Alternative HD distribution vs. the failing Blu-ray format!
 

Read about this unit on my blog... its fantastic!
http://blog.jcdv.com/2008/11/03/alte...ry-vs-blu-ray/

Thanks for the post and link Jerome, I jumped to HD just recently and have been reading a lot about the best way to show my clients the benefits of HD.
Most of my clients have a HD ready or full HD screen but allmost all attach a plain dvd player to it, I was thinking of buying a playstation or some other type of HD player with a build in harddrive to attach to the customers tv but after reading your post I definitely will wait untill it's available in Europe.

Just thinking out loud; considering the low price I even could consider adding the mediaplayer incl a usb stick into a HD package that I offer. No worrying about incompatible BR players that choke on the BR disk. Just plug and play, right?

btw, your link is not correct, I had to manual search on your site to find the post.

Edit: YES! allready found it at a Belgian supplier for 99 euro, ordering one tommorow! and a interesting youtube link about the product: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=9kI_PO...eature=related

Thanks Noa, I fixed the link... something got whacked.

What a great device and so cheap. I bet they sell a pile of them.

I am using a tv pc at the moment and like the ability to stream or copy from my main pc. This would be THE greatest invention if it had network support. I don't like the idea of having to go back and forth copying media on the externals.
Maybe I am just lazy.
Still I might just have to buy one for the portability.

Such devices are potentially useful, but your estimated net cost (with hard drive) of $200 is more than some places will be charging for Blu-ray players at this month's "Black Friday" sales. And Blu-ray is hardly a failing format: standalone player sales are up an estimated three-fold this year with another doubling (to 4 million units) expected next year.

Your gadget review mentioned lack of standard navigation menus or chapter advance, two important features for consumer video delivery. We've had devices like this in various forms for several years now and they've never caught on as a mainstream delivery solution, regardless of lower prices. If you can make it work for some of your customers that's great, but Blu-ray is the global standard now for HD content delivery.

If your clients would have an external harddrive so it would only leave them with a 99 dollar device to play it in HD, if you do video and photo you could make both available on their ext drive. What I'm curious about is the performance and quality if you write it to a usb stick.
In that case portability because a big advantage, I don't see people dragging their BR player to friends who have a lcd tv but no BR player. The WD hd player and a usb stick will fit in their pocket.

I think as for menu and such, why not just deliver the parts of a weddingday in seperate files and put in a a folder. Ofcourse it doesn't come close to a real BR disk with menu options but that will work as well. It could work for weddings as an add on, especially for those who have an external drive.

For myself I see it as very usefull to display HD at my clients who don't have a BR player and for that price and if it performes good I don't see it as a gadget.

Did you read the whole thing? Here's what I just copied off of it:

" I wish you could build custom menus like a DVD or Blu-ray disc, but you can’t. "

"This doesn’t allow chapter skipping or the like, but has a relatively fast 16x forward search. It reminds me of VCR days, but faster. You can update firmware (although this unit is NOT currently listed on Western Digital suppoer site) so I would think that they could add a “skip forward 5 minutes” or something like that in a firmware update… who knows."

I did just realize I never copied the file specs over that it says it will play....

Jerome, how does it look if you play a mpeg4 file on a usb stick. Does it stutter in playback and is the quality much better then with regular dvd?

Another review of this interesting unit here....

MaddHat.com Blog Archive New WD Media Player Reviewed, Stripped Naked

Anyone know of a UK supplier/stockist?

I just came across this yesterday

Galaxy Metal Gear, Inc.

It looks to be a similar product. It is an enclosure for a hard drive that has multimedia playback capabilities. They have several versions and it looks like you can navigate an ISO file just like you were playing a DVD.

Does anyone know how this compares to the WD unit?

Thanks,

Lloyd

One media machine is ready for nearly both: The Sony PlayStation 3.

Sure, MKVs need to be converted and it only accepts 1080p60 via XviD (AVC 1080p60 drops tons of frames). And even that could be ready for a movie purchasing service on the PlayStation Network (but of lower quality).

But for purists that just need that high-bitrate HD (with nearly no perceptible artifacts) and uncompressed or lossless sound, then the market is still there for Blu-ray.

With this machine, you're ready for both.

Right, those are the comments I was referring to when I said this device won't meet the expectations of many consumers. The price is right but it's not a replacement for Blu-ray, which isn't failing and not going away any time soon.

Hi Noa, can you tell us please which Belgian supplier this is?

Thanks in advanced!

pixmania.be

Play.com (check the 'where to buy' on the WD TV website for more UK retailers).

