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Suggestion
Published on December 26, 2005 By John Galt In Gadgets & Electronics
I hate this format war that is coming. Namely because BlueRay is the better technical concept but HD DVD is the better implimentation, so no one wins. Further, BlueRay still doesn't impliment required managed copy and doesn't support anything other than a VERY complex Java programming language that is not thought out very well at all. (It came from Refridgerators and it's going back into dumbass devices again, hopefully to stay forever!)

Here's an idea to solve this problem:

Get MS to go and create the standard under the requirement that whatever MS comes up with must be completely opensource and IEEE standards and they must reliquish the rights to their patents with the exception of making money off of WMV video codec if they want since everyone pays for MPEG2 now anyhow.

Here's what we would get:

1. Windows CE with .NET Mobile on it.
2. WMV. The best codec for Video and WMA the best codec for audio out there. Every test confirms it. At EVERY sampling rate, WMV and WMA are always preferred by impartial judges (check out Sound and Vision's review for just one of many online).
3. WMV can encode at 1080p and take up only a little more space than a Standard Def DVD currently does. It's that efficient!
4. WMV doesnt' kill your processor and make it beg for mercy like Apple's QuickTime 7 HD does. If you don't have at least 3.2 ghz or better yet a Dual Processor (or Dual Core) system, don't even bother, it won't play smoothly. Contrast that to WMV that will run on a 1 ghz machine at 40% CPU and 1080p and you can see why this codec is so good.
5. It would work with computers and have managed copy so that I could buy a Media Center and rip all of the discs that I bought to it.
6. It would eventually come to IPTV and be able to download these instead of buying discs that I really don't want to have to keep around.
7. MS might be able to undo the evil HDMI standard and get Firewire or USB2Go instead. (4 wires versus almost 30 for HDMI, Bi-Directional versus one way for HDMI) Very simple math for you: 30' firewire cable: $20. 30' HDMI cable $190 CDN. And before you laugh, if you ever buy a projector, you'll want one of these! And at 30' you'll get all kinds of worries about interferance because of the high frequency and high data pipe required by HDMI versus Firewire which is 800 mbps instead of dozens of Gigabytes for HDMI.
8. XBOX360 would get it right away
9. Because of MS running the show, everyone would get behind it. Even Sony that just enabled WMA on both the PSP and all of their MP3 players.

Now all we have to do is convince MS to support 1080p via a digital output unlike the XBOX360 and we'd be set.... why oh why do I have to use a Analog VGA Cable MS?

Comments
on Jun 20, 2006
lol, idiot