Should MPAA be scared?

[Poplar]

We all know RIAA has gone nuts and started suing people, left and right, young and old, all because of this little thing called MP3. MP3 and P2P networking knocked them off their smug and greedy way of doing business. Maybe now it's MPAA's turn.

For years, they say DivX is the MP3 of video, which I always think is a hype, until Divx Pro 5.1. I got a 144-minute movie in DivX 5.1, with excellent quality, and its size is only 686MB, which means I can fit it on one CDR! It's really amazing how DivX has improved in leaps and bounds! Now you can download a high-quality movie in less than 30 minutes, and you don't even have to leave your room. The MP3 of video finally arrived. And people will know it ultimately, that's MPAA's nightmare

[The village idiot]

I guess I'll have to play with some Divx movies again. The last time I tried it, there were so many different codes involve, you never could get them to play. And they all looked like crap. The best were the super compressed SMR codec. At least those all use the same codec, no messing with different audio and video codecs to maybe get it to play.

You do know that Divx is really just a hacked version of mpeg4? They hacked it so that it would compress more. They compress it more by allowing a greater number of P and B frames between the I frames. This can result in lower quality during fast motion. But I'll have to check it out, It's been over a year since I tried fooling with Divx

[RabidDog]

:P No I think divx has been completely microsoft free for at least two years.
Poplar.. 700mb (1 film) in 30 mins I think not!! some day, but not at present adsl speeds
I have tried compressing some of my own movies to divx but I found that unless i used an unusual resolution say 544x380 it would be no better than VCD or svcd. the quality was good, but I think it lacks the ease of use of say, tmpgenc, and also the controllability re filesize/quality.

[BJ_M]

world wide - most people don't have broadband and so its not as big an issue .. (canada is 3rd in the world and its CHEAP here, usa is 11th place and its 2 times the price, though I wouldnt want to pay finland prices)

see :::

S. Korea leads world in Net speed
Tuesday, September 16, 2003 Posted: 8:52 PM EDT (0052 GMT)


GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- South Korea holds a large lead over the rest of the world in the percentage of inhabitants who have high-speed Internet connections, with Japan poised to catch up, according to the U.N. communications agency.

Between 60 and 70 percent of all households in South Korea have a broadband connection, and cybercafes where students play online games are "almost on every corner," said Taylor Reynolds, one of the authors of a report by the International Telecommunication Union.

"Broadband is just an essential part of everyday life. They use it for e-mail, they use it for chat, for music, all sorts of things," said Reynolds.

Broadband is the term for high-speed connections, created mainly by hooking up computers to phone lines using so-called Digital Subscriber Line technology -- DSL -- or by using extra capacity on TV cable networks.

People use it for downloading music, movies and programs, as well as making international telephone calls no extra cost.

"Around the world, there were around 63 million 'broadband' subscribers at the start of 2003 compared with 1.13 billion fixed-line users and 1.16 billion mobile phone users," said the ITU's 196-page report "Birth of Broadband."

More than 10 million of the world's high-speed users are in South Korea alone, a rate of 21.3 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants. Hong Kong was in second place with 14.9 percent and Canada was third at 11.2 percent.

Japan is currently in 10th place, with 7.1 percent of its inhabitants on broadband, but it the report said it looks set to move up the global standings because it is now offering the world's fastest speeds and lowest prices.

Broadband service is available in Japan for $24.19 a month, and opening a page on the World Wide Web is 520 times as fast as standard dial-up modem, the report said.

"It's nearly instantaneous," said Reynolds.

Monthly subscriptions -- which are flat-rate so there is no extra charge no matter how long people stay on line -- are generally between $30 and $50, but run as high as $165.89 in Finland, the report said. The average cost in the United States is $52.99.

The United States is in 11th place, with a subscription rate of 6.9 percent. However, the country has the largest number of broadband subscribers -- 19.9 million.

The report stressed that the technology was just in its infancy, and was expected to grow rapidly.

Japan, which at first concentrated on developing broadband over the long term by concentrating on expanding optical fiber networks, has been catching up since changing its approach to include more use of broadband over old-fashioned copper-wire telephone lines.

Competition
The result is that Japan now offers download speeds of 26,000 kilobits per second, compared to 50 kilobits per second over a standard dial-up modem.

A Japanese user can download an entire movie over the Internet in 20 minutes. South Korea is almost as fast -- 26 minutes.

