First batch of HD players won't support MMC
Posted by Some Guy at 4:37pm on Tue Mar 21st 2006
Apparently the first batch of HD players to come out won't support Mandatory Managed Copy. Although I insist otherwise, if you must jump on the bandwagon, this is yet another reason to wait for the dust to settle. No one knows yet how well MMC will work, if all movies will in fact allow it, what it will cost you to make your "mandatory" copies, what you will be able to do with these copies (will they really let us move them onto portable players?), etc... but I do think it's an important feature to have if you're going to drop a G on a shiny new player.
"blue ray sucks" won't bring you much further.
Being Pro or Con is probably more often than not a matter
of what is ones private and personal interest.
The actual discussion about DRM and whatever comes with it is actually a silly discussion and when you look back and when you look forward we continue into a direction which for
regardless what your personal interests and ideas are or being part of the corporate world or defending intellectual property being torn apart.It is positive that consumers worldwide are actively involved in order to avoid that all sorts of technical features are build in without any limit, nor taking into consideration your right to privacy.
To characterize all those involved in the discussion as
"Hollywood and Corporate Thiefs" is narrow minded and not
productive.
Everyone is his right mind understands that if you want something you have to pay for it.That is why free VOIP
is not the way to go, it invited people to cross a highway
full of cars by feet and bad luck if you were killed.
The quality of free VOIP was not very good and what people forget is that it was not free but part of your internet package.If water from the tab would be for free everyone would leave it open, to invite for endless nonsense phone calls because it is for free is just as stupid as leaving the tab open.
The Blue ray versus HD DVD standard is indeed an important
issue, each and everyone is armed upto his teeth and after every negotiation to find a solution they continue to dig deeper and bring in more arms.
The discussion around this standard is dragging itself forward and for the consumer an option between the devil and the deep blue see.
Where we all should agree with in the first place is the fact that copying without any limits would be disasterous
for each and evryone as it will kill effectively the appetite to invest into filmproductions which in itself is already a sort of Russian Roulette game with historically more winners than loosers and unless you want to watch every evening the movies made about the heroic struggle of the chinese army, one need to find a way to allow the rightholders of content.
If you would just take into consideration what amount of money has been spent worldwide since let say the introduction the cassette / tape recording some 35 years ago
and , correct if i am wrong , was the first product which
was accesibale for large parts of the population.
The money spent since that time on Rights Management in all sorts of forms like trying to prevent it by technological
means is a schizofrenic amount per year and equals carrying
buckets of water to the sea.
The only industry which is making consisently money is those who are involveed in any sort of law enforcement and
thats about it.
What i am furthermore missing in the discussion is the role
of Microsoft.
It would make sense to include Operatioal Systems a central part and key issue as well.
It is not the dominant marketshare but the way they abuse it with hardly any alternative.They received a few weeks ago
an official warning by the European Community to be very carefull with Vista, as apparantly it contains too much hindering elements for others to use for attaching their new software to it.This warning is probably historical.
I don't deny them the right to preach for their own church, but should not be a hindering factor for other companies who
want to add their value whereby in the end the customer can decide what or what not to buy.
For the industry the DRM is a real pain in the butt, but whether they like it or not, they have to find solutions and these solutions cost time and money and are wasted.
HDMI is not adding anything in terms of quality and takes
you 30 USD out of your pocket for nothing and probably the
technology is inferior to SDI which avoids conversion of the signal from analog into digital.
The amount wasted on features build in today to enforce at least some of the DRM issues is real waste and should be used in fact to increase and not decrease quality.
For me blue ray ? no way, for the simple reason it is not
adding any value to the proposed HD DVD standard of the other camp.
he major argument for blue ray is the amount of gigs which can be written on discs whereby blue ray claims a substantial higher capacity.
So, let say their disc is good for 20 gig and the HD DVD for
8 gig is apparantly good enough to destroy an amount of capital invested by each and everyone alike be it producers of hardware, the discs, the movied and music bought over the last years, the confusion which it creates
amongst the consumers and worse, the price tag atached to it
which is simply outrageous. If you look what the taiwanese discmakers had to invest in new machinery just to make these discs is billion of Dollars.
The alternative for a 1000 dollar is a 150 - 200 dollar max.
for a HD DVD kind of of quality with the similar features.
An element forgotten is why we need these discs in the first place as by the time that a new standard is arrising from the smoke of the battlefield there could be a system in place which makes more sense and more convenient and
users friendly.
The amount of software programms for recording and burning
DVD's is schizofrenic, make a list of what is today available for decompacting and encoding it is meters long.
For some people perhaps interesting to rip,zip, from one standard into the other , for most consumers a good reason to stay away from it.
It would make more sense to have the option to become member
of a database based service which contains every movie and record and just when it suits you play your music and see movies when you want.
I quess no one has a problem to pay a few dollars to see a movie or pay 10 dollar to buy the right to replay a music disc as if you would have it physically in your hands
at home. No more hassle if the dvd you have in your hands is dvdv or dvda or svcd or vcd or sacd or DD or DD plus,eac 2.0 , V8 , mpeg2 or 4 , hdmi, dvi, coaxial, firewire ,divx, etc etc etc etc etc
Just one push on the button and it goes.
If one takes LINUX as basis made by and for individuals and
organise yourself to act as a group of millions in stead of
million individuals, you will be surprised how fast things
will be sorted out.
Those who fight for the right to get their piece of the cake
, your "Hollywood lobby" want what you want, they want you to see their movie, and get paid for it.
By taking the hardware part in your own hands and use the force of quantity would allow you to obtain that hardware
for a much lower price as much as half of what you pay now.
At aby time of the day i show that it makes more sense to fight with brains than with an axe.
Peter