Spring Break
Motion Picture Association of America lawsuits futile
Cork Board
By: Paul Corkery
Issue date: 11/19/04 Section: Sci-Tech
Originally published: 11/18/04 at 10:22 PM EST
Last update: 11/19/04 at 1:37 PM EST
Originally published: 11/18/04 at 10:22 PM EST
Last update: 11/19/04 at 1:37 PM EST
Although DVDs do not feature advanced copy protection, they are not as easily copied (ripped) to disk. Encoding DVD video and audio requires a more advanced skill set.
Several products like DVDXCopy (parent company went belly-up after being sued by the MPAA) have been released, designed to simplify the process for consumers, but none have reached the "insert disk and click" simplicity of CD encoding. This process also takes much longer than CD encoding, depending on available processing power, and the files produced are extremely large.
DVDs, having multiple recording layers and thus containing more data than conventional CDs produce movie files that can be several gigabytes in size uncompressed. Uncompressed music files are around 50MB depending on track length. This astronomical size hampers the portability of these files, so obviously the solution is compression.
By sacrificing debatable amounts of quality, it is possible to reduce a full length movie to less than 1 GB in size. The process for doing this is not only complex, but can require an immense amount of time and processing power. Although significantly smaller than its lossless format, compressed movie files still restrict file portability.
Broadband is finding its way into many homes across America, but many are still limited to slow dial-up speeds that would require several days to download a full-length compressed movie. Even broadband subscribers may have to wait several days to download such large files through P2P services depending on the bandwidth afforded by the source. Although there are alternative means of downloading these files in a speedier fashion (BitTorrent, etc), many have not found their way into the mainstream, and are primarily utilized by advanced users.