Comments | pmb: Large groups of corporations working together are not always your friend.

pmb

Large groups of corporations working together are not always your friend.

Jul 12, 2006 15:43

So, let's say you own a projector.

Woohoo!

Now, let's say you want to hook up a DVD player to that projector.

Awesome! Like a movie theater!

But now you want your DVDs to look good like when you play them off of your computer.

SWEET!Unfortunately, at this point we are screwed. You see, because Hollywood is addicted to broken business ( Read more... )

Comments 23

roninspoon July 12 2006, 23:31:27 UTC

And once you get it all figured out, you'll have to drop $300 on a replacement bulb for the projector after 1000 hours of lamp time.

pmb July 12 2006, 23:54:06 UTC

1000 hours is a whole lot of TV, dude. Based on current usage (even counting the world cup where we more than quadrupled our usage for a month), after 7 months, we have used 12% of the expected bulb life. 7/.12 = 58 months = almost 5 years. 3The MTBF on modern TVs is about that, which means that most people are going to buy a TV every 5 years or so. This is much cheaper than most nice TVs...

roninspoon July 13 2006, 02:01:49 UTC

Maybe for you. The way I figure it, my TV gets 2,392 hours a year.

pmb July 13 2006, 03:40:21 UTC

Holy shit! 2392/365 = 6.5 hours a day, every day. That's a freakyhuge amount, yo.

Thread 7

triath July 12 2006, 23:45:31 UTC

Dude, I love the commentary along the way. You totally crack me up!

cosyne July 13 2006, 01:12:55 UTC

agreed. It's also somewhat reminiscent of The Show with Ze Frank
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/062106.html

goteam July 13 2006, 02:40:16 UTC

We <3 Ze Frank, oh yes we do.

triath July 13 2006, 16:21:21 UTC

Oh my gosh. I'd never heard of this, but now I'm a huge fan. Dude.

cosyne July 12 2006, 23:46:10 UTC

that's why i've decided to say "screw the entertainment industry, i have better things to do than watch movies." Like, drink. You can get a lot of booze for the cost of one of those HDIM thingamijiggers.

clipdude July 12 2006, 23:47:21 UTC

Word.

And anyone intent on making illegal copies of the DVD will find a way around this.

jes5199 July 13 2006, 00:06:14 UTC

yeah, if you're buying a "DVD Player", then you're a sucker. it's laptops from here on out.

cosyne July 13 2006, 01:04:01 UTC

I'd be shocked if they don't have some way to disable the VGA/DVI outputs. And they almost certainly won't let you license the decoder algorithm so you can write your own player which will play to an external device.

flamingweasel July 13 2006, 01:35:59 UTC

Except, every new computer comes with an Untrustworthy Computing chip on its mobo. Couple that with some untrustworthy operating systems, and you've got computers which can be disabled in all sorts of entertaining ways by the media cartels.

I'd guess that any next-gen media storage isn't going to be able to be hooked up to a non-UC mobo, and if you have that you can't use it to its full extent (that is, to play back media you've legally bought) on anything but said untrustworthy operating systems.

The answer, of course, is to just get your media off bittorrent at whatever resolution you want it, because none of this bullshit is going to stop the real pirates for more than a few months. There's too many smart people who want to view media on their own platform, and too few, and too stupid, people building these systems.