It's true and Apple has always sold itself on the premise "buy this thing with the Apple logo and you will be a happier person! And you will have friends too!" Apple's advertising says exactly that. Except for the friends part, they're right. Having helped nearly 100 random people with migrating to the Mac, not one of them has asked for their PC back.
For many people, the attraction to Apple ends when they find out that they can't easily do something that's important to them. The hardest part is people who only use Outlook for everything to do with business. There's not a direct replacement for Outlook on the Mac that comes with it. Even people who are wizzards with Microsoft Excel are almost illiterate on the Mac - mostly because the Fonts in the menus are different and a key has moved on the keyboard. That's just resistance to training and familiarization. Most everything else is quite a bit simpler on the Mac. There is a learning hump but most of the effort to overcome it relate to getting the new Mac user to not think so hard about fighting the OS. Windows is rigid, ambiguous and vague at the same time.
For some, like those people who wear "Abercrombie and Fitch" t-shirts and never realize that it's just an ordinary t-shirt, are happy because someone told them they would. [Think placebo effect] (Yes, there is a tiny minority that actually use Apple because they are actually more productive in what they do with it...) About two-thirds of the people I've helped migrate have noticed that they are more productive on the Mac. The rest just notice the operating system is quite a bit less "needy" than Windows. They really don't care if the logo on it is an Apple or purple dog shit and it has nothing to do with "style" - the users quickly discover a machine that doesn't fight them and that's what most of the appreciation comes from.
But by and large, too much of the digital world out there depends on being inter-operable with the larger world which is basically Windows and software written for Windows. That's a huge myth. Except for closed, task specific data and files, everyone makes exactly the same binary files which can be opened, modified and saved on Macs and PCs. Image files, video files, text files, Photoshop files, Microsoft Office files, zipped files, email messages, web pages etc. The platform matters less when the files are universal and I've actually found the Mac to be MORE compatible with these files than Windows machines. If you're talking about specific software, try running the most popular video editing software in the world on a PC. That would be Apple Final Cut Pro (no, its not Avid), so the shoe fits both ways. However, you can import and export the files between platforms and between FCP and Avid. Frankly, there's lots of software available on the Mac that doesn't run on Windows, but you can find equivalents for most of it. Same with Windows software - you can find equivalents for most of it on the Mac.
What counts as a PC? That's a real question. Every cash register? Gas pump? Milling machine? Elevator controller? Surveyor's transit? Millions of PCs in the landfill? Does anyone have real data about how many PCs, Macs and Linux machines (with keyboards and monitors) are in the hands of humans? We'd probably find a much different ratio of how many of each there really are. My web server stats went from 3% Macs in 2001 to 34% Macs in 2007. 80% of our clients now carry Mac laptops instead of PCs. Depends on the industry for sure, but just from what I've observed from dozens of people I know who have switched who are NOT in my industry, the slice of Macs has got to be north of 10%.
Customers are suffering? I've been suffering under Apple for many years and intend to continue, if you call that suffering.
iPod: Show me another company that develops an enormously popular product then continuously replaces it with major functional extensions and increasingly sexy devices in the face of almost no competition.
Show me another company with this kind of popular product that doesn't try to leverage the RIAA against its customers. If it was up to any other company, we'd be paying between $2.50 and $4.50 for legal music downloads and be able to listen to them three times - just like the RIAA wants. Oh... wait... no, we'd be getting music from all the torrent sites instead. All of it.
If anything, Apple is holding the prices down for mainstream music and allowing fair use of music like no other company - and at the same time showing the music industry how to keep EVERYONE from stealing from them. Apple is helping the artists in spite of the RIAA "cut open the golden goose" business model. They even host buckets of indie labels on ITMS.
However, the original model of encrypted music downloads is now harming the ability to move directly to other music playing devices. That's changing too - if only the record labels would lift the contractual requirement of encryption. Meanwhile, exercise your ability to move the music around with the pathways supplied by Apple in spite of the RIAA protests.
Even sticking to their guns in the computer industry, Apple is slowly getting noticed as a better choice than Windows. They could have sold out to the mainstream Lemmings but OS X users are almost universally much happier with their machines than Windows users. It's all about principal.
Betamax had better picture quality, VHS tapes had longer running time.
Wellll.... sort of. Even in Beta III mode, the SuperBeta (4.5 hours on an L-750) was much better than VHS-HQ in SLP mode (9 hours on a T-180) so that theory holds true. The only thing that beat SuperBeta resolution was S-VHS but that only ran for 2 hours on expensive tape; better quality but less than half the recording time. Ah, tradeoffs. The Beta ED in turn beat S-VHS hands down but only amounted to a technology demonstration. Very few were sold.
Right around the sunset of Betamax, Sony created a large cassette shell for the professional spinoff, BetaCam SP. It contained three times the tape length of the standard Beta tape shell which would have allowed 4.5 hours at Beta I, 9 hours at Beta II and 13.5 hours at Beta III if it had ever hit the consumer market (using L-750 thickness tape). They could have done that much sooner and saved the whole lot.
I "protect" all the laptops (Macs) in the company by installing a crontab which pulls a special page on our web server once an hour using a curl statement. The web server captures the IP address and serial number of each laptop so I know where they are. Works great but never had to use it.
