Y
YKhan
Microsoft Vista will ignore your monitor
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26703
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26703
D
Derek Baker
The more I hear about Vista the less I like it.YKhan said:
U
Unknown
it will be cracked within hours to allow it, microsoft has nothing to gain
by restricting users and it would be comercial suicide to force almost
every op on the planet to upgrade for the limited functionality vista will
provide.
i mean if you were trying to sell an os which was going to be slower than
XP, make all open gl games upto 50% slower, has had almost all the
features removed or getting backported to xp and then ask people to spring
300 quid+ for some new hardware as well and see how long till people start
moving to x86 osx and linux.
G
George Macdonald
You really think so? I dunno - it seems like enough of the err, DRM is
going to be in hardware that this could be difficult.
I tend to think that x86 OSX is going to have the same impediments - the
hardware DRM was one of the things which caught Job's eye in his quest to
come up with a better multimedia computer. We'll see what Oct 12 brings
but if, as strongly predicted, it's movie studio deals, that'll be a
pointer here.
C
chrisv
YKhan said:
Not. It's only for HDCP-protected content, like HD-DVD.
N
nobody
What created by a man, can be broken by a man. Seriously, how long it
took to crack DVD zone limitations? WinXP 'Genuine Advantage'? Why
both MS and Sony had to resort to legal actions against mod chips?
The only thing that will (at least for a while) protect HD content
from being as widely shared and downloaded as .mp3 music and .avi
movies is their sheer size. While it is acceptable to spend a few
minutes to download a song, or a few hours for a movie, it would take
many days to get HD full lenght movie downloaded. Not everyone is
that patient, most folks would just go spend $20 for the disk they
want _now_. The way it's going now, when even regular DSL is
available not everywhere, I don't see fiber coming to my house any
time soon. When there will be the bandwidth, there will be sharing
(or copyright infringement, if somebody likes to put it this way).
Having said all that, I will not install Vista unless and until I
_have to_ - hopefully rather later than sooner.
NNN
G
George Macdonald
DVD CSS got broken because the "encryption" is *not* a cipher - a simple
table look-up cracks it and no "key" is required... IOW the only thing
"scrambled" about it is algorithm and the guys who "invented" it. If you
read Frank Stevenson's paper on it it's obvious that he is no common hacker
- the programming part done in Germany and Norway was easy stuff.
DVD zone restriction depends on whether your drive has firmware which can
be updated and if some bright spark has the crack for it - not obvious that
this current state of affairs will continue into the new HD-DVD or Blu-Ray
drives. One has to assume that the movie studios won't make the same
mistakes twice. The current systems also have no system hardware assist...
as in the next systems are going to have things in various hardware
components, which are not so easy (could be impossible) to break with
software.
The question of size of HD video is, as you hint, only a temporary issue...
and there are countries where high bandwidth Internet is freely available
to almost all... and often sufficiently high. In any case, if you don't
care about archiving, you probably don't care about a slight degradation in
video... throw away doesn't matter that much. Look at all the movie copies
which came out of China on SVCD. IOW the copies for casual use don't have
to be to the same standard as HD-DVD, especially if the user doesn't have a
huge-screen home theater system.
I don't think it's quite clear yet where all this is going to lead: clearly
the movie producers need something to protect the original digital content
at its highest quality - threats of prison are no deterrent to thieves. My
impression so far is that the new content protection is going to be very
difficult to crack.
T
Tony Hill
While I agree with you that the new content protection will be rather
hard/nearly impossible to crack, I think it's also going to be a VERY
hard sell. Unless the studios can provide some REAL tangible benefits
over DVDs people are not going to shell out thousands of extra dollars
to upgrade their various computers, video players, home theaters,
etc., let alone paying extra for the media themselves.
As you mentioned above, most people don't really care all that much
about a slight degradation in quality, and lets face it, DVDs are
already rather high quality.
Add in competing standards into the mix and the whole and it's dead in
the water. Obviously the movie studios just didn't learn from the
mistakes of the music industry and their (still basically
non-existent) DVD audio format. 10+ years in the works and still
nothing to show for it except a bunch of whining over standards,
encryption and content protection. I fully expect HD-DVD to continue
in the same fashion at least through 2010 and possibly well beyond
that point.
N
nobody
The simplest thing that comes to the mind - a small box (or even a
dongle) that connects to the video output of the PC/HD DVD player and
looks to them as HD compatible, DRM compliant monitor. Inside - very
simple circuitry lifted from HD monitors. And on the other end - the
opportunities are endless. Connectors for plain vanilla DVI, VGA (why
not?), PC video input for burning copies, etc. etc... Since most of
HD monitors will be eventually made in China, some entrepreneurial
Chinese will find a way to steal / reverce-engineer the DRM circuitry,
incorporate it in a device as described, and mass-produce it
_cheaply_. While you will not find these devices in your local
CompUSA, they will be readily available mail order. Just as
cable/satellite descramblers.
NNN
G
George Macdonald
True and your average Joe who stops by the video store on the way home from
the diner -- and maybe has a small valued collection -- doesn't care about
the pinciples involved - he doesn't feel the "penetration". I've been
sitting on the fence with DVD for TV -- recorders were late & TV standards
are in a mess -- so don't even have a player yet, so I've no experience.
