Archive for October, 2008
Drop The Movie And Step Away From The Hard Drive
A conversation with a fellow tech geek and devoted cinephile recently veered toward foreign films. He was recommending a new Italian movie called “Gomorrah” which was the big hit at Cannes. Described it as an unflinching look at real mob life — think “Goodfellas” with the charm turned down and the ugly amped up to eleven. We’d love to see it, but we can’t. Not playing anywhere. Not available on DVD. Not on cable or satellite. A quick look at Neflix says “future availability is not guaranteed.”
So we’re SOL? Not as far as our friend was concerned. He showed us a site where faster than you could say “illegal download” we could have had a full-length disc in our hot little hands, not to mention a cute little plug-in that would have provided the English subtitles as we watched. Naturally, we recoiled in horror, as just one ill-advised click would have officially made us criminals. Salud!
The MPAA has been ratcheting up its all-out war on illegal content distribution since, well, since P2P networks and broadband Internet access started making these things easy to do. The MPAA’s point of view, clearly stated on their web site, is simple: “Whether you download a movie from an unauthorized source or sell counterfeit DVDs on the street, you are a movie thief whose crimes carry serious legal consequences.”
Ok, ok, we capiamo. But there’s obviously another side of the story, one that might lead to the inevitable conclusion that the current laws and practices keeping the MPAA up at night may be out of date.
We live in an age where we expect our content to be available anytime we want it (or just about). We read last night’s email on the commuter train. We listen to yesterday’s radio show on today’s podcast. We can watch our local TV when we’re out of town on IPTV, and see missed programs later on our DVR. Why shouldn’t we be able to watch our DVD movies — movies that we’ve already bought and paid for — when, where and how we like?
Take the MPAA’s recent legal action against RealNetworks. Real has come up with a software program called “RealDVD” that lets you copy a DVD disc onto your PC’s hard drive. This would basically make your PC into — more horrors — a movie server.
These two words have incurred enough legal billings in the last five years to make the payments on Beemers and swimming pools from coast to coast. The MPAA is gunning — perhaps a bit indiscriminately — for any technology that might inhibit studio profits from legal movie downloads and video on demand. Any company that dares introduce an alternate method is a guaranteed target of litigation.
Take Kaleidescape as an example. Back in 2003, this Silicon Valley startup launched a high-end movie server that “imported” your DVDs onto a hard drive, retaining all the copy protections, menus, et al of the entire disc. One reason why the system cost so much ($27k for a base system at the time!) was because the company paid all the appropriate licensing fees so that all the DVD copy protection remained intact on the hard drive. The system was for personal use only, and movies could not be burned to DVD from the hard drive, once they had been digitized.
Nice eh? Too nice. Not long after launching the product, the company was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association (CCA), which maintained that Kaleidescape was “misusing” its license. In 2007, Kaleidescape won the case, which (of course) is now under appeal.
Back to RealNetworks, which is now under a temporary restraining order to not sell RealDVD. The company says that…”RealDVD is a completely legal product. It is properly licensed by the nonprofit group created around the DVD standard – the DVD Copy Control Association (CCA). RealDVD follows the guidelines and rules set by the DVD CCA.”
Why would you want a movie server when your PC or AV system already has a DVD drive and you can play movies that way? Because it’s more convenient to have all your choices ready at hand. If you took a 5-day business trip and wanted to watch movies in your hotel room at night, wouldn’t it be great to have all the choices of your movie collection with you? Rather than just the handful of discs that you remembered to take along? Exactly the same way that you always have your music collection with you, thanks to your iPod?
Frankly, we’re not sure what the upshot of all this will be, besides a stalling of the inevitable. There are already numerous programs that do what RealDVD does, with varying degrees of legality.
Note to the MPAA and its buddies — you can’t stop the future. You can only hope to contain it.
What’s your view? Let us know in your comments below!
1 comment October 27, 2008
Gold, Pyrite And The 1080p Shell Game
When is HDTV not HDTV? Much of the time, if you think about it. When does your 1080p television give you a complete 1080p experience? In truth, almost never. So what’s the big deal with 1080p?
Before you get mad and wonder if the money you just plunked down on your new 1080p HDTV was worth it, let’s set the record straight with a down-and-dirty explanation of what 1080p means. A 1080p device is capable of passing or displaying video information in the highest quality digital format currently supported by the ATSC (the standards body that decides these things). That quality is 1080 lines of vertical resolution in a frame of video (lines of picture information going from top to bottom of the screen), portrayed in the progressive scan format (hence the “p” in 1080p). Feel free to help yourself to a more robust explanation of progressive scan, or a more meaty overview of digital TV resolutions.
Ok, great, so now you have a TV that is capable of 1080p. Does that mean you’re watching 1080p? Well, yes. And no.
Digital TV (DTV) pictures are a chain of events. Each link in the chain has an effect on final displayed picture quality in your home. It all starts with the resolution of the original content. Was the movie transferred from film to video in high-def? Was the soccer game captured by high-def cameras? Maybe, maybe not.
Once the content is captured, the broadcaster sends it out to your home (via cable, satellite or over the air — OTA — broadcast). Did the broadcaster send it out in HDTV? Hint: not always.
Once the content is broadcast, it’s captured in your home by a set-top receiver (again, cable, satellite or OTA). Is the receiver box capable of HDTV? Maybe yes, maybe no.
The connection from your set-top box to your TV is critical to whether you’re actually getting HDTV. Naturally, the Wirewize connection tools will help you choose the right cables for your setup. Suffice it to say that if you’re not using HD-capable connections from your HD sources all the way through to your HDTV, you’re not getting high-def, much less 1080p.
