Video

HDTV, Part Duex

I have been reading online about a proposed change to the HDTV standard that may nearly be a done deal. It is a highly complex set of issues and since it I do not wish to plagiarize by any means, I would direct you to the article on Home Theater and High Fidelity web site.

In a nutshell, the content providers, such as television networks and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are very concerned about their product being stolen and redistributed. They have seen what has happened with the CD to MP3 situation and they have seen how easy it was for users to crack the copy protection on DVD’s, and they are not about to let it happen with HDTV. Broadcast companies have been slow in getting things going, and the MPAA has not even addressed HDTV until now, at least in a formal way.

There are those in the content business that do not want their products being shown at high resolutions like the 1080 lines found on current HDTV’s, and most seem concerned even about 720 lines of resolution. The current DVD standard calls for 480 lines, which while superior to VHS, is still not of a high enough quality to please HDTV technophiles. If content is to be distributed at higher resolutions, which will result in incredible image quality, they want to ensure that it is well protected against theft. To make sure that happens, they are proposing a new set of standards, including a new method of encryption, that will, in effect, make almost all existing HDTV sets obsolete.

This means that all of you who spent $2,000 to $5,000 on a big-screen HDTV for your home or business will not be able to play the HDTV compatible content that will be coming your way. Why not just add an adapter you say? Because for some reason, the requirements are that the decryption be done inside of the unit itself. I would highly recommend you check out the detailed article at the link provided earlier. If this doesn’t get you upset about the entertainment industry, I wonder what will.

DVD Confusion

People seem to be enamored with DVD’s. They love the movie selection and the quality, and they love to fork out the money for these DVD players. I am not a huge movie guy, and the only DVD player I have is right here in my computer that I only purchased so that I could review it and test 5.1 speaker sets that I also would review. The only other item I have that benefits from the DVD player in my PC is the Britannica 2001 DVD. No longer do I have to shuffle disks when I do research. However, the number of productivity software titles that ship on DVD is very small, so there is almost no real reason for me to have one.

I have been waiting for write-once and re-writeable DVD’s to come down in price, because 4.7 gigabytes of data storage is enough to backup my programs in a single shot. I have continued to wait, however, because there seems to be a standards war going on that I simply don’t want to deal with. First, they had DVD-RAM, then DVD-R and DVD-RW. Just when I thought that was settled, they come out with DVD+RW and possibly a new format called DVD+R. So, you are stuck thinking “Which one do I waste my money on?”.

Then there is the issue of media. The DVD specification calls for about 4.7 gigabytes per layer, per side. Theoretically, you can have two layers per side, so about 9.4 gigabytes of space should be available on each side. If you buy double-sided media, you could have 18.8 gigabytes of data by simply flipping the disk over. So why have we not seen any DVD burners that let me burn more than 4.7 gigabytes?

There is a need for more capacity, not only for movies, but for data archiving. Instead of pushing the current standard to its limit, they are proposing a new blue laser technology that can write at a higher density than the current red laser writers can. This sounds all fine and dandy (well, sort of) but now they have a larger group that does not want to adopt blue laser technology, and wants to stick with the red laser but switch to a lower quality form of encoding that gives higher compression rates. They actually want to make DVD movies look worse, not better. All of this makes no sense to me, and as a consumer, it’s frustrating. I’m not going to fork over any more of my cash for any of this stuff until somebody gets their act together. I have a trusty CD-R/RW drive that has Burn-Proof and 16x burn speed, so I’m set for at least the next couple of years. What a terrible mess!