[opendtv] Re: New Sony COO bullish on Blu-ray
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 08:37:40 -0400
At 1:45 AM -0700 5/16/06, Ron Economos wrote:
>Except that the reality of current cable STB's
>is that they all have ethernet and USB ports,
>yet none of these interfaces are actually enabled
>by cable providers.
>
>BTW, I'm the designer (along with my JVC cohorts)
>of the 1394 interface for the HM-DH40000U,
>HM-DH5U and HM-DT100 D-VHS decks.
>
You're not going to make any progress with this discussion Ron.
Kilroy is simply parroting the MS company line with respect to
Firewire. They never liked it, never will.
Most of the FUD about 1394 as a display interconnect came out of
Redmond. !394 was never intended as a display interconnect, nor was
it designed for the transport of uncompressed bitstreams, although it
can do this with SD video in a pinch.
The whole idea behind 1394 with HDCP was as a device interconnect for
compressed isochronous streams. in a more perfect world, you could
use the 1394 port on that cable box to add more hard drives to
increase the total storage capacity of the system. But this would
also mean that you could take digital content from the cable moguls
and put it on a hard drive that you could connect to any other
machine and play.
Once again we are getting hung up on what is possible in a technical
sense, versus what is ALLOWED in the REAL techno-political world.
1394 with DTCP was supposed to be the political solution that would
allow us to share media across an in-home network. DTCP provides the
content management layer to support handshaking between devices and
the keys that would make sharing content practical in the home, and
profitable for the members of the DTCP royalty pool.
It is ironic that Kilroy points out that 1394 has been a success as a
professional interconnect for digital camcorders and the world of
professional digital media content authoring; a world that Microsoft
does not dominate. In that world you can buy a wide range of devices
from a wide range of vendors, plug them together and do your job.
This is what SHOULD be expected in the digital world we are trying to
create. There are no political barriers to raising the bar; thus we
have seen the growth of digital media authoring platforms for SD to
HD, and the ability to output your content in whatever format/codec
you want/need. Even Sony and Avid have been forced to open up their
systems and codecs, due to the reality that this involves nothing
more than some simple blocks of plug-in code that can be used across
the diverse devices that are used to author content today.
Unfortunately, the same capabilities do not exist for digital media
consumers today. Rather than a vibrant marketplace where you can buy
components from any vendor and plug them together to create your
in-home digital media entertainment configuration, we have a world
filled with roadblocks, and connectors on the backs of boxes that
simply do nothing, because the companies that reluctantly put those
connectors on the boxes will not enable them.
The CE guys keep building components that only work together if you
buy everything from them. Microsoft keeps designing Media Centers
that support only the "Open Technologies" they wish to support, and
only then with layers of Microsoft proprietary code to keep you
inside THEIR walled garden. By the way, although I appreciate the way
the products i buy from Apple work together, they are no better than
Microsoft in terms of being "open."
As I told Bert when I first responded to this thread, we are not
discussion technical issues here. We are talking about a handful of
oligopolists trying desperately to hold onto archaic business models
that would already have been blown away, were it not for their
ability to impede technical innovation while seeking protection from
the politicians, who are cannibalizing our constitutional rights with
respect to its original intent to proliferate intellectual property
to the masses.
And the beat goes on and on and on...
Regards
Craig
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