Then — finally — there’s the resolution of your TV. Every “fixed pixel” digital television, which is to say LCD, plasma and DLP sets, has a native resolution, consisting of the number of pixels that are displayed in a single frame of video and the method by which the picture was scanned. All signals that come into the TV are automatically converted to that native resolution. If your TV has a native resolution of 720p and you feed it 1080p content, the content is downconverted to the TV’s native resolution. If you have a 1080p TV and you watch a DVD, the TV will upconvert the DVD player’s 480p output to 1080p. This process is called video scaling. Virtually every DTV display sold to consumers has a built-in scaler that does this.
So now you’ve got a 1080p TV, and its built-in scaler is able to bump up all your incoming content to 1080p. But that content almost certainly wasn’t 1080p before it got to your TV, so you lose something in the digital conversion from one display format to another. If you’ve got a high quality (read: costly) 1080p TV, the built-in scaler is probably pretty good. If you’ve got a cheap 1080p TV, the picture artifacts from the scaling can be painful to see. Want real 1080p content to start out with, so that there’s no conversion needed? Sorry — the only current sources of true 1080p content are Blu-ray discs, a handful of PS3 and Xbox games, and some video clips on the Internet. Satellite TV? Cable TV? They both top out at 1080i. DVDs? Not even high-definition.
Naturally, this “problem” isn’t lost on the content providers. Dish Network has already promised to start delivering movies in 1080p that match the high resolution of a 1080p TV. Which, of course, prompted a similar announcement from rival DirecTV. Or was it the other way around?
Vudu, the video-on-demand (VOD) service has announced a new “HDX” service that will allow 1080p content to be downloaded to the company’s proprietary, subscription-based set-top box. The company claims that the offerings are “very artifact free” (by who’s measure?) and because of the high bandwidth requirements of 1080p, a download will take about four hours on a 4Mbps Internet connection. If you have run of the mill cable or DSL Internet service, you’re probably only getting about a third of that speed or less, so draw your own conclusions of how “on demand” the new service will be.
So what’s the big deal with 1080p? The good news is that if you’ve got a 1080p set already, you’re ready for the new content. Whenever it shows up, or from where.
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Add comment October 13, 2008
Get Ready For 3D TV — Again
“I’m waiting for 3D TV” — Ralph Kramden, 1955
If you don’t know who Ralph Kramden was, you’re probably too young, not from the East Coast, or mercifully free of addiction to silly sitcoms that played over and over on local TV (we’re none of the above, hence the reference).
For those who fit into one or more of these categories, Ralph Kramden was the lead character on “The Honeymooners,” Jackie Gleason’s greatest creation and source of some of the finest comedy moments in TV history. In one classic episode, Ralph has split the cost of a newfangled TV with his neighbor Ed Norton (no not that one, the Art Carney one), which results in nightly arguments over who gets to watch what. Ralph’s wife Alice asks why they can’t get a new TV of their own. Because, Ralph memorably declares, he’s waiting for 3D television.
Ralph Kramden, poet and prophet
In a way we’ve all been waiting — for the half century since that episode first aired. But according to the consumer electronics industry, our wait is over. Again.
In case you haven’t noticed, 3D TV is back, and both Mitsubishi and Samsung already have new models out in the stores. The concept isn’t new, but because the display engines used in today’s upper-end digital TVs are so powerful, it’s now possible to deliver a relatively convincing 3D experience in the home. Or so it is said.
3D imaging for your eyes works very much like stereo imaging for your ears. In this case, your two eyes — which are 2-3 inches apart and see the world in separate pictures before your brain combines the two images — are fed with two separate left and right video streams, which alternate on and off with a digital mask that blocks the left eye from seeing what the right eye should be seeing and vice versa. When these signals are flashed by quickly enough, the brain combines the information from the left and right signals and assembles a 3D picture. The amount of 3D at any given time is characterized as the “depth”, and is created at the time when the content is rendered (in the case of animation), or when the 2D image is being processed into 3D. Images that are supposed to be “closer” are represented by brighter pixels, while images that are supposed to look further away are lower in grayscale value.
To get the 3D effect from either the Mitsubishi or Samsung TVs, you need a pair of stereoscopic glasses. Fortunately, these aren’t the same red and blue glasses that have given us headaches since cheese-o-ramas like “House on Haunted Hill” and “The Tingler”, both of which date pretty much from Ralph Kramden’s time. The new update is slick digital eyewear that does the left-right, on-off communication with the 3D TV instantaneously via infrared signals.
Let it be said that the Mitsubishi and Samsung offerings are not the only games in town. Philips offers its own take on 3D TV, which doesn’t require glasses, and has even shown the technology using a Blu-ray disc as the carrier, though to be fair, their recipe is mostly used in signage and not available for the home — yet. Sharp has already successfully built a laptop with 3D display capabilities, which like the Philips technique, doesn’t require special glasses. However, to keep the 3D effect consistent while you watch, you need to keep your head more or less in the same spot as you watch. That makes more sense looking at a laptop than lounging in a sofa to watch a movie.
So after all this time, now that the technology has caught up (more or less) and is feasible for the consumer market, has 3D TV’s time finally come? Obviously, it’s up to you, the consumer to judge. For now, there’s still no 3D standard, there’s virtually no content (though more and more games and movies are coming out in 3D), and according to Mitsubishi: “3D video, gaming and dual screen features require compatible 3D source devices, 3D glasses and IR emitters.” They go further to say that “A 3D format does not currently exist for Blu-ray or prepackaged media. A 3D standard may emerge that is not compatible with Mitsubishi Home Theater DLP TVs or LaserVue TVs.”
Doesn’t sound like something you’d want to rush into. But who’s rushing? After all, Ralph’s been waiting ever since the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series.
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Add comment October 6, 2008
