.
BTW, yes, the slow boot-up time of the Toshiba is a downside to those players. I'm told by an Xbox HD DVD user that the latter has nothing like the same issues. Expect the same problem if Toshiba ever produces a Blu-ray player. Of course, you can do what all us Toshiba users do and leave the thing on all the time, though that does mean you don't get to enjoy the player's friendly "Welcome" and "Goodbye!" LED messages quite as often...
The catalog isn't that tiny, there's some real gems such as most of the major Kubrick films and the Blade Runner collection (which I ordered right after Christmas for $25. Wow. Most awesome DVD set I've ever had, until then it was the Criterion "Brazil" set but the Blade Runner DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray thing blows that away), and, on the other end of the scale, the only high-definition release thus far of the Matrix series. It's worth checking both Amazon.com and Amazon.de as the European releases covered a slightly different collection of movies to those in the US, due to differing distribution rights; and HD DVD is region free so this really is worth doing.
Yes, there are plenty of movies not available on HD DVD. But the catalog isn't "tiny", people were buying DVD players back when the available DVDs were nothing like as plentiful as HD DVD is today.
It certainly would be if Sprint PCS used SIM cards.
Yep, that's right, just like we had to pay an upgrade fee when we got the first version of iTunes with the iTMS, and then a year or so ago had to pay an upgrade fee for a version of iTunes that had a built-in movie store.
I have to admit that I doubt the "obscure accounting rule" explanation has ever been true. It certainly isn't true when Apple is pushing something they're making revenues from like a music, movie, and now software, store. But I don't think it's true for goodwill type freebies either. I think the truth is Apple is cheap. This is the same Apple that was charging $20 for "Quicktime Pro" for all those years. This is about revenue generation, not about accounting.
I think that would be true if it wasn't for the case that the Wii and Maemo versions are presumably from the same code base, and that even if they're not Flash playback on various other PCs I have (albeit all faster than the 800 VIA C3, but not necessarily as fast as the 2GHz Pentium mentioned by the GGP) is very smooth indeed.
I honestly think the issue is the interaction between the browser and the plug-in, not the efficiency of the plug-in's code. I don't think the plug-in "knows" how to efficiently access the screen.
From a "Can it work ok on iPhone" PoV, that's what matters. If the raw code Adobe has implemented can play flash smoothly on lower end hardware, then Jobs may be exaggerating the extent to which this is a problem with Flash's technology.
Chances are this has something to do with the X11 driver and the way Flash uses it, not Flash per-se. My Wii, which is a much poorer spec'd machine than your Pentium from the sounds of things, has no problems at all with Flash. Try the following:
The chances are that playback will be smooth as a baby's bottom. This, at least, is my experience on an 800MHz VIA C3 in my living room. "Slideshow" in the browser, "Smooth" when played with MPlayer. The problem isn't the Flash codec, it's something to do with the way Flash videos are pushed through the browser.
Now, my N800 with OS2008 does strain a little to play a Flash video perfectly smoothly, but on the other hand it's not a bad job and it's more than acceptable.
The CPU usage of Flash video isn't that great relatively speaking. It's just it's very easy to foul up playback.