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Friday, April 11, 2008

Media Center and HD Content Challenges

by Don Burnett

I normally don't talk a lot about Media Center here or the challenges of bringing HD content to it, on DVD, but there are some very interesting posts to Chris Lanier's Blog about the fallout of HD-DVD going away, and what it would mean to bring Blu-Ray to both the PC and X-box 360 natively. I myself was a very big fan of HD-DVD and my player of choice was the X-box 360. I have a big collection of Red Discs that have now "disappeared" from store shelves. The local Best Buy acts like they never had this format or sold it. It's a shame because I know more than a few people who preferred the format over the blue discs, for it's interactive features, Picture-in-Picture, and over all quality. It had a lot of features missing from the initial Blu-Ray  player release. Also Blu-Ray is based on Sun's Java technology. So why did it win? Both technologies use the same blue laser and just a bit different disc formats. Anyone who tells you the picture was better is just talking marketing hype, 1080p is 1080p. Nearly the same video codecs were available in both platforms.

So why did it win? Simply it was a content war and content is king.. Disney focused on Blu-Ray and they own a lot of the DVD market. People make decisions based on what content they can buy. Sure there were companies that did content for both, like Warner Brothers but adoption was slow. The other piece of hardware that put the number of Blu-Ray players out there was the Sony Play Station 3 or PS3. Interestingly enough the PS3 still isn't winning the console wars with the X-Box 360 or the Nintendo WII which is doing extremely well and neither of those machines have a Blu-Ray player built-in. Do all PS3 folks do is watch movies on their shiny new game machine? Sales don't indicate much else.

If I sound bitter it's because I don't really like Sony all of that much due to the number of the rampant anti-consumer scandals of the past few years. The last big Sony product I bought was a Playstation Portable, only to have UMD for it become a flop, as I watched the number of video titles for it shrink, and major studios stop producing titles for it. That was just a couple of years ago, so I didn't expect much from Blu-Ray. What a fickle market we live in here in the USA. One other reason I don't like Sony products is Sony's attempt to put RootKits on their CDs a few years back.

HD on Media Center

So back to Windows Media Center, and the HD content question.. Natively Microsoft didn't end up supporting HD-DVD or Blu-Ray in Media Center. So how do you get content, like from your cable TV? Well, since the content is protected (meaning you can't copy it or move it to other devices), Media Center has to build in support for that content protection. They do this through the use of a Digital Cable tuner. ATI makes a tuner that accepts a "CableCard" tuner. However CableLabs (the cable companies tech arm) has been very paranoid about making these available and you can only buy these from a vendor with a system like Dell or HP. To me that really sucks, I don't want to go buy a product from one of these vendors. CableLabs and the cable companies really don't understand the PC or the Home Theater PC (HTPC) market very much.

The HTPC market This has developed over the years mostly from do-it-yourself PC buyers. Most of these folks buy their own components and assemble their own systems based on high-spec components that most vendors like Dell and HP charge premium costs for. What does this mean to you as a consumer? Well you can't go out to Best Buy and purchase a CableCard Tuner (unless you buy it with a Dell 420 box), The stand-alone tuners that are sold separately don't support HD protected content over cable, you just use them with over-the-air free HD.  So if you want this capability you are forced now to buy a premium system that maybe back ordered. I think this really sucks and it's just an attempt by the cable industry to exert monopolistic controls over the market. You should be free to go out and buy one of these tuners for your home brew machine. I my opinion with the current situation, this is just someone maximizing profit and taking advantage of the situation (follow the money). If they are so worried about someone subverting their technology (which  seems like what they are saying), they should stay out of it entirely. Media Center does let you burn content onto DVD that you recorded and stored, but probably not the HD protected content from the cable company. Temporary storage and DVR playback doesn't mean archival storage to your burnable DVDs.

Cable Monopoly Issues

On top of all of that once you get it, you may be waiting on the cable company to install it forever. Last time a technician from my local cable company was out I asked them if I bought a CableCard based device how long it would take to get installed. I was told that they only had one installer for the entire area that did these, and they only did installs one day a week and that they already had a huge backlog of installs. The cable companies really don't want to support CableCard, they want you to buy their DVR instead.

My experience (at least with the local company's DVR (a Motorola product) was bad.. I had four of them to die. The problem with them, is they were regular HD boxes with an optional hard drive plugged in. But the problem with them off the top was HEAT. The box had no FAN and heat dissipation was a serious problem for them. I finally went to a non-HD non-DVR box because of all the problems. The technician admitted to me at the time that I wasn't the only one having these issues and he admitted having "seen small fires with them as a result."  Either way I don't want one of these in my home. They have kept the problem quiet because of the small percentage rate of  these problems with these overall.

If you have a Motorola box I definitely recommend you watch the heat situation. I just got tired of having a new box every three months and losing the programming I had stored on the previous box..

Is it all worth it?