I'm not sure why you put VC-1 on the list of things holding Blu-ray back.
I'm not. I actually don't give a hoot about Blu-ray or HD-DVD. The planet is moving toward digital delivery anyway. The only issue I have with VC-1 is as the potential trojan horse to be used later by Microsoft to recapture what they actually wanted - full control over all media exchange. This is all about profit and control, not good pictures.
VC-1 and H.264 have different strengths, so one or the other can come out ahead depending on what is being tested for. And, of course, implementation quality makes a much bigger difference than anything else.
You've got that right. Outside of the lab, there are a hundred things that could tip the scales of quality and usability one way or the other.
Anyway, I manned the VC-1 pod at NAB 2006, so I can definitely state it was far from the major story for our booth! Silverlight and MSTV (now MediaRoom) were the big pushes.
Those two things are intriguing, and would be more so if it weren't for the history of the parent company. It really appears to me that some really bright folks at Microsoft come up with fabulous ways of doing things which embrace function, interoperability and extensibility. Then, a team of specialists swoop in to "cleanse" the project of anything Microsoft doesn't get paid for and design a development path to ensure interoperability becomes a poison pill to make all the competitors fail... the competitors who thought they were part of the team. After that, another team comes in to figure out how to entrap a bunch of developers to use the product by seeding free tools and licenses to anyone who will take them. All the things that initially made the technology promising now feel like quicksand. The rest of the industry suffers for years trying to get this odd duck to swim in the common pool. Some of Microsoft's products wouldn't be half bad if they used actual interoperable standards (not the ones standardized by ballot box stuffing). They could make the best damned tools to use H.264 or ODF or real Java or AJAX or dozens of other technologies, but instead Microsoft chooses to bend everything toward themselves and beat the interesting parts of the technology into second place. Again, a great business model on paper but everyone is really tired of that game.
Working on the codec team, I certainly wish that Microsoft overall made VC-1 as high a prority as you think it is:). Being a stockholder, I understand that there are much bigger fish to fry.
I also wish Microsoft made VC-1 that high of a priority - as a codec. Without the Windows Media Player wrapper, it's kind of neutered as a lock-in technology which makes it less interesting for advancing the business. Enter Silverlight - the new VC-1 Trojan Horse...
Incidentally, I was in the Microsoft booth in 2006 looking at this great little media asset management system. Enter some search critera and up comes a bunch of thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail and it plays - unless the media was unavailable and a QuickTime logo pops up on the viewer pane. Oops! The small crowd around the display (a dozen or so) all chuckled and left. I said "wow, so it works in the real world!" What was that system all about?
Of course you would think that but these were the facts back then if you didn't work for Microsoft. I have to ask you how long it will be before Microsoft offers an unstandardized extension to VC-1 to the studios. If anyone could speculate, you could and I'm thoroughly curious. I've long since stopped believing that all this technology is for fantastic image quality, ease of use and achiving digital nirvana. No, it's about getting royalties. The rest is a side show.
VC-1 and the road it took is now history subject to interpretation. However, I was on several news groups as a fly on the wall with some very connected people where all this was under daily discussion. A lot happened between 2002 and 2006. It was a group I had known during the early days of the ATSC and my ITS affiliations with people coming and going. Also in the group were people I didn't know who appeared to crystal ball what was going on in SMPTE. The proof was what I read in these groups is what actually occurred and was publicly known a few days later. There was no reason to doubt what was being said or what constantly changing pressures were occuring. There were more political hurdles with adoption than technical ones. A fascination for the process is what kept me engaged.
The statements that H.264 outperformed VC-1 were from them and I've confirmed it myself with my own tests. Not in the 2002 DVD Forum era but in 2007 with present day hardware. (yes, H.264 is still a pig to compress) There were plenty of fans of VC-1 as well but standardization was the biggest roadblock to acceptance. The holdup with MPEG LA was real with their onerous licensing terms which would make H.264 unaffordable. That went on for a long time. Microsoft created their own controversy over licensing terms for VC-1 but that ony slowed ratification. The delay the MPEG LA created was the only reason VC-1 had time to get standardized for final inclusion in Blu-ray. Otherwise, Blu-ray would have been finalized much earlier without VC-1 - back when Microsoft was still stonewalling and filibustering SMPTE. VC-1 was apparently in, out, then in again.
If you don't remember the Microsoft announcement about VC-1 entering Final Committee Draft (and a rubber stamp away from ratification) before the actual vote, that occurred when a trigger happy PR person extended an upcoming vote to mean Final Committee Draft Status had occurred and told the trade rags. It was later retracted but not for a week. There was intense pressure to get VC-1 ratified by NAB'06 and someone jumped the gun.
Microsoft had a big booth with lots of partners which would be irrelevant at NAB if VC-1 wasn't at least in FCD. I no longer have these references and you're welcome to doubt me if you like. You can also read this which has been roundly refuted by Joe Kane but encapsulates most of the chatter I was witnessing in real time.
