Get ready to buy new hardware for Vista
I am not by nature a grumpy person (ha!) but one thing that really annoys me about the technology world is format wars.That’s because the only loser in these skirmishes is the consumer because a huge percentage of them will end up with expensive hardware that won’t survive. We saw that on a large scale with the VHS/Betamax war of a few decades ago, when movies had to be made available in two formats.
We’re about to be in the middle of another one when it comes to the new DVD format and our shining new flat-panel monitors and HDTVs. I’ll take the last one first.
As you are aware, unless you live under a rock, the movie industry is very powerful. And it has a product (movies) that lends itself to copying pretty readily. But instead of adopting the model that the music industry has (lowering prices and at least begrudgingly accepting online distribution, the movie industry has remained pretty protectionist.
Therefore they have convinced Microsoft and other manufacturers to include something called PVP-OPM (“Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management”) in Windows Vista (the next generation of Windows) that is designed to help prevent casual piracy of movies. However, unless your monitor is PVP-OPM compliant (which it’s not) you won’t be able to play high-definition DVDs on your Windows machine. (Ditto your video card and other components; all must meet the standard.) If not, the machine will either “downgrade the content” (make it fuzzy) or you will get a blue-screen of death telling you you’re out of luck.
If PVP-OPM sees a video capture device in your system, or an open analog port or anything, it will shut down the broadcast, even of a DVD in your drive.
That is, of course, if you pick the right DVD format in the first place. As of today, at least, there are two new formats on the horizon, one called Blu-ray and one called HD-DVD. Both have blue lasers instead of red (shorter wavelength, in case you weren’t paying attention in senior-year physics class) which allows the laser to make a smaller spot on the bottom of the disc, therefore allowing the same surface area to hold more data.
That’s 5 times or more more data; in some cases more than 40 gigs of data. That would be pretty cool, especially for backing up data and for high-def content for movies. If you have a high-def TV, like I do, some DVD content today actually looks far worse than live HD content. That’s because there’s not much room on that disk to store a lot of information.
Years of meetings between the two camps, (HD-DVD is led by Toshiba and Blu-Ray is led by Sony) has not garnered any kind of truce so it does appear we’re in for a battle again. Guess wrong and you’ll send up selling your DVD player at a garage sale along with all of your movies that won’t play on the winning format. (Remember laserdiscs?)
It all does not bode well for consumers. Even if there was no format war it is nice to have continuity in media; right now I have some 5 inch floppies I need to get some data off of and I am scrambling around to find a drive. I can imagine all of us doing this for our CDs and DVDs years from now (even if they are still readable) trying to find the right drive in the right format.
It’s silly.
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James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
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