So is it all worth it just to record delayed viewing of that program you missed while at your friend's house on HBO, the one you probably could go out and buy six months ago on standard DVD or on high-def DVD ? The answer to most people is probably not.. HD content on DVD also might have it's issues getting to your PC for playback.. Let's look at what mess the HD-DVD departure has left.. Over at Chris Lanier's Blog, there is some great discussion about bringing Blu-Ray to Windows and Media Center. Native Blu-Ray support doesn't exist currently. You have to launch an application from a third party company so really when the media plays back you are not inside Media Center. This means the controls and the great UI you are used to isn't necessarily available to you. Plus since it's a third party it might not always work as expected and you can't look to Microsoft to fix the bugs in it.  Another not so cool thing is the playback won't probably work across your own home network to stream playback to other devices in other rooms (Media Center Extenders, like the Linksys Extender or the X-box 360).

Also you just can't add an HD DVD/Blu-Ray player to every PC anyway... It must be at least a 2.4 Giga-hertz processor, with a graphics card that supports HDCP , well actually the whole system has to be supportive of HDCP protection. Personally if you bought your system within the last 3 years, most likely it doesn't support at least one of these specifications.  

So will we see a Blu-Ray player for the X-Box 360 anytime soon? The answer is probably not, and the best explanation as to "why" comes again from an entry in Chris Lanier's Blog..

"Another issue is building such a player to spec, something Microsoft will have a hard, or rather near impossible time doing. Unlike HD DVD’s hardware specs (PL1), Blu-ray requires that all players support multichannel PCM out. The Xbox 360 can’t do this with current hardware (no software update fixes that), nor does it have HDMI 1.3 to directly output the bitstream of advanced codec’s like TrueHD. Would the BDA let Microsoft make a player that is not built to spec just because they are Microsoft"

Frankly even if Microsoft designs their own non-Java device drivers and playback libraries there is a lot of things standing in the way of that happening..

Does this all really Matter?

Why does the X-box 360 continue to sell in great numbers as an HD content playback system, without Blu-Ray and now without HD-DVD? Simply, it still has an HD content system in it. It's called X-Box Live... Like Apple's iTunes, you can buy TV shows, Music, and HD movies and download them to your X-Box 360 hard drive with X-Box Live. Up until this year the X-Box 360 has only had a 20 gig drive in it, but with the 360 Elite and Microsoft now selling a bigger 120 gig replacement hard drive, it's possible to download and playback HD content right to the device over a standard broadband connection at reasonable speeds. Can you get the content off this unit and store it? No more than you can the cable company's DVR or the new CableCard tuner systems from Dell, and others.  But hey it works great and the picture looks great and may be a cost effective alternative to high cable and content you can't burn to a DVD or record and save anyway.

Bottom line, with the current situation, cable companies and movie houses don't want you burning HD content to DVDs or long term storage and playback. They have worked with the politicians to enact laws that really trample all over your right to "fair use" anyway. Fair use today doesn't include HD content, just poorer non-HD versions. Some of the movie companies though see that media is now a portable thing and you might like a digital copy to view on your laptop or some other device and are including coupons to download a digital copy of the movie (still copy protected to a device like your home PC).. That's at least some movement on their part towards fair use.

So will PC's get Blu-Ray players and recorders? Will Media Center work with them natively? Will the cable company monopoly ever accept "fair use"? Will the 360 really ever get any HD playback device that lets you keep a copy of the movie?

I think consumers here need to be starting to write their lawmakers and require these companies to stop the protectionist practices. Before HD and DVD copying existed and even today with non-HD copying still a possibility (not a legal one really), the studios are still making money, people still go to the movies. Their profits aren't going down the drain. We are honestly loosing freedom of choice here.. This is just my opinion, but I don't want to pay every time I see a movie. I like the idea of buying it once. For that reason I think regular DVDs will be with us for some time to come. Also due to PC requirements and the lack of consumer understanding of them, I don't think we'll see Blu-Ray recorders and PC players zooming on and off the shelf for sometime.

More opinion: The promise of HD has been subverted, by the movie industry, by the cable industry, and by our law makers who really aren't seeing what's going on here.. As for Media Center and native support and a new Blu-Ray add-on for the 360, survey says "Not anytime soon.." and that's really a bad situation. It just proves Microsoft is not immune to "industry" and market forces..

Could it be the real monopolies are the movie companies and the cable television industry that's holding us back because they won't get their premium cut? Maybe folks now should start worrying about them, over a company like Microsoft. Should they be investigated for their practices by Congress? In my opinion the survey says "yes they should".. Will they? Probably not, you can ask politicians like Congressman John Conyers, who is historically  has voted  in the media companies favor. Or that Alaskan Senator, who doesn't understand technology and things like DRM. Something we could do to improve the situation with congress is requiring them to be educated about the facts and consequences of all of this, and I am not talking about a hearing with a bunch of CEOs of media companies in the room.

What's Next?

What do I think is next? Well I think media companies will start offering their own Media Players, and their own content branded playback device (like DVRs) that only work with their content. I think after plain DVDs there won't be media, except for maybe memory cards and USB drives with content on it.. Branded and only working with their playback devices.. Right now it sounds risky because the Media companies are worried about the same things they are with DVDs, unauthorized use. But I think this is a trend and one that will continue thanks to companies like Adobe that announced their own "media player" release. We'll soon see the movie companies with their own "branded" media players and more separation of media.. These players can be physical boxes or computer programs..

 

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