How do I know this? Through acquaintances in the industry. Some were on the SMPTE committee, I was on an unofficial email discussion list about this [plus other DTV stuff] and I personally know one of the vapid yet arrogant Microsoft product pushers - haven't seen him in a few years, though. It was a slow motion train wreck. And, yes, the goal was to deploy the codec, not back one disk standard over the other. Microsoft seriously needed to hedge their bets and the potential failure of HD-DVD would have taken VC-1 with it. Diluting the influence of H.264 was (is) vitally important to Microsoft.
SORRY!!!! SORRY!!! That's what happens when the wife yells "dinner's ready". Yes, there's a wife here and she's a geek. Who else has a wife who comes running home from Costco saying "Hey, they have compressors on sale! Didn't you want air tools?" or "I think the 42" flat panel would look great in the bedroom". If you missed it, an apology for the Big Block O'ASCII was posted right after that. For those of you who want paragraphs, I will now REPEAT the entire blah blah right here. Karma be damned, send me to Remedial Preview School if you like:
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One thing to keep in mind about Microsoft's success at "requiring" the VC-1 codec was that neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray had a VC-1 requirement at first. That was a long, painful battle for Microsoft which was typically used to dictating standards to everyone. Ultimately, Microsoft skillfully played the game of leverage between competitors to shoehorn themselves into both disk standards.
With the future of digital media unfolding in the early 2000's, Microsoft simply offered High Definition equipment manufacturers and movie studios the whole Windows Media system [for a fee] expecting a quick surrender to the obvious victor of any technical battle - themselves. Microsoft envisioned their Windows Media player as the basis of all future television with themselves in control, dispatching all their competitors to oblivion and erecting a global toll booth between media creation companies and viewers.
However, manufacturers tend to avoid these traps and SMPTE wouldn't touch Windows Media with a 10 foot pole for exactly that reason, recognizing that the Windows Media Player wrapper was fairly treacherous ground under Microsoft's control. Microsoft was informed by SMPTE that the codec inside Windows Media could be accepted if it was split out and properly standardized like all the other codecs. Leave the "player" wrapper with undocumented controls out of it. Although the DRM offered by Microsoft was attractive to Hollywood, it became clear that manufacturers would not simply hand their future technical path over to Microsoft, nor would the Hollywood production studios hand over control of their assets to an organization with a history of modifying the terms of an agreement to benefit themselves. Manufacturers and content creators knew that Microsoft could suddenly replace VC-1 with VC-2 and demand a ransom to stay in business. Windows Media 10 was on the horizon and everyone knew what that meant. Microsoft wasn't trustworthy in either of those circles and proper SMPTE standardization was the only road to considering any products from Redmond.
Microsoft finally did separate the codec from the Windows Media player and offer it for ratification expecting a rubber stamp approval by SMPTE while refusing to release the source code, refusing to define the royalty conditions in advance, promising to deliver finished codecs while retaining control of the current and future source (and a few other tricks). This all prevented ratification by SMPTE. It was Microsoft's first foray into the workings of a real standards body and they thought they could simply bully their way through it. They weren't used to anyone standing up to them like this. Microsoft was very much out in the cold and basically entered panic mode as they watched other formats develop, deploy and gain momentum. Manufacturers were not going to commit to a proprietary codec which would later hold them hostage. No SMPTE standardization? No use for VC-1. Period. End of codec. End of Microsoft's influence on media. PANIC!
As Microsoft was slowly releasing control of VC-1 and approaching SMPTE compliance, Microsoft released premature press releases claiming SMPTE ratification months before they were in actual compliance. SMPTE had to smack them down at least once for this tactic. Finally, Microsoft did what was needed for SMPTE ratification and gained acceptance by the HD-DVD camp [support and funding had something to do with this, I'm sure]. I don't personally know t
I could see the potential of a DVD player that could play H264 HD content from a DVD.
So Why doesn't it yet?
HD-DVD does this. Just plop an AVC/H.264 HD video file on blank red laser media and drop that into an HD-DVD player. It will play the video. The Blu-ray, idunno... haven't tried that yet. Talking to Sonic about pro authoring systems, there's apparently a licensing issue; the BDA wants a $1,500 license fee to encode a Blu-ray title, even if it's a check disk. Has something to do with the encryption key you have to buy to make it play. Haven't confirmed details but may explain why Apple's DVD Studio Pro will encode HD-DVD media but not Blu-ray.
The irony, given Microsoft's position on VC-1 vs H.264, is the Xbox contains the ability to decode H.264. Perhaps they had to do that to call the player an HD-DVD player.
It's in there somewhere but I'll extract it so you don't have to read through the monolith of text:
First Microsoft dropped the planned use of the Windows Media Player wrapper because the industries were only interested in the codec, not the advertising portal / "phone home" laden / consumer dictating / system call making player interface.
Second, Microsoft gave up control over the Windows Media 9 codec itself, revealing the source code so anyone can roll their own instead of relying on (trusting) Microsoft to do it for them. That's huge since it removes the keystone of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
Third, Microsoft relinquished the ability to suddenly change the licensing terms of VC-1 by publishing a binding royalty structure in advance.
All of these things are completely foreign to Microsoft and were a tremendous loss compared to their normal methods. However, those actions saved the VC-1 codec from early extinction and Microsoft pulled out a great victory by remaining relevant in the world of standards. Otherwise, Microsoft would have remained an "also ran" in the world of big boy media.