What can this thing play exactly?
.mov, .avi, mpeg2, mp4, mkv, wmv...
I can't find the specs. Do you still need to go through the long process of compressing your movies to weird formats with specific sizes, containers, mbits per second, etc...?
Or can you just play your self contained Final Cut movie.

Price increase
 

Checking a couple of sites just now, including Best Buy, the price has gone up to $129.99. Weaker dollar exchange rate or higher than expected demand - or both? Even so, it's still not "expensive".

Ok I see what it can play now:

Music - MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA
Photo - JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG
Video -MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264)
Playlist - PLS, M3U, WPL
Subtitle -SRT (UTF-8)

But what does that mean for my HDV (final cut pro .mov) from my apple computer? The problem with the PS3 and the xbox 360 is I have to spend days compressing my videos, they look like crap with low bit rate, and they NEVER work.
I would feel a lot better if it said: "MOV (mpeg 2)"...

I am kind of anti Blu-ray... it looks great, but it's slow to load, slow to get around in. And for a small publisher to pay $3000 (to join) and $1500 per title, plus replication, it shuts out too many small, low budget producers.

Cisco released some very interesting numbers on web video traffic a couple days ago. Their prediction is that the fastest growing segment of web video over the next 3 years will be web video played on a TV!!

Wha? Who has a computer connected to their TV?

Today, almost nobody. But in three years, a third of the web video viewed will be on a TV.

I made some graphs and wrote an article from their report here:

Video Is No Longer The Future of the Internet. It’s the Present. at DVcreators.net

Rumors are that there will be dedicated fullscreen H.264 hardware acceleration chips so that even the cheapest computers will be able to play 1080p H.264 without dropping frames through an HDMI or DVI output. That is an important puzzle piece.

Then, video podcasts already exist to deliver free content at very high quality. The last puzzle piece is a way to sell HD programs. If you are a major Hollywood studio, that means iTunes, Amazon Unbox, Netflix, or many others.

If you are not, there's MOD Machine.

Leaping Brain Labs, Inc. Overview

It is an exciting time to be a video producer! I love how technology steadily crumbles the walls between the big money and low-budget producers until almost anyone has an equal chance to deliver HD video to households.

I don't really like this WD thing, it hasn't made my life any easier. But it would be good to carry around along with a hard drive to present your work. I can't think of any other use for it as it wasn't compatible with any of my entertainment media files.
Apparently Roxio Toast 9 can make blu-rays on a dvd. That's not to shabby, in fact that sounds easy. I don't care if it's blu-ray HD-DVD or anything else. I just want people to decide so I can offer some HD.
But as far as that insane $1500 cost to make a blu-ray that I keep hearing about... What is that referring to?

Aric the $1300 dollar cost is for distribution licensing rights. Follow this link

DVD vs. Blu-ray


But here is a snippet of the article -

-----------

There are two sets of fees. First, there are those involved with BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) licenses, which are content provider and content producer licenses that allow for the use of the Blu-ray logo. The AACS (Advanced Access Content System) licenses, which are specific licenses mandated by the BDA, require that all replicated Blu-ray ROM discs carry AACS content encryption to prevent piracy. So there are two sets of licenses, and two sets of fees, which make life twice the fun.

Let’s deal with AACS, because a lot of people are very confused about why it is so expensive. Let’s look at a typical independent publisher, for example. You would first need to acquire a licensing agreement, which is the signatory relationship between the publisher and the AACS licensing authority, for which they charge a $3,000 fee. It is my understanding that the fee goes to AACS to cover their administrative overhead and their expenses.

The second licensing fee is the issuance on a per-title basis of an AACS title key, which is the actual encryption information that licenses a particular title to a specific publisher, and then allows the replicator to embed the content keys that allow the player to unlock and play the content. The way that Blu-ray players are set up, they must have an AACS key embedded on a replicated disc or they just won’t unlock the content to play, period. So to cover the costs, because the AACS license administration is outsourced from the AACSLA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator), they charge $1,300 per title certificate.

-------
So Aric, it's not an issue if you're simply creating a handfull of discs, but it you're tryng to replicate and release a full length project, then it can run into quite a piece of change. Documentary filmmakers are really getting hit by this.

This device would be cool if it had a 500Gb hard drive built into it. As it stands you would have to lug an external hard drive plus this around as well as your TV to a trade show for it to work.

Thnk its just as easy to take my PS3 and a blu-ray dvd on a loop to be honest.

