Alphabet Soup

Nice article ;)
I knew things were a bit all over the place with HD stuff but I've never been able to put it all together, to see the clearer picture (no pun intended). Think i'll keep my wallet in me pocket a bit longer :)

Very good! Likewise, I'm waiting on the sidelines. There's more hdcp (or HD-Ready) lcd tv's on the market at the moment, but what if, before sd broadcasts are turned off permanently, hdcp is found to not be enough? What if standards change and yet another goggle box has to be bought for the living room, just so we can see the hairs on the pimple on Dirty Den's face as he rises from the grave once more?

Well said.

Very nice article, filled with acronym love, from a BT author...

British Telecom? :)

...it's actually entertaining that the MPAA and friends concentrated on the cable between the display and playback device - 99% of piracy is done digitally from the source itself....

... The one problem with big business is that its loftiest goal is to stick it most to the people that it needs most. The whole high-def revolution has so far called us untrustworthy, gullible, and worked very hard to make us feel stupid to boot. Some sales pitch.

...Perhaps some time soon, we consumers will get some of our own protection in the form of industry and content standards and marketing practices. Until then, I'll wait in this standard-def world - $2,000 is a little bit much to pay for some alphabet soup.

;) Quoted for truth - especially that first bit Great stuff as usual




The reason we don't have the "hundreds, maybe even thousands, of channels" that pundits once predicted (and are still predicting) has nothing to do with technology (except that of "content protection") and everything to do with big business getting as much as they can from the content. :( (The one area where you can find the promised hundreds of channels is in satellite radio - and the RIAA is not too happy with that.)

One of the fundamental problems with all of this is the different concepts those businesses and we consumers have of the "content": I think most consumers see the purchase of a music CD as an agreement between them and the original artist(s) - with the record label simply acting as an intermediary - much like they view the store where the item was purchased.

Recording companies, however, see the content as their own (now and forever) - artists are a source of content and consumers are a source of income. In their eyes artists sell the content and consumers pay to hear &/ see that content. They see you and I buying a CD much like us purchasing movie tickets - consumers never purchase the content.

Maybe it's time artists find a way to reclaim their own content. (I realise that this gets more complicated esp. in TV & movies where it's an entire cast & production crew involved but if musicians can figure something out there might be a better model to work off of).

awesome article, just got my mum to read it and now she understands most of the HD stuff :) well written and very informative.

With that in mind, it's actually entertaining that the MPAA and friends concentrated on the cable between the display and playback device - 99% of piracy is done digitally from the source itself.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

this one sentance sums up the WOLE ENTIRE problem with all this HD crap.

dont get me wrong, i was an early adopter as well - i have had my 26" westie for 13 months now, and my hd cable box for almost 6 months more- and most everything i actually record and watch is HD content now.

but dvds - will remain dvd quality for me for a long long time. on my 720p monitor dvd quality looks just as good as any HD i record from any of the networks or Discovery or whatever.

i can go download a movie with the protection gone, or rent and rip it my damn self, or i could even go thru the hassle of downloading and burning all my favorite shows in hd, with the commercials ALREADY GONE. that way i dont have to fast forward thru them with the flakey ass scientific atlanta dvr box , which does FF in either 2x, 10x, or blink and you miss itx.

so why am i paying an extra 20$ a month for a dozen HD channels and another 35$ a month for a hd dvr (they say it's only 10 a month, but then you pay 5 for the remote, 10 for the "service" - which is the right to use the crap you already paid extra for, and fees and taxes!) - and i pay em 40$ a month for the internet access that i need to bypass paying them all this money.

the saddest part of it all is, that i cant stand to watch SD tv anymore. it hurts my eyes. or at least that's what my wallet and pride teamed up and came up with.

</rant>

Um, I'm still confused about this upscaled BLU-RAY business. So you're telling me all those $30 BR disks are the same resolution that I can do with a decent upscaling dvd player and a regular DVD? But how can that be given they hold 25gb? And the VC1 is supposed to improve on that?

Correct me if I am wrong. But say for instance you take your favorite song off the audio cd you purchased legally from the store right? You take that home and rip it into mp3 format say 256kbps. You have just lost a good bit of the original quality to the song. Say you now want to put it back into the original format. Sure you can get it to fit in its original 50 or so MB, but it will no longer be the cd quality audio you started with.

