[opendtv] Re: New Sony COO bullish on Blu-ray

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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