Delivering HiDef content NOW

farss wrote on 1/6/2005, 5:58 PM
Well it seems Sonic and uSoft haven't let HDV slip past them.
Now I think we all know that one of the best currently available delivery medium is WMV9. However as many of pointed out the down side is no menus. Well not any more. Sonic now have an authoring solution in conjunction with uSoft that uses a combination of html and java to deliver a HiDef experience complete with menus and many other goodies it seems.
At the moment of course you can only play them on a PC and for 1080 read a pretty beefy one at that. However if you can believe the spin doctors, chips are already in production for a STB to play these disks.
The good news in all this I think is you could probably clobber something passable together using existing web authoring tools without giving the deeds to the house to Sonic, you only need an existing DVD burner or I guess if you wanted DL then existing DL burning software would be good enough as you wouldn't need to be meet all the stringent requirements that DVD players impose.
If anyone is interested more info at DMN.
Bob.

Comments

p@mast3rs wrote on 1/6/2005, 6:06 PM
Lets not forget that the same thing is available with Mpeg-4 ASP and H2.64 AVC. Theres a forum on doom9.org that tells you how to create DVD style menus for your Mpeg-4 files. However, it does have a learning to it. Its not point and click like MS has be accustomed to.

Menus, extras, etc... are my least concern until everyone figures out how they are going to protect the content we deliver.

MS DRM 10 is nice but I have yet to see how a server can authorize a STB that isnt connected to a phone line or an internet connection.

Either way, good times are ahead.
farss wrote on 1/6/2005, 6:16 PM
Well the DRM solution that this uses requires an internet connection.
I'm not so certain that that isn't a viable solution, I'm not saying I like the idea, I just wouldn't be too hasty assuming that internet access isn't going to be all pervasive.
There's a cheap DVD player, made in China, that auto updates it's firmware through the web.