OK, here's a straight forward, no nonsense way to utterly obliterate your point.
I have NEVER, EVER had a disc rejected by ANY player for DRM.
Regardless of how loudly you
Shout, your personal experience is still 100% Anecdotal. It also doesn't help that it still totally
missed my point.
You read somewhere in 2005 that Blu-Ray is evil because it has onerous DRM and you just can't let go of it.
Unsubstantiated speculation on your part. And to illustrate, I'll ask you to think about how many firmware updates you've downloaded for your consumer CD players over the years, etc. My point here has been to merely illustrate the contrast in these classes of consumer products. Right or wrong, there's going to be a segment of consumers whose fear of "scary" stuff (such as being harder to maintain due to firmware updates) is going to have an influence their purchase decisions.
BTW, please note that I didn't say that I'm one of these "scared off" consumers ... I'm not, so please don't try to claim otherwise.
An early HD-DVD player I had got bricked because they didn't test the firmware update process with a disc in the drive, if that counts.
Potentially. What you're done is to provide an anecdotal illustration that the above customers who may have heard "scary" stuff probably do have (to some degree) a valid basis for them to be intimidated by some of these new products.
FWIW, also keep in mind that there's the true (objective) risks and then there's the general consumer's (ignorant) perception of what these risks are: the two are not likely perfectly in agreement.
My point being you are deathly afraid of DRM somehow being a hindrance to Blu-Ray.
You're speculating again. And that's also not an apology from your prior accusation that I pirate media.
Which leads me to speculate what your hangup is. Since as you said proof of either is absent, because you haven't TOLD US what your case is, all I can do is postulate the possible reasons.
Just who is forcing you to go speculate?
Perhaps the hangup here is self-imposed?
Frankly, I'm trying to be neutral in this debate. I'd prefer to have BD on a Mac (for free, of course) and prefer to not have DRM at all ... but I also recognize DRM as a necessary evil within the current business models as well as other
TANSTAAFL factors. As an adult, I expect that there's going to be some form of "Payment" imposed upon me if the Mac gets BD...and overall, I'm not 100% sure as to what that would entail: a "Protected Stream" does suggest a system lock-down which may prevent some other nifty feature(s).
I also recognize that there's pros/cons on all sides that prevent this from being a clear "black & white" issue ... and I recognize that human nature tries to simply everything into black & white, which is why we've had many "Evil Steve Jobs" statements so ignorantly thrown about.
More technically for BD DRM (and DVD's too, for that matter), because I recognize that no DRM is utterly "unbreakable", it is forever going to be a rear guard action that consumes corporate resources ... and thus with benefits of diminishing returns, particularly when the same business model makes the legit consumer experience less friendly than when the product has been pirated. I see this as business who is clearly alienating their own customer base (which is stupid), but I also recognize that they must have reasons that they're nevertheless choosing to do it ..even though my personal speculation is that they're probably being shortsighted.
Of course, speaking of shortsighted, we have posters who have demonstrated that they are intellectually incapable of separating the messenger from the message, and then "Shoot the Messenger". I find that to be particuarly disappointing within the MR community...but for those who believe that such childish personal attacks are fair game, feel free to give this post a
-1 rating
In the meantime, I've been letting my home theater system's hardware languish...I used to be in the Industry and I'm glad I'm out, and cynically, the latest razzle-dazzle bullhockey expensive cutting edge stuff is just that, which I simply don't "Need". As such, I'm generally more of a "trailing mainstream" adopter...although this too does depend: I happened to have bought for myself two complete 1080p-capable speciality systems last year. Frankly, I'm more into making my own content for myself instead of serving another master, and I'm trying to salt away an extra $30K for a trip to Antartica in probably 2013.
FWIW, I do expect BD to be reasonably successful as a media, mostly because in the USA, we're not going to have the bandwidth infrastructure to threaten it. FWIW, I also expect DVD to hang around for longer than most people here probably expect, and then we're going to have the fun of watching what happens when 4K really gets a firmer grip, and this whole media-vs-streaming question repeats itself again, with a higher resolution being the basis of a strategy to try to "escape" upscale. Afterall, the 'upscale escape' has happened before in other industries.
Since there are few if any documented cases of a legitimate customer being prevented from viewing a disc because of DRM and I will add my personal experience of over 4 years of ownership to that, having NEVER had it happen.
I understand you, but frankly, I'm not necessarily convinced that this is fully adequate to address the general consumer's perceptions. For example by analogy, look at how many people are terrified of flying despite the statistics that objectively show how much safer it is versus the automobile or train. Unfortunately, I don't have any concrete suggestions for how to solve this perception problem.
I had a really lengthy reply here and upon rereading decided to just cut it short because we're getting into the weeds. Some of what you list are filesystems, others are proprietary enhancements that probably can't even be licensed by anyone other than the original inventor, others still are long forgotten dead experiments. Players like the Oppo play a great deal of them -- do they play them all? We'd have to ask them or try it ourselves.
In other words, I don't get a free dinner at the Chester Publick House from you. Oh well...
FWIW, I think the last time I was there was around the time that Larson's Turkey Farm closed (my accountant moved up to Succasunna).
I guess you force me to be specific, and this "unbroken chain" can "only" apply to the mainstream formats. I believe we need to have a noise floor for this argument.
And we forgot HDCD, DualDiscs, the original Circuit City Divx, and the SACD redbook layer.
Not really necessary. I had noticed that you were being pedantic in the thrashing of another poster, so I merely gave you some of your own medicine. What's really the more important underlying point (lest we lose that!) is that there are different tiers of consumers with different priorities, and what the high end "A/V-phile" niche is willing to tolerate in order to have the
Nth degree of quality usually isn't anywhere near what the mainstream consumer is willing to tolerate ... these sorts of factors ultimately will contribute to if a product will be able to successfully "break through" on the mainstream consumer market, and to what degree.
BTW, I recognize that the statement immediately above will probably prompt a "But BD is hugely successful!" type of claim. First off, I'm making a generalization that not necessarily specific to BD. Second, there's multiple ways to measure what "success" is, and some of the ones often thrown around in the popular media are, in simplest terms, wrong. In less simple terms, they're "Misleading Statistical Manipulations". That's an entire subthread topic for discussion, if someone wishes.
In any case, what I've been observing is that the mainstream, non-"Phile" consumer is trying to be much more value-concious these days and a BD purchase is perceived(!) as a luxury item and with cynicism towards its implications for their prior investment in DVDs. Yes, this is unfounded, but the mainstream consumer merely remembers (or believes) that they got burned with VHS & 8-Tracks, so they're not predisposed to be particularly trusting. Right or wrong is irrelevant, unfortunately.
-hh
