DVD Insider #43 - Next Gen - The Public Be Damned!

Suddenly we can't wait for blue laser technology to arrive so we can get beyond
the war of words to real products!

Imagine - 5x the storage capacity, sharp, brilliant movies and a real choice
- BD or HD DVD. Well yes the two standards are totally incompatible but don't
worry they will eventually work out their differences. When they do, you'll get
to buy new burners, new players and new media all over again.

Oh we forgot to add that both sides have embraced some super digital rights management
(DRM) technology that Hollywood would "like" included before they are going to
knock out copies of their stellar masterpieces. The cool and super advanced
DRM technologies include digital watermarking, programmable cryptography and
self-destruct codes. Don't try and decide which is best for everyone involved
- including the consumer - throw them all into the mix!

Don't the three sound like something you just have to buy and put in your home?

Digital watermarking is something they call a ROM Mark. It really only applies
to the pre-recorded media you buy - movies, music and games. Don't worry about
it because they say you'll never even know it is there. It was used in today's
DVD technology but you could easily defeat it just by writing over it with a
permanent marker.

Both sides like Advanced Access Control System (AACS) which requires your player
to maintain connections to the content provider thru the Internet. If your disc
doesn't pass their security check it isn't a big thing. The provider will simply
send your player a "self-destruct code" ROM update that will blow up your player.
Ok so it won't physically blow up. You simply won't be able to use it until
a repair technician reprograms the player. And your entire library of discs
that may have been encoded with the broken security may be unplayable also.

That is so cool !!!

Just in case you get past these two hurdles, they've added a third. This is
a renewability method that lets content providers implement dynamic updates of
compromised code. This is advanced form or CSS (content scramble system) they
used before which was defeated in hours after it was released and is called SPDC.
Simply stated every time someone cracks the code the encryption algorithm will
"learn from its mistakes" and improve the code. That's a challenge no DEFCON
hacker can refuse !!!

If these fail Hollywood has a fallback plan when the 15-year-old kid cracks it
all…their lobbyists will put the squeeze on congress to "protect us from ourselves."
Don't worry their lawyers will continue to have paychecks by suing every Tom,
Ricardo and Harriet who might have an illegal copy.

While both sides (and they will continue down their separate revenue - oops technology
paths) are determined to win and have lined up an almost equal number of hardware
and content providers. They are quite similar technically but dramatically different
in the important areas of media structure and write/read techniques.

H.264 - "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." - Wizard of Oz

Our personal life has been so preoccupied with the here and now -- MPEG-2 (the
dramatic increase of quality storage/viewing over MPEG-2 - VHS) -- that we missed
the big picture. There is another standard out there and it isn't exactly "brand
new!"

Contrary with what the blue technology folks would like you to believe, they
didn't invent the superior storage capabilities of MPEG-4 or H.264. The technology
- an open-standard -- has been around since 1998 and it's being widely used…except
in storage.

It's big in broadcast and it's big in wireless content delivery. Truth is H.264
delivers the best compression efficiency for a wide range of applications - broadcast
or satellite delivery, DVD, video conferencing, video-on-demand, streaming and
multimedia messaging.

It is so good that Microsoft developed their own version - Windows Media Video
9 (previously called VC-9 and now VC-1/AVC). From the industry's perspective
H.264 is a great codec because it scales beautifully from mobile content phones/devices
up to high-definition broadcast.
Since it makes efficient use of bandwidth and the distribution spectrum, H.264
broadcasters have already begun using the technology to send digital TV. It
will be an efficient technology for them to use when they begin streaming video
across the Internet to your home.

In their leading edge fashion Apple integrated H.264 into the Mac OS and QuickTime
early this year and frankly we never even noticed the news. So this past weekend
we visited an Apple store to see if it was as good as their web site PR said
it was. It is darn good!