Notice Microsoft didn't offer Windows Media 10 into the fray. I'm certain Microsoft is trying to figure out how to entice manufacturers into adopting that codec on their equipment without standardization (coupled with enticing content providers into using it) so they can regain control of the entire distribution chain again. Microsoft lost the first round to SMPTE but still have that foot in the door with VC-1 as the trojan horse.
Shit. Big "sorry" to everyone for that huge block of unreadable text. I can't believe I didn't put all the paragraph tags in there and missed the Preview button.
One thing to keep in mind about Microsoft's success at "requiring" the VC-1 codec was that neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray had a VC-1 requirement at first. That was a long, painful battle for Microsoft which was typically used to dictating standards to everyone. Ultimately, Microsoft skillfully played the game of leverage between competitors to shoehorn themselves into both disk standards.
With the future of digital media unfolding in the early 2000's, Microsoft simply offered High Definition equipment manufacturers and movie studios the whole Windows Media system [for a fee] expecting a quick surrender to the obvious victor of any technical battle - themselves. Microsoft envisioned their Windows Media player as the basis of all future television with themselves in control, dispatching all their competitors to oblivion and erecting a global toll booth between media creation companies and viewers.
However, manufacturers tend to avoid these traps and SMPTE wouldn't touch Windows Media with a 10 foot pole for exactly that reason, recognizing that the Windows Media Player wrapper was fairly treacherous ground under Microsoft's control. Microsoft was informed by SMPTE that the codec inside Windows Media could be accepted if it was split out and properly standardized like all the other codecs. Leave the "player" wrapper with undocumented controls out of it.
Although the DRM offered by Microsoft was attractive to Hollywood, it became clear that manufacturers would not simply hand their future technical path over to Microsoft, nor would the Hollywood production studios hand over control of their assets to an organization with a history of modifying the terms of an agreement to benefit themselves. Manufacturers and content creators knew that Microsoft could suddenly replace VC-1 with VC-2 and demand a ransom to stay in business. Windows Media 10 was on the horizon and everyone knew what that meant. Microsoft wasn't trustworthy in either of those circles and proper SMPTE standardization was the only road to considering any products from Redmond.
Microsoft finally did separate the codec from the Windows Media player and offer it for ratification expecting a rubber stamp approval by SMPTE while refusing to release the source code, refusing to define the royalty conditions in advance, promising to deliver finished codecs while retaining control of the current and future source (and a few other tricks). This all prevented ratification by SMPTE. It was Microsoft's first foray into the workings of a real standards body and they thought they could simply bully their way through it. They weren't used to anyone standing up to them like this. Microsoft was very much out in the cold and basically entered panic mode as they watched other formats develop, deploy and gain momentum. Manufacturers were not going to commit to a proprietary codec which would later hold them hostage. No SMPTE standardization? No use for VC-1. Period. End of codec. End of Microsoft's influence on media. PANIC!
As Microsoft was slowly releasing control of VC-1 and approaching SMPTE compliance, Microsoft released premature press releases claiming SMPTE ratification months before they were in actual compliance. SMPTE had to smack them down at least once for this tactic. Finally, Microsoft did what was needed for SMPTE ratification and gained acceptance by the HD-DVD camp [support and funding had something to do with this, I'm sure].
I don't personally know the back story of HD-DVD very well but VC-1 incorporation into Blu-ray had everything to do with the greed of MPEG LA. More on that later. I can say that the buzz at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show floor was that HD-DVD was a Microsoft backed entity which didn't do it any favors. The NAB members are typically only interested in repeatable standards. Looking around the 2006 NAB show floor, the only people using Microsoft video standards were their direct "partners" in a confined area. Everyone else was using AVC/H.264. Meanwhile
First rule of warfare, don't fight unless you have to.
Good advice and good perspective. Korea was fought to keep Japan from falling to the Communists (it's a real short trip across the water between the two), so there was perhaps some merit to that. We were already investing in Japan's reconstruction and, frankly, the Koreans would have massacred the Japanese wholesale in retaliation for years of brutal rule. Viet Nam, a French colony, was seeking independence from France, increasingly with the help of their communist sponsors. The U.S. came in as advisors to the French and within two years were dropped 50,000 tons of advice on the communists. We came into a very different war than what started with the French. The Vietnamese saw the Americans as more colonialists and fought like hell against us. They misunderstood the American objective, which was, supposedly, to regain Viet Nam's independence from what we perceived as potentially oppressive communist rule [insert domino theory here] - oh, and make sure they buy lots of Coca-Cola. Both wars were [only] fought to stalemates because they were not direct threats to American soil and we didn't want to risk actualizing that threat.
I'm certain that if the Americans were threatened in a substantial way, whoever was behind it would get wiped out without restraint. The difficulty now is we're fighting against an ideology instead of a geographic target.
We haven't fought a victorious full-scale battle on our own since the Civil War. And I can't think of any occasion where we have won a battle against a half-way decent foe.
