jleader  02-24-2003
03:40 PM ET (US)
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Yeah, but Cory, if we REALLY try hard enough, eventually we might be able to come up with some other future threat to the MPAA that might justify some other mandate than the one they're asking for. So why are you guys being so specific as to actually answer what the MPAA is saying? After all, it's not like Congress is going to listen to them or anything.
Oh. Right.
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Cory Doctorow 02-20-2003
11:25 PM ET (US)
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AAAAAAAND... The scenario you describe is nearly identical to VHS cassettes ($0.50/ea in bulk, can hold 3+ movies each) today -- so what if people can sneakernet movies in ten years? We've been sneakernetting movies since the Supreme Court legalized the VCR in 1984 and Hollywood's bottom line has improved every single year since, with the single largest piece of its bottom line coming from pre-recorded media sales.
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Cory Doctorow 02-20-2003
11:14 PM ET (US)
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Also, remember that *no advances* in storage are required to sneakernet, ad infinitum, your captured HDTV files. DVHS cassettes are cheap as hell, can store an entire HD movie, and can be readily shared.
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Cory Doctorow 02-20-2003
11:12 PM ET (US)
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Keep in mind that sneakernet is EXPLICITLY ALLOWED in the mandate that Hollywood proposes, and that they assert that physically sharing media is not an issue for them.
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Cory Doctorow 02-20-2003
11:10 PM ET (US)
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You're not making any sense: why should we allow a mandate that criminalizes open source and gives Hollywood control over the design of general purpose PCs, a mandate that is aimed solely at controlling Internet redistribution, if the real problem is likely to be sneakernet?
Say there's a real chance of you getting hit by a bus -- why would that justify banning everyone's *bicycles?*
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El Kabong 02-20-2003
11:03 PM ET (US)
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"The MPAA says that this mandate is necessary because DTV will give rise to "instantaneous," "perfect," "wide-scale" *Internet* redistribution."
Sometimes you can be right for the wrong reasons. Perhaps the MPAA is wrong about the threat of Internet redistribution. And they could be wrong if they're not worried about the sneakernet scheme I described.
It's ironic that this item appeared near another Boing Boing story that described a boost in storage capacity to the terabyte per square inch range. If it works out it should be commercialized in less than five years. And then we're talking 50+ HDTV movies per square inch.
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Cory Doctorow 02-20-2003
10:42 PM ET (US)
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The MPAA asserts nothing in respect of physical transfer of files (and in fact has *already approved* DVHS as an output, which would handily permit the sneakernet scenario you describe).
The MPAA says that this mandate is necessary because DTV will give rise to "instantaneous," "perfect," "wide-scale" *Internet* redistribution.
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El Kabong 02-20-2003
10:39 PM ET (US)
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This guy says an hour of ATSC takes about 8.6 gig, right? So a 100 gig drive will hold about six average length movies. A 100 gig firewire drive costs about $180. A bunch of friends each invest in a drive. They coordinate what they each record (perhaps with some Net-based app) and when a drive fills up, it rotates through the group. This kind of physical drive file transfer would not be a problem on college campuses, where file transfer is most popular. And remember, I'm using 2003 prices. In a few years the price of that drive will be $90, then $45 then who knows what? Before long it will be economical to maintain an HDTV movie collection on a hard drive, without ever worrying about whether or not you can keep them on removable media. Can you blame the MPAA for looking ahead just a few years? Edited 02-20-2003 10:40 PM
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effugas 02-20-2003
04:12 PM ET (US)
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Meria--
Hard drives silently got a hell of alot faster than you may have expected. The hard drives at the gaming center I've been reimaging are pushing 40MB/s -- yes, that's 400mbit sustained; they're completely saturating their interface.
Even this crappy laptop manages 10MB/s direct.
File systems have become the bottleneck.