I've therefore no feel for whether that many people are going to care about
the enhanced quality of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray... but I suspect that's why the
studios were initially attracted by the backards compatible HD-DVD layer.
The studios also want to convert theaters to HD or Blu-Ray of course and
that may be its niche for a while yet.
So we're going to have a DVD-R/DVD+R war all over again?... for 5 years?
I'm sure the studios are just dying to dump the flawed DVD CSS scheme so
they're going to try to force the new format down our throats.
I just wish both the audio and movie industry would get their collective
heads around the concept that when sales are down, it's the fault of their
"content".
Hell I don't even bother to listen to the radio in the carany longer - it's all so dreary and mediocre... if not offensively
non-musical - what's to protect?
G
George Macdonald
Anything like that is going to fall afoul of DMCA so any supplier is going
to be playing a shell-game with regulators and consumers are still made to
feel like thieves. I also don't see how you're going to make a DVI, VGA
connector-interposer which re-encodes for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray for small
change.
Y
YKhan
George said:
What attracted the manufacturers to HD-DVD over Blu-Ray wasn't because
of issues of backwards compatibility in the player, but in issues of
backwards compatibility in the manufacturing equipment. Essentially you
can make HD-DVDs on the same lines that you make DVDs on. Not so with
Blu-Ray. With Blu-Ray you have to put in new equipment.
As for players, neither HD nor BR are compatible with the lasers of
existing DVD players. They both use a blue laser to decode, while DVD
uses a red one, so you're going to need a dual-format laser generator
in both cases.
Yousuf Khan
T
Tony Hill
Blu-Ray claims some sort of backwards compatibility mode as well.
Still it's going to be a tough sell unless the cost is the same.
Perhaps, and in the market the whole idea of updating equipment, DRM
and whatnot is rather less important, so no one is really going to
care too much (except the smaller independent theaters of course, but
the movie studios tend not to care one lick about independent
theaters).
That's definitely the way I see it going, and it could be worse. At
least DVD-R and DVD+R disks would read just fine on any DVD drive, it
was only the drive they were burned on that had to match the disk (at
least in theory). HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks will only read in drives
compatible with that particular standard.
The one possibility for success here is that Samsung at least (and
probably some others), has stated that they fully expect to produce
dual-format drives in the near future unless there is a clear winner
between the two formats.
I wouldn't be surprised if they try, but I think this may be another
failure like many previous new types of media in the past.
I just wish both the audio and movie industry would get their collective
heads around the concept that when sales are down, it's the fault of their
"content".
any longer - it's all so dreary and mediocre... if not offensively
non-musical - what's to protect?
Well there was one sign of hope at least, recently the movie studios
admitted that a large part of the reason for their lackluster theater
receipts this year was because they really didn't have many good
movies. This is a HUGE change for them, where previously they would
blame ANYTHING other than themselves (high gas prices was one that was
quoted earlier... yeah, like the extra $.50 I pay in gas to get to the
theater made a huge change to the $10/person ticket price). Maybe,
just maybe, they actually are wising up.
The record industry certainly isn't. The whole time that they were
yammering on about copyright infringement being responsible for their
drop in sales, many independent record labels mostly saw double-digit
growth in sales.
As for the radio, I mostly listen to more classic rock stations. For
new music I get it mostly from the internet first. If I like the
songs I've downloaded I'll go buy the album.
G
George Macdonald
It's the backwards compatibility in the media I was referring to - there
has to be a strong case for selling a single disk which plays in a DVD and
a HD-DVD player, if only because it simplifies stock units in the
distribution, retail & rental channels.
You really think anybody's going to produce a HD or BR player which can't
handle DVD? ISTR that some company already has a single chip for dual
laser control.
G
George Macdonald
I didn't see that Blu-Ray disks could be produced such a that a single disk
would contain both formats and play in both DVD and Blu-Ray.
There are some players which apparently don't like native DVD+R and require
DVD-ROM "bit-setting" during burn. Funnily enough my NEC 3500A DVD burner
doesn't have that feature enabled in the firmware, though some of the
identical OEM drives do... and of course unofficial modded DLs are
"available" from the usual sources.
Funny but Janis Ian makes just that point -- "...every time we make a few
songs available on my website, sales of all the CDs go up" -- here:
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html. A very interesting
read - I also particularly like: "Again, from personal experience: in 37
years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and
I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them
money."
T
Tony Hill
I don't see that for either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. It's certainly not
listed as a "feature" on any of the HD-DVD sites, and that certainly
would be a very beneficial feature.
The "backwards compatibility" that both formats are talking about is
really just dual-format, ie a single drive that can play either
high-def disks or DVD disks.
G
George Macdonald
It's mentioned here:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Toshiba_Developing_45GB_HDDVD_Disc/1115827313
for the "original" 15GB discs; of course going to the 30GB or 45GB capacity
eliminates the 2nd DVD layer.... *but* here,
http://www.hometheatermag.com/news/051105toshiba/ there is also a
double-sided version with HD-DVD on one side, and standard DVD on the
other. Seems like Toshiba just keeps moving the goalposts.