Basically size has little to do with quality. You can have a 4 TB movie that amounts to nothing more than a cartoon show. Upscaling is IIRC really no different than Fit-to-screen. It will be stretched and scaled up until it fits the resolution of your screen

Yep, but it depends how you upscale. On the fly with approximation or with advanced prediction and per pixel estimation. It'll never be better than the original but it'll be bigger, rather than going back to the original film or DV and reauthoring it from there.

BRDVD and HDDVD play at a certain bitrate, in that bitrate, depending on the compression determines how much information can be processed and output at once. With VC1 or h264 you can fit MORE information per bitrate, enabling a greater quality, rather than mpeg2 which is a poorer compression and the increase in bitrate is offset by the fact it has to carry more pixels.

very very good article, i know now more about this chaos than before.

Great article. I had been looking into this myself, and found myself being really put off buying a HD TV the more a learnt.

I just find it rather funny that they spent so much effert this time to try and protect content. HDCP in hardware and all.... and its just all going to go down the tubes (not to be mistaken with the internet :) ) fairly quickly when some clever nerd finds out how to remove the protection from the source.

Well I'm not standing by as My TV is already old, Like I bought It in 1992 and If I don't buy an HDTV replacement now, I never will be able to as I won't be able to afford It, It's a long story. :( :( :(

Well, being a college student, I'm gonna definitely wait this one out. Just got myself a really nice 20" widescreen LCD (Acer AL2051W) which does not have HDCP, but woop-de-doo... Just wait till DVDjon (or someone else) make a DeAACS, and we can just roll our own HD with MythTV and plan old DVI at sweet 1080p (or better). One area that I really want to see HD though is in the consumer video camera market. I make short films from time to time, and I would really love to have an affordable HD cam to shoot on, even at 720p. Now... 1080p/24fps... thats something else entirely :)

The part about protecting the cable part from piracy really, really cracked me up.

I'm 20, and I think if I went and bragged about ripping a DVD by doing.. something.. with the cables, they'd make a face, say "Man, old school, go get yourself AnyDVD & CloneDVD, fool!" and turn away.

I really don't think many my age first of all would know exactly what to do with the cables, and if we did, we'd be too lazy to do it and too cheap to buy what ever additional equipment would be required. Those that are that motivated to actually do all that will do what it takes to crack any scheme, cables or not.

So yeah. This sounds like something they thought up in the 1980s and just now got around to forcing on us as a smoke screen for licensing fees and what not.

Good article!

Originally Posted by Ringold

So yeah. This sounds like something they thought up in the 1980s

Hahaha... they should have done something like this for audio tapes!

The RIAA actually tried to introduce a version of it for CD's - the so-called "Secure Digital Music Initiative" (SDMI) it failed utterly and was put on "hold" in may of 2001.

Yes well written artirtle ;) I need many guacamole's because of it. Fill my pants with cream cheese. I would like to shake your thighs.

Great article!

Originally Posted by Nature
Yes well written artirtle ;) I need many guacamole's because of it. Fill my pants with cream cheese. I would like to shake your thighs.

:) :? I think you need to get a better translator: The first part made sense but after that - well, it's quite funny but not the kind of thing people say - unless they are using some sort of random sentence generator.

Nah, nature speaks perfect english, I should imagine it's a quote off the internet or some random tv program :)

[EDIT]

Although he does has a questionable love for cheese and clams

Supurb article Brett, as always you provide plenty to fuel my vitriol about the music and movie industry, and very justly so :D

The stuff about FFDshow was intresting, I hadn't realised that one could end up with a better image often just by upscaling the DVD's themselves then by buying the HDDVD's. Good to know be wary of HDTV's still though.

Why are you wary of HDTVs? So long as you buy one with an 'HD Ready' sticker it has 720 lines of vertical resoloution and supports HDCP which is all you need. If your tv has a better picture with 1080i then 720p then its faulty and you will only see a difference with 1080p over 720p if your display is very large say 50" or over.

The more important factor in buying an HDTV in the UK is how well it handels standard definition material as thit is what the most of will be watching the majority of the time for a good few years yet.