--Dan
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Meriadoc 02-20-2003
02:16 PM ET (US)
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This is indeed hysterically funny. And it demonstrates, incidentally, the frustrations at moving around the large files so popular today. Admittedly a 43GB Super Bowl telecast is an extreme, but on my dial-up connection at home I cannot adequately send or receive any file too big to fit on a 3-inch floppy ...
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effugas 02-20-2003
12:41 PM ET (US)
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Cory--
Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm saying. MPEG4-class codecs are an order of magnitude more efficient than MPEG2; DVD->DivX transcodes approach (but do not equal) perceptual losslessness. Right now, soundtracks are recoded to MP3; eventually the AC3 will be ripped straight off and the audio will be truly lossless.
(AC3 is an interesting codec...each new channel you add to the mix takes less and less bandwidth to encode, due to the flexibility of the codec -- it gets to rob bits from one channel when another requires more detail. But I digress.)
As Wes points out, the new codecs are pushing CPU's to the limit, but they're getting impressive results -- perceptually equivalent video at far lower bitrates, today. And it's not like there isn't an entire generation of codecs beyond MPEG-4 waiting to come out, ready to trade not just CPU but memory, latency and streamability for AV archival.
I do note that udpcast would eat even raw ATSC for breakfast. udpcast is gloriously insane; 95mbit sustained to any number of hosts on a 100mbit LAN? No problem :-)
--Dan
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Wes Felter 02-20-2003
11:34 AM ET (US)
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I already addressed this stuff in my first message. You can recompress an ATSC sctream down to around 6Mbps with WM9 without losing quality. (Of course, the resulting file requires a 2.8GHz machine to play back.)
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Cory Doctorow 02-20-2003
10:52 AM ET (US)
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Dan, if what you're saying is that DiVX transcoding won't reduce the quality of the original files from the ATSC transport stream while producing smaller files, then I stand corrected. Is that true?
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Craniac 02-20-2003
10:47 AM ET (US)
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"astonishingly, startlingly wrong."
I know I caught my breath when I read the original statement, and then a single tear crept down my face.
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effugas 02-20-2003
02:53 AM ET (US)
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Cory-- Odd that they're trying to prevent the spread of sporting events, considering they're (by far) the least popular material after the fact. Except for place-shifting and *really* short timeframe delays("wait till i get home from work"), sports are irrelevant even the next day. Your statement about ATSC being compressed to the max is astonishingly, startlingly wrong. Among other things, ATSC/MPEG-2 is lossy. It's also not the most efficient codec available for large-scale video archiving -- MPEG-2 needs to be streamable, low latency, and fixed processor load, and is frankly an aging codec. However, it does transcode very nicely to MPEG-4/DivX -- DivX rips of DVDs are essentially equivalent to their originals, and once AC3 soundtracks are ripped wholesale and attached to the DivX's, they'll be effectively indistinguishable. Digital-to-Digital Transcoding really is required for this quality level to be attained. This doesn't take away from the fact that the entertainment industry is trying to ban VCR's. Again. --Dan Edited 02-20-2003 02:54 AM
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Cory Doctorow 02-19-2003
11:31 PM ET (US)
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Maf, you're incorrect on every count:
"He picks a 5 hour show, when people are more likely to trade much shorter shows with the ads removed (say 24 minutes)."
Wrong. The MPAA and the Assoc. of Sports Leagues *specifically* request this mandate to prevent the spread of feature films and full-length sporting-events.
"He makes no real attempt to recompress the file to a more manageable bitrate, which can be done with or without downrezzing."
Wrong. The Studios' *only* rationale for doing this is if the files are traded at full rez (otherwise, there's no difference between today's movie-trading and DTV movie-trading). ATSC files are *already* compressed as far as they'll go without lossiness.
"He assumes that bandwidth available to the home user will never increase."
Wrong. He never, ever, asserts this. In fact, quite the opposite, he undertakes a number of his experiments using the connectivity available to one of the largest, best-supplied research facilities in the entire world.
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