Opinion: The only way defeat an enemy is to completely flatten the opponent (children and all), then negotiate the terms of peace from that position. The Americans didn't do so bad against the WWII foes. We were taking body counts of 1,000 a day in the heat of it and delivered some pretty crazy munitions, both things we have no stomach for today. We saw American forces showing tremendous restraint in Korea, Viet Nam and most other major conflicts - Politicians feared getting other nuclear powers involved. The Americans did NOT go there to "win" those wars, otherwise Hanoi plus some of Korea and China would be a glass bottomed ash tray. All the Americans managed to do for the last 60 years is run around and piss off a lot of people. These became Politician's wars which leveraged the "think of the children" vote. Bad combination for any hope of decisive victory.
I'd love to hear the morning traffic report if more than three of these get sold into one metro area. It ain't just fender-benders anymore, folks. The accidents are bound to be specatcular.
Had to scroll way down to find this intellegent retort. Thank you. Part of the [any] process is discovering tomfoolery like this and righting it before it gets too far. The largest impact is revealing that OOXML (using a supposedly open XML-like syntax wrapped in proprietary digital glop from Microsoft) won't stand a chance unless someone is stuffing the ballot box. The Swedes are doing their part to root out and neutralize this kind of pressure from the Great Satan(TM) in the upper North West..
Slashdot Mirror
Hint: alt-tab then you can run the mouse over the icons
Don't think this isn't already happening on land lines - and the ads show up as the Swat team.
What counts as a PC? That's a real question. Every cash register? Gas pump? Milling machine? Elevator controller? Surveyor's transit? Millions of PCs in the landfill? Does anyone have real data about how many PCs, Macs and Linux machines (with keyboards and monitors) are in the hands of humans? We'd probably find a much different ratio of how many of each there really are. My web server stats went from 3% Macs in 2001 to 34% Macs in 2007. 80% of our clients now carry Mac laptops instead of PCs. Depends on the industry for sure, but just from what I've observed from dozens of people I know who have switched who are NOT in my industry, the slice of Macs has got to be north of 10%.
Customers are suffering? I've been suffering under Apple for many years and intend to continue, if you call that suffering.
iPod: Show me another company that develops an enormously popular product then continuously replaces it with major functional extensions and increasingly sexy devices in the face of almost no competition.
Show me another company with this kind of popular product that doesn't try to leverage the RIAA against its customers. If it was up to any other company, we'd be paying between $2.50 and $4.50 for legal music downloads and be able to listen to them three times - just like the RIAA wants. Oh... wait... no, we'd be getting music from all the torrent sites instead. All of it.
If anything, Apple is holding the prices down for mainstream music and allowing fair use of music like no other company - and at the same time showing the music industry how to keep EVERYONE from stealing from them. Apple is helping the artists in spite of the RIAA "cut open the golden goose" business model. They even host buckets of indie labels on ITMS.
However, the original model of encrypted music downloads is now harming the ability to move directly to other music playing devices. That's changing too - if only the record labels would lift the contractual requirement of encryption. Meanwhile, exercise your ability to move the music around with the pathways supplied by Apple in spite of the RIAA protests.
Even sticking to their guns in the computer industry, Apple is slowly getting noticed as a better choice than Windows. They could have sold out to the mainstream Lemmings but OS X users are almost universally much happier with their machines than Windows users. It's all about principal.
Customers suffering indeed.
Cross platform? Is there another one?
Not funny?
Wellll.... sort of. Even in Beta III mode, the SuperBeta (4.5 hours on an L-750) was much better than VHS-HQ in SLP mode (9 hours on a T-180) so that theory holds true. The only thing that beat SuperBeta resolution was S-VHS but that only ran for 2 hours on expensive tape; better quality but less than half the recording time. Ah, tradeoffs. The Beta ED in turn beat S-VHS hands down but only amounted to a technology demonstration. Very few were sold.
Right around the sunset of Betamax, Sony created a large cassette shell for the professional spinoff, BetaCam SP. It contained three times the tape length of the standard Beta tape shell which would have allowed 4.5 hours at Beta I, 9 hours at Beta II and 13.5 hours at Beta III if it had ever hit the consumer market (using L-750 thickness tape). They could have done that much sooner and saved the whole lot.
I "protect" all the laptops (Macs) in the company by installing a crontab which pulls a special page on our web server once an hour using a curl statement. The web server captures the IP address and serial number of each laptop so I know where they are. Works great but never had to use it.
I'm not. I actually don't give a hoot about Blu-ray or HD-DVD. The planet is moving toward digital delivery anyway. The only issue I have with VC-1 is as the potential trojan horse to be used later by Microsoft to recapture what they actually wanted - full control over all media exchange. This is all about profit and control, not good pictures.
VC-1 and H.264 have different strengths, so one or the other can come out ahead depending on what is being tested for. And, of course, implementation quality makes a much bigger difference than anything else.You've got that right. Outside of the lab, there are a hundred things that could tip the scales of quality and usability one way or the other.
