So You Say You Want HD?
January 21, 2007 1:09 pm…then you might not want Vista running your Media PC. The issue is whether or not you’ll see a true HD image from an HD DVD or BluRay disc played under Vista. If the disc in question is a commercial, copy-protected program, then the answer is…no. You’ll see regular old television quality. The Team Vista Blog has a 20-questions FAQ. One of the exchanges says:
Will the playback quality be reduced on some video output types?
Image quality constraints are only active when required by the policy associated with the content being played, and then only apply to that specific content — not to any other content on the user’s desktop. As a practical matter, image constraint will typically result in content being played at no worse than standard definition television resolution. In the case of HD optical media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the constraint requirement is 520K pixels per frame (i.e., roughly 960×540), which is still higher than the native resolution of content distributed in the DVD-Video format. We feel that this is still yields a great user experience, even when using a high definition screen.
From my point of view and, I think, that of many other consumers, the issue isn’t whether the delivered resolution is better than a standard DVD. It’s whether the delivered resolution is what we expect it to be when the format promises an HD image.
I gave my opinion of Stupid Copy Protection a couple of posts back. I don’t really blame Microsoft for this–they’re doing what the big studios tell them they must. I have to say, though, that I agree with Glenn Reynolds when he says that the ultimate result might well be to drive more people to pirated programming–which will come without the bits of software that assume every user is a thief.
It’s a vicious cycle, and ultimately the biggest losers are honest, legitimate users, and the artists who try to give them a good show to watch. Unfortunately, there won’t be real incentive for change until the studios and software companies see themselves as coming up with the short end of the stick.
Categories: Entertainment, General computing, Media
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One Response to “So You Say You Want HD?”
[...] When you read the article, it’s obvious that this isn’t a move that’s going to happen tomorrow, but as I said in an earlier post, when the record companies feel pain, they’ll look at changing their strategies. There’s nothing like a sales number lower than the one you expected to cause pain in the halls of the record companies, so there’s reason for hope–and reason to keep supporting the artists and record companies that have already taken a listener-friendly approach to distributing their music. « Goodness, Gracious… | [...]