Josh, you have some major omissions in your assessment of of HD delivery via internet. First of all it's less then 50% of households with fast internet connection ("According to new consumer research from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), 69% of all US households now subscribe to an online service at home, and high-speed Internet services now account for about 60% of all online subscribers"). To put it in the perspective these are the pure numbers: cable- 25,772,886 households, DSL - 20,172,216 households, total:45,945,102. These are the numbers from 2006, but as far as I remember 2008 was not that much different (add about 500 000 new accounts per year is the usual number).
You also have to look at contracts with providers. Comcast has very strict limits on bandwidth and downloading or even streaming any high volume content. Dual BD holds up to 50GB and forget about downloading such numbers. "That limit is now set at 250 Gigabytes a month (upload and download included), per residential customer account, as of October 1, 2008, under the companies new Acceptable Use Policy" makes it for 5-7 movies per month.
To sum it up- HD via internet is years away, and it will be relatively small market what it happens.

That's over five times the limit currently proposed by Time Warner Cable. (Reference link: Time Warner bandwidth caps to be expanded) Policies and pricing like this will seriously stymie Internet downloads for VOD and will retain the disk delivery model.

It's interesting to note that TWC is a corporate cousin of WB, a creator of that content and major supporter/user of BD.

EDIT: Charter seems to be going the same direction: Charter Communications to start bandwidth caps

The other issue with "internet delivery" system is protecting copy rights. Any downloadable content is way too exposed to p2p.
I bet SDXC card players will be way sooner then any web HD content. BD will stick around for a while and the cost will continue to drop (both of the players and the media itself). As the matter of fact BD players aren't much more $$$ then top of the line DVD players as we speak. Even outfits like Costco is selling them now for about 200 bucks.

Your stats are out of date. A quick google search reveals that even a year and a half ago, 75 percent of U.S. households subscribed to broadband:

Three-quarters of U.S. households have broadband - Research - BizReport

By now it could be 80% - 85%.

And there is no "usual number" in a market that is undergoing explosive growth. In fact, the number of consumers watching video streamed through a browser has doubled over the past year:

Number of US Online Households Watching Broadband Video Doubled In One Year | Press Release | ABI Research

Also- don't forget about international markets- increasingly important for entertainment and educational video. There are 352 million broadband households in the world and growing fast.

HD via internet has been going on for years. Have you watched "24" on Fox.com? Or hulu.com, theWB.com, the hundreds of HD podcasts from every major broadcast network, or HD videos on Vimeo or YouTube? Hundred of millions of people have watched HD via the internet, and the numbers keep increasing.

I don't like the download caps, but 250 GB still gives each household about 200 movies per month, or 6.5 movies per day, which is more than most people watch I think :) As long as people restrict their movie viewing to 2 or 3 HD movies a day, they'll still be under the caps.

I'm not saying DVD or Blu-ray is going away this year, or even in the next few years, there will always be people that don't own a computer. It's just that savvy comapnies, like Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Roku and many more are leapfrogging Blu-ray by offering HD movies over the internet today, and it's important that producers be aware of the current situation and future trends to stay ahead of the curve.

VHS, DVD and Blu-ray are three ways to sell video, MOD Machine is the fourth- a brand new format, with definite advantages (see:

Leaping Brain Labs, Inc. MOD Machine vs. DVD

for a comparison)

With unprotected movies this is true, but, for example, with MOD Machine, the movies are scrambled and unplayable outside the player- pirate-proof.

Compare that with the dozens of utilities that let anyone rip a DVD in a few clicks.

From the MOD website -

"Of course, nothing is 100% hack-proof. But after the hours it would take to assemble the fragments of your content into anything resembling the original experience, they would quickly conclude it’s just not worth the trouble. It’s way easier to rip one of your competitor’s DVDs."

Uh.... yeah, that's what the studio's thought about encryption.

And as far as I can tell, you need to watch it on a laptop or computer. What, can't send it out to the big screen? Because if you can, you are back to the weak link in piracy.

DIVX already tried this, and failed. So did APPLE. What is MOD offering that is different?

Josh, sorry, but your sources are kind of bunk. They don't provide any real numbers and are based up on 900 sample survey.... These are some hard facts: Total household units: 105,480,101. Total cable in 2008- 36,492,914 (net increase of 873,745 in 3Q 2008 vs 1,407,902 in 1Q 2006- see the number difference?). DSL in 2008- 30,168,880 (3Q 2008 increase 425,868 vs 1,658,139 in 1Q2006). Total broadband: 66,661,794. So as you see it's not 75% or 80 or 85 like you suggested, but the real number is hovering roughly about 60%.
DSL is not able to deliver smoothly HD content- only fiber optic cable can. The other issue is paying for bandwidth for HD delivery- your 1300 bucks fee for a title would be nothing compared to the cost of server and enough bandwidth. Typical server you have about 500-900MB space with monthly limit of 2 GB transfer for about $200-250/year. See the issue here? (if you know hosting sites let me know- please!)
Quoted HD content via internet (like "24") and films on BD is like comparing apples and oranges. First of all Hulu only shows 1280x720, don't have time to check at what resolution ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox show- I doubt it's 1920x1080p. I know what my eyes see- any newer film on BD looks far better then any TV show via cable or satellite, even in HD.
There is no such thing as pirate proof. These are codes, any code can be cracked, something any programer will tell you.