Anyway, I manned the VC-1 pod at NAB 2006, so I can definitely state it was far from the major story for our booth! Silverlight and MSTV (now MediaRoom) were the big pushes.Those two things are intriguing, and would be more so if it weren't for the history of the parent company. It really appears to me that some really bright folks at Microsoft come up with fabulous ways of doing things which embrace function, interoperability and extensibility. Then, a team of specialists swoop in to "cleanse" the project of anything Microsoft doesn't get paid for and design a development path to ensure interoperability becomes a poison pill to make all the competitors fail... the competitors who thought they were part of the team. After that, another team comes in to figure out how to entrap a bunch of developers to use the product by seeding free tools and licenses to anyone who will take them. All the things that initially made the technology promising now feel like quicksand. The rest of the industry suffers for years trying to get this odd duck to swim in the common pool. Some of Microsoft's products wouldn't be half bad if they used actual interoperable standards (not the ones standardized by ballot box stuffing). They could make the best damned tools to use H.264 or ODF or real Java or AJAX or dozens of other technologies, but instead Microsoft chooses to bend everything toward themselves and beat the interesting parts of the technology into second place. Again, a great business model on paper but everyone is really tired of that game.
Working on the codec team, I certainly wish that Microsoft overall made VC-1 as high a prority as you think it isI also wish Microsoft made VC-1 that high of a priority - as a codec. Without the Windows Media Player wrapper, it's kind of neutered as a lock-in technology which makes it less interesting for advancing the business. Enter Silverlight - the new VC-1 Trojan Horse...
Incidentally, I was in the Microsoft booth in 2006 looking at this great little media asset management system. Enter some search critera and up comes a bunch of thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail and it plays - unless the media was unavailable and a QuickTime logo pops up on the viewer pane. Oops! The small crowd around the display (a dozen or so) all chuckled and left. I said "wow, so it works in the real world!" What was that system all about?
Of course you would think that but these were the facts back then if you didn't work for Microsoft. I have to ask you how long it will be before Microsoft offers an unstandardized extension to VC-1 to the studios. If anyone could speculate, you could and I'm thoroughly curious. I've long since stopped believing that all this technology is for fantastic image quality, ease of use and achiving digital nirvana. No, it's about getting royalties. The rest is a side show.
VC-1 and the road it took is now history subject to interpretation. However, I was on several news groups as a fly on the wall with some very connected people where all this was under daily discussion. A lot happened between 2002 and 2006. It was a group I had known during the early days of the ATSC and my ITS affiliations with people coming and going. Also in the group were people I didn't know who appeared to crystal ball what was going on in SMPTE. The proof was what I read in these groups is what actually occurred and was publicly known a few days later. There was no reason to doubt what was being said or what constantly changing pressures were occuring. There were more political hurdles with adoption than technical ones. A fascination for the process is what kept me engaged.
The statements that H.264 outperformed VC-1 were from them and I've confirmed it myself with my own tests. Not in the 2002 DVD Forum era but in 2007 with present day hardware. (yes, H.264 is still a pig to compress) There were plenty of fans of VC-1 as well but standardization was the biggest roadblock to acceptance. The holdup with MPEG LA was real with their onerous licensing terms which would make H.264 unaffordable. That went on for a long time. Microsoft created their own controversy over licensing terms for VC-1 but that ony slowed ratification. The delay the MPEG LA created was the only reason VC-1 had time to get standardized for final inclusion in Blu-ray. Otherwise, Blu-ray would have been finalized much earlier without VC-1 - back when Microsoft was still stonewalling and filibustering SMPTE. VC-1 was apparently in, out, then in again.
If you don't remember the Microsoft announcement about VC-1 entering Final Committee Draft (and a rubber stamp away from ratification) before the actual vote, that occurred when a trigger happy PR person extended an upcoming vote to mean Final Committee Draft Status had occurred and told the trade rags. It was later retracted but not for a week. There was intense pressure to get VC-1 ratified by NAB'06 and someone jumped the gun.
Microsoft had a big booth with lots of partners which would be irrelevant at NAB if VC-1 wasn't at least in FCD. I no longer have these references and you're welcome to doubt me if you like. You can also read this which has been roundly refuted by Joe Kane but encapsulates most of the chatter I was witnessing in real time.
Good tip. Thanx.
Wow. Thanx for the props.
Actually, she is. A six footer, 130lbs, semi-pro Volleyball player who looks like Jodie Foster. So go fuck your mother, jackoff.
How do I know this? Through acquaintances in the industry. Some were on the SMPTE committee, I was on an unofficial email discussion list about this [plus other DTV stuff] and I personally know one of the vapid yet arrogant Microsoft product pushers - haven't seen him in a few years, though. It was a slow motion train wreck. And, yes, the goal was to deploy the codec, not back one disk standard over the other. Microsoft seriously needed to hedge their bets and the potential failure of HD-DVD would have taken VC-1 with it. Diluting the influence of H.264 was (is) vitally important to Microsoft.
SORRY!!!! SORRY!!! That's what happens when the wife yells "dinner's ready". Yes, there's a wife here and she's a geek. Who else has a wife who comes running home from Costco saying "Hey, they have compressors on sale! Didn't you want air tools?" or "I think the 42" flat panel would look great in the bedroom". If you missed it, an apology for the Big Block O'ASCII was posted right after that. For those of you who want paragraphs, I will now REPEAT the entire blah blah right here. Karma be damned, send me to Remedial Preview School if you like:
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One thing to keep in mind about Microsoft's success at "requiring" the VC-1 codec was that neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray had a VC-1 requirement at first. That was a long, painful battle for Microsoft which was typically used to dictating standards to everyone. Ultimately, Microsoft skillfully played the game of leverage between competitors to shoehorn themselves into both disk standards.
