Sometimes I really really hate the fact that I am always working and never have time to play with things like the above.
I wouldn’t mind building a decent jacket that would write things that were related to the persons position – or something like like that.
Sony makes amazing technology. Their professional Broadcast division did a great job with the HDCAM SR. Only the name was a gigantic mistake: Much like a Porsche competitor would call it’s car a ‘Yugo RS’.
Branding for the “bravia” seems to be working ok as well.
But: There is no Playstation-3. And there will be none that you can buy this year.
Blueray sounds like Betamax.
Sony was always bigger and more important than the other consumer electronics companies in Japan.
It will have been this size difference that led to their demise: They are not what IBM was to computers in the 70s
or Apple is to the mp3 player market. Still they are big enough to think that they can push their own formats
alone: Betamax, Minidisc, MemoryStick, iLink (only the name was different), and now blueray.
Sony leaned out of the window last year with the Playstation-3 Presentation. They would need to deliver
this year. And I am taking bets that they can not.
Sad really: I loved those Trinitron TVs in the 80s. Nothing came only close.
What is it with four letter acronyms?
RIAA
MPAA
AACS
The last one I had never heard of. The “Advanced Access Content System” is a brainchild of everybody who is involved in either one of the upcoming HD disk systems.
DVD came with DSS copy protection. Since 1999 it has been hacked. DVD was a success for everybody involved. Despite the fact that it’s copy protection wasn’t working.
The job of the AACS is to make sure that this will not happen again. The digital connector for both Blue-Ray and HD-DVD are HDMI which is more or less DVI with added copy protrection via HDCP. Yes: 4 letter acronyms spell TRBL.
Since there are no actual devices yet to hack the xxxx institutions still live in the the phantasy world that their content will be save and their maginot-like system will work this time. For the first time.
But then there is the ‘analog hole’. They feel they need to close that one real fast.
According to this press article the solution will be that all players will down sample their analog output to 960×540. That’s a quarter of the original 1920×1080 resolution. Many existing HD displays don’t have digitally-kosher-drm-compliant HDMI inputs yet. That’s what you get for being an early adopter: your image will be downsized and then upconverted in the display again. Yes this probably much like a normal DVD at that point. But since you are an early adopter you gonna buy a HD DVD AND Blu-Ray player anyway. Right? Hey, come back here. Early adopter: your friends in the industry need you now more than ever …
The real tragedy is, that this crippling will not cure the issue. There will be hacks for HDCP. And pirated content never cares about quality in the first place. People will continue to ‘get’ a pirated movie. Maybe those four letter institutions should have a look at their enemies first before they punish the people that pay their bills (again). Pirated content exists because it is easy to access and/or cheaper. NOT because it features more pixels or samples. Most of the time it does not.
So our friends at the AACS just made the whole thing more complex, added a little bit to the price of the every player and made probably lots of people with non HDCP screens pretty unhappy. For zero gains. Brilliant!
Ars Technica comments on the same matter.
Ferrofluid Sculptures by Sachiko Kodama
Beat’s a lava lamp
really.
Now that it’s over it might be worth looking at FireWire again. I think there are lessons to be learned if something as smart and nice as FireWire looses against a mix of ‘ok’ replacements.
FireWire is a standard to connect things. Together with DV tape it was supposed to change everything. And interestingly enough it did not. Computers and Video were not exactly an easy match in the early 90s. TVs, recorders, transmissions: it all was analog. Digital processing was simply not fast enough to keep up with 25 or 30 images per second. Machines that could keep up with this onslaught of bits were expensive and complex. So was the connection of the video equipment: You had cables for audio, two of them if stereo, control and one to three for video. And the computer had to do the analog to digital conversion on the way in, and vice versa on the way out.
miniDV and FireWire did change all that. One cable between your camcorder and computer and you are done. Best of all: the data traveled in its native format between tape and computer. No conversion introduced a generation loss. The visual quality of the DV format is amazing, compared to any other consumer format that existed before.
When these solutions entered the market I was convinced that they would change everything. After all it was now amazingly inexpensive to create content of technically good quality. I think that Apple shared some of my enthusiasm: They promoted FireWire but also asked for a 1$ license fee per device. They invested allot into applications that would allow for easy video editing. I think every Mac runs iMovie, and with FireWire you really only need a cable and a camera to start. It is amazingly easy. Yet nobody really does it. People that edit video today probably would have cut super 8 film with a razor blade in the seventies.
Devices get sold. Of course. But there is very little output from this equipment. There are so badly named ‘vlogs’. But just a few thousand, and only few have original content.
There will be a sequel to Clerks. The story goes that Kevin Smith was buying filmstock by loaning money on his credit card. Back in 1994 that’s what you needed to do when you wanted to make a movie. Now you go and pick up a tape for 8 dollars and that’s all you need.
Has it let to an onslaught of new and fresh ideas? When Arri made a small handheld 16 millimeter camera in the 50s it spawned the nouvelle Vague. But what did DV do? Where is the contribution of FireWire? Just because everybody can edit does not mean that everybody can edit.
When FireWire was making things easy I had high hopes in the youth. I thought that there would be a revolution in visual content. That one day I would turn on the TV and would be surprised. I think it was two or three moves ago that I did not bother wiring up the TV set anymore. Finally I sold it, after I dragged it around from place to place.
The FireWire on the latest “MacBook Pro” is half as fast as on the previous PowerBooks. iPods started out with FireWire connections but are USB2 now. The self made porn market has transitioned from Polaroid over Video to phone cams.
Firewire is a thing of the past. People don’t really want to edit video it seems. For years video editing has been amazingly simple on Mac’s, and weird and cumbersome on Windows. But its market share seemed unfazed. The iPod and the constant Windows, malware malaise did what FireWire/Video could never accomplish.
I would have bet money on the opposite. Glad I did not.
CES breaks loose in Las Vegas, and a big and involuntarily sigh of relief escapes me:
“Finally some content for the internet”
Video! Great, from Google; Music from the lovely M&M combo via ‘Urage’.
It got kind of boring out here on the net. All those TV episodes
and music files to pay for is what was missing. Now I realize.
And if you have a Windows PC, then you can have not only Microsoft
and anybody in Russia with an IQ above 87 on your machine. No,
also Google can be part of the party on your hard drive now:
With the aptly named GooglePack comes GoogleUpdate which will
provide you update versions of anything that they think might be good
for you.
Andreas Pavel invented the Walkman
I knew about this story for so long and told it to so many people that at certain points I wasn’t even sure anymore if it was real or an urban myth.
I am not sure if Adobe is that important.
But the underlying question that Apple is indeed challenging Microsoft’s operating system monopoly is interesting. And not news to me.
What I had not realised is the vertical integration depth of all those Office applications and macros arouund it. This will most likely not go away. Ever. Vista will have a chance if all those tiny little visual basic thingies continue to work.
Those IT monsters will not go away. They rather turn the internet off of safety and glue the CDROM drives shut before they try to migrate those tangled webs of IT gopher tape to /anything/ that is different.
It’s called gamma stupid.
Funny that this kind of simple thing can happen. But then again you never know how much of the real issue is left once the BBC got a a hold of it.