"You can download a movie faster than you can watch it," said Reynolds.

But the rest of the world is considerably slower. It takes six hours to get a movie in the United States and 12 hours in Switzerland. For somebody trying to download it over a standard dial-up modem, it would take 71/2 days.

Reynolds said a key reason Japan and South Korea are so far ahead is because of heavy competition among broadband providers.

Also, the Japanese and South Korean governments have taken steps to encourage use of broadband, such as requiring telephone companies to let competitors use existing lines at low cost.

"In economies where there is effectively no competition, where there is no choice except for the incumbent operator like Swisscom (in Switzerland), prices are going to be higher and the speeds are going to be lower," he said.

[RabidDog]

article in Guardian about japan stated that to encourage take up they were being offered sdsl at 45mbps for about £11 per month no setup no modem cost and free wireless router... competition working!
At these speeds, yes the mpaa should start s+++++g their pants

[gmatov]

Very interesting.

Do you think it's possible there are some people in cahoots with each other, here in the US, and maybe some other countries?

Comcast has just begun a trial doubling my throughput, from 1.54 to 3 megabits per second. One ninth of the Japanese speed, and theirs' over DSL, or copper phone lines, anyhow.

Here, DSL is a max of 768 kbps, and with a distance limit of 18000 ft.And that only if the phone company, or someone will install a DSLAM. I was unable to get it at 12000 feet, happy now that they wouldn't, would never have gone with cable.

As far as cahoots, the "conspiracy theory", why can't the richest, by our own estimate anyway, country in the world provide faster connections? Because if we did, we'd have even more DLing of movies in a decent format, put the manufacturers-distributors out of business?

So spend a bunch of bucks, tho' still a pittance, compared to their profits, to buy enough lawmakers and regulators to put the brakes on it.

We've laid so much fiber in this country, 95 % or more is "dark", no data to send over it. So many companies went belly up in the big bust, and the survivors bought their assets for pennies on the dollar, and mothballed them.

Locally, Northpoint, a go-go company with many subscribers fell prey to the malaise, was bought by AT&T for a nickle on the dollar, told the subscribers they were SOL, they were discontinuing the service, get cable or go back to dial-up.

Also, a short while ago Verizon said they were going to compete with cable with a faster DSL, at a cheaper price, 30 bucks or less per month. Nothing has come of it yet, but a girl I know who had Verizon DSL, and was happy with it, had problems, and their tech support jerked her around for nearly a month before they admitted the local loop she was on was no longer supported.

They're going to make it faster, and reach more people, yet they're throwing off people who already had it. She's on cable now, also, and loves it.

My own AT&T broadband was bought by Comcast. I had the Dish, no cable TV. Within a month, I was informed that since I did not have cable TV, my internet would go from 42.95 to 57.95, but I would stay at 42.95 if I subscribed to any level of cable. Blackmail? I think so, but it's the only game in town.

The services are so cut up between companies who do not compete against one another that it is damn nigh impossible to drive down prices, or drive up service. Hey, if no one is allowed to offer more than I do, why should I offer more?

Until some deep pockes rebel decides to take on the segmented monopolies, they'll just feed us a little bit at a time,as they did with modems, step up a little, go buy a new one, step up again, do it again.

Same, in a way as CPUs, step up, couple steps later, you just gotta have it, except now they're supposedly hard put to get anymore out of them with the present technology.

I think we are a bunch of fishes, just eyeballing that glob of worms on the hook.

Cheers,

George

[g_shocker182]

From the DC metro area I get cable, modem, install, support, & service for $20/ month for a year.

[g_shocker182]

In response too my own post

[gmatov]

Shocker,

I don't think it's off topic. Broadband, and I mean broader band than we have will, eventually, kill the MPAA and the RIAA, or whatever it is.

If they don't get on the stick and offer this same content over BB, they're dead. If they DO decide they can offer a movie for 3 or 4 bucks, DL'd, they make money. If they decide to protect "buggy whips", have laws passed, regulations re-written, to stop it, someone with more money, a Rupert Murdoch, for example, will just thumb their noses at them and eat their lunch.

They should be scared, very scared.

If I can buy a PPV for 3.99, record it with no macro, why would I go to the store and pay 20 bucks for it? Hell, I'm sure cable and dishes have them scared s**tless.

Cheers,

George

Any progress?

[zzyzzx]