With the future of digital media unfolding in the early 2000's, Microsoft simply offered High Definition equipment manufacturers and movie studios the whole Windows Media system [for a fee] expecting a quick surrender to the obvious victor of any technical battle - themselves. Microsoft envisioned their Windows Media player as the basis of all future television with themselves in control, dispatching all their competitors to oblivion and erecting a global toll booth between media creation companies and viewers.
However, manufacturers tend to avoid these traps and SMPTE wouldn't touch Windows Media with a 10 foot pole for exactly that reason, recognizing that the Windows Media Player wrapper was fairly treacherous ground under Microsoft's control. Microsoft was informed by SMPTE that the codec inside Windows Media could be accepted if it was split out and properly standardized like all the other codecs. Leave the "player" wrapper with undocumented controls out of it. Although the DRM offered by Microsoft was attractive to Hollywood, it became clear that manufacturers would not simply hand their future technical path over to Microsoft, nor would the Hollywood production studios hand over control of their assets to an organization with a history of modifying the terms of an agreement to benefit themselves. Manufacturers and content creators knew that Microsoft could suddenly replace VC-1 with VC-2 and demand a ransom to stay in business. Windows Media 10 was on the horizon and everyone knew what that meant. Microsoft wasn't trustworthy in either of those circles and proper SMPTE standardization was the only road to considering any products from Redmond.
Microsoft finally did separate the codec from the Windows Media player and offer it for ratification expecting a rubber stamp approval by SMPTE while refusing to release the source code, refusing to define the royalty conditions in advance, promising to deliver finished codecs while retaining control of the current and future source (and a few other tricks). This all prevented ratification by SMPTE. It was Microsoft's first foray into the workings of a real standards body and they thought they could simply bully their way through it. They weren't used to anyone standing up to them like this. Microsoft was very much out in the cold and basically entered panic mode as they watched other formats develop, deploy and gain momentum. Manufacturers were not going to commit to a proprietary codec which would later hold them hostage. No SMPTE standardization? No use for VC-1. Period. End of codec. End of Microsoft's influence on media. PANIC!
As Microsoft was slowly releasing control of VC-1 and approaching SMPTE compliance, Microsoft released premature press releases claiming SMPTE ratification months before they were in actual compliance. SMPTE had to smack them down at least once for this tactic. Finally, Microsoft did what was needed for SMPTE ratification and gained acceptance by the HD-DVD camp [support and funding had something to do with this, I'm sure]. I don't personally know t
And then what happened?
So Why doesn't it yet?
HD-DVD does this. Just plop an AVC/H.264 HD video file on blank red laser media and drop that into an HD-DVD player. It will play the video. The Blu-ray, idunno... haven't tried that yet. Talking to Sonic about pro authoring systems, there's apparently a licensing issue; the BDA wants a $1,500 license fee to encode a Blu-ray title, even if it's a check disk. Has something to do with the encryption key you have to buy to make it play. Haven't confirmed details but may explain why Apple's DVD Studio Pro will encode HD-DVD media but not Blu-ray.
The irony, given Microsoft's position on VC-1 vs H.264, is the Xbox contains the ability to decode H.264. Perhaps they had to do that to call the player an HD-DVD player.
It's in there somewhere but I'll extract it so you don't have to read through the monolith of text:
First Microsoft dropped the planned use of the Windows Media Player wrapper because the industries were only interested in the codec, not the advertising portal / "phone home" laden / consumer dictating / system call making player interface.
Second, Microsoft gave up control over the Windows Media 9 codec itself, revealing the source code so anyone can roll their own instead of relying on (trusting) Microsoft to do it for them. That's huge since it removes the keystone of "embrace, extend, extinguish".
Third, Microsoft relinquished the ability to suddenly change the licensing terms of VC-1 by publishing a binding royalty structure in advance.
All of these things are completely foreign to Microsoft and were a tremendous loss compared to their normal methods. However, those actions saved the VC-1 codec from early extinction and Microsoft pulled out a great victory by remaining relevant in the world of standards. Otherwise, Microsoft would have remained an "also ran" in the world of big boy media.
Notice Microsoft didn't offer Windows Media 10 into the fray. I'm certain Microsoft is trying to figure out how to entice manufacturers into adopting that codec on their equipment without standardization (coupled with enticing content providers into using it) so they can regain control of the entire distribution chain again. Microsoft lost the first round to SMPTE but still have that foot in the door with VC-1 as the trojan horse.
Shit. Big "sorry" to everyone for that huge block of unreadable text. I can't believe I didn't put all the paragraph tags in there and missed the Preview button.