Robert... I'd have to go with Josh's numbers. He sites two sources where you site none. In a discussion of facts, you really have to site legitimate sources of those facts.

We may all just be picking the bark off the trees because when we're talking about HD delivery we're referring to the upscale portion of the video market anyway. The penetration of broadband in households with at least one HD TV is likely higher than those without.

I know. I'm violating my statement in the first paragraph above, but I think it's a valid assumption.

Tripp, this is the source: MediaPost Publications Broadband Adds Subscribers As HDTV Owners Increase 01/06/2009
http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/pre...08release.html
Josh quoted a 980 people survey. Here actually they went and counted the accounts. Figure which is is more accurate? Number of households is from the Census Bureau.
Josh's anti BD sentiment is because this technology and licensing is screwing the small guy. He is also stating web delivery of HD content is not. My point is that for now it is a smaller market with higher cost than any BD licensing costs. BTW BD is not failing judging by the fact that every new movie is released on BD and most of movies on Netflix on BD has wait list.
It is what it is, no reason to gripe about it. I am not happy about licensing fees. For now DVD delivery has to do.

Whether it's 60% or 80%, HD on the internet has been alive and well for a while, and is growing fast. Many DVinfo readers have been delivering HD over IP for a while, this year, I would imagine almost all of them will, for a client or independent project.

To clarify, smoothness in playback has nothing to do with bandwidth, but with processing speed. Older computers cannot decode 1080p H.264 without dropping frames, it's too processor intensive. (My MacBook Pro can play 10mbps 1080p H.264 with ease however :) )

A viewer's connection speed determines only how long they have to wait before playback starts- enough video must cache so that playback is uninterrupted.

The Bitrate Budget Calculator will tell you what bitrate to stay under and how long your viewers will have to wait, there's a movie here:

Bitrate Budget Calculator at DVcreators.net

If you are putting video on a web page and you want it to start within a couple seconds:

For DSL1, you need to keep bitrate under 1200 or so, which might work well with low motion content at 960x540.

DSL2 has been rolled out around the U.S. offering speeds upwards of 2500, you can deliver beautiful 1280x720 at these speeds.

About halfway down this page:

Encoding at DVcreators.net

in the left column, there are links to 720p and 1080p video I encoded with DV Kitchen.

If anyone with DSL wants to post how long they took to start and if they played smoothly, that would be cool.

But here we are only talking about video on a web page. MOD Machine downloads video to your drive so it always plays smoothly- even when you're not connected to the internet. Even someone with a slow 768kbps DSL connection will get great HD quality and performance with MOD Machine-delivered video.

Dreamhost offers unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for $5.95 per month. We signed up for a test account and can stream about 1.2 kbps- not enough for HD.

However, you can put your website there, and host your video content on Amazon AWS/Cloudfront at 17 cents per GB. So to deliver, let's say, a feature-length 1080p movie would cost about 68 cents- that's less than Blu-ray replication, not to mention the other fees.

True, but my point is, if you want to protect your content, DO NOT DELIVER ON DVD OR BLU-RAY! Anyone who knows how to do a Google search will find it easy to download to free or low cost utility that will rip a disc in a few clicks.

At least MOD Machine is safe from all but perhaps a handful of the world's greatest hackers.

That's exactly what I do. Both HD WMV (including 1920x1080) and MP4 play smooth and without any stutter or dropped frames. I have an extra external USB hard drive I've been intending to move over to the TV to use with the WD TV but walking over and plugging in 8GB thumb drives is so convenient I'm content to do that.

I've been waiting for over a year for such a device as this and the $130 I spent on mine is money well spent. I like this thing!

If I had to, I could stuff the unit, remote, wall wart power supply and HDMI cable in a small messenger bag and take it to someone's home or business if they had an HDMI input on their TV.

In the meantime I bought the player and have used it at clients, the visual difference on their big screen lcd makes a big impact if I show them a regular dvd afterwards. It plays, as you said, high bitrate files without a problem from a usb stick and I'm really pleased with my purchase. Having such a small player that easily fits into a backpack with me at client visits is a advantage when you want to sell your work. Most people don't have a BR player yet but I make them a Mpeg2 BR file which can be stored on their laptop or ext drive without any extra cost, in that way they can come back later to have their wedding burned onto a BR disk.

Back to this WD TV device. Does it support Chapters? Say if we have chapters in our HD movie, can it be jump through chapters?