One thing to keep in mind about Microsoft's success at "requiring" the VC-1 codec was that neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray had a VC-1 requirement at first. That was a long, painful battle for Microsoft which was typically used to dictating standards to everyone. Ultimately, Microsoft skillfully played the game of leverage between competitors to shoehorn themselves into both disk standards. With the future of digital media unfolding in the early 2000's, Microsoft simply offered High Definition equipment manufacturers and movie studios the whole Windows Media system [for a fee] expecting a quick surrender to the obvious victor of any technical battle - themselves. Microsoft envisioned their Windows Media player as the basis of all future television with themselves in control, dispatching all their competitors to oblivion and erecting a global toll booth between media creation companies and viewers. However, manufacturers tend to avoid these traps and SMPTE wouldn't touch Windows Media with a 10 foot pole for exactly that reason, recognizing that the Windows Media Player wrapper was fairly treacherous ground under Microsoft's control. Microsoft was informed by SMPTE that the codec inside Windows Media could be accepted if it was split out and properly standardized like all the other codecs. Leave the "player" wrapper with undocumented controls out of it. Although the DRM offered by Microsoft was attractive to Hollywood, it became clear that manufacturers would not simply hand their future technical path over to Microsoft, nor would the Hollywood production studios hand over control of their assets to an organization with a history of modifying the terms of an agreement to benefit themselves. Manufacturers and content creators knew that Microsoft could suddenly replace VC-1 with VC-2 and demand a ransom to stay in business. Windows Media 10 was on the horizon and everyone knew what that meant. Microsoft wasn't trustworthy in either of those circles and proper SMPTE standardization was the only road to considering any products from Redmond. Microsoft finally did separate the codec from the Windows Media player and offer it for ratification expecting a rubber stamp approval by SMPTE while refusing to release the source code, refusing to define the royalty conditions in advance, promising to deliver finished codecs while retaining control of the current and future source (and a few other tricks). This all prevented ratification by SMPTE. It was Microsoft's first foray into the workings of a real standards body and they thought they could simply bully their way through it. They weren't used to anyone standing up to them like this. Microsoft was very much out in the cold and basically entered panic mode as they watched other formats develop, deploy and gain momentum. Manufacturers were not going to commit to a proprietary codec which would later hold them hostage. No SMPTE standardization? No use for VC-1. Period. End of codec. End of Microsoft's influence on media. PANIC! As Microsoft was slowly releasing control of VC-1 and approaching SMPTE compliance, Microsoft released premature press releases claiming SMPTE ratification months before they were in actual compliance. SMPTE had to smack them down at least once for this tactic. Finally, Microsoft did what was needed for SMPTE ratification and gained acceptance by the HD-DVD camp [support and funding had something to do with this, I'm sure]. I don't personally know the back story of HD-DVD very well but VC-1 incorporation into Blu-ray had everything to do with the greed of MPEG LA. More on that later. I can say that the buzz at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show floor was that HD-DVD was a Microsoft backed entity which didn't do it any favors. The NAB members are typically only interested in repeatable standards. Looking around the 2006 NAB show floor, the only people using Microsoft video standards were their direct "partners" in a confined area. Everyone else was using AVC/H.264. Meanwhile
First rule of warfare, don't fight unless you have to.
Good advice and good perspective. Korea was fought to keep Japan from falling to the Communists (it's a real short trip across the water between the two), so there was perhaps some merit to that. We were already investing in Japan's reconstruction and, frankly, the Koreans would have massacred the Japanese wholesale in retaliation for years of brutal rule. Viet Nam, a French colony, was seeking independence from France, increasingly with the help of their communist sponsors. The U.S. came in as advisors to the French and within two years were dropped 50,000 tons of advice on the communists. We came into a very different war than what started with the French. The Vietnamese saw the Americans as more colonialists and fought like hell against us. They misunderstood the American objective, which was, supposedly, to regain Viet Nam's independence from what we perceived as potentially oppressive communist rule [insert domino theory here] - oh, and make sure they buy lots of Coca-Cola. Both wars were [only] fought to stalemates because they were not direct threats to American soil and we didn't want to risk actualizing that threat.
I'm certain that if the Americans were threatened in a substantial way, whoever was behind it would get wiped out without restraint. The difficulty now is we're fighting against an ideology instead of a geographic target.
We haven't fought a victorious full-scale battle on our own since the Civil War. And I can't think of any occasion where we have won a battle against a half-way decent foe.
Opinion: The only way defeat an enemy is to completely flatten the opponent (children and all), then negotiate the terms of peace from that position. The Americans didn't do so bad against the WWII foes. We were taking body counts of 1,000 a day in the heat of it and delivered some pretty crazy munitions, both things we have no stomach for today. We saw American forces showing tremendous restraint in Korea, Viet Nam and most other major conflicts - Politicians feared getting other nuclear powers involved. The Americans did NOT go there to "win" those wars, otherwise Hanoi plus some of Korea and China would be a glass bottomed ash tray. All the Americans managed to do for the last 60 years is run around and piss off a lot of people. These became Politician's wars which leveraged the "think of the children" vote. Bad combination for any hope of decisive victory.
A Newspaper.
I'd love to hear the morning traffic report if more than three of these get sold into one metro area. It ain't just fender-benders anymore, folks. The accidents are bound to be specatcular.
At least they're fixing it.
Had to scroll way down to find this intellegent retort. Thank you. Part of the [any] process is discovering tomfoolery like this and righting it before it gets too far. The largest impact is revealing that OOXML (using a supposedly open XML-like syntax wrapped in proprietary digital glop from Microsoft) won't stand a chance unless someone is stuffing the ballot box. The Swedes are doing their part to root out and neutralize this kind of pressure from the Great Satan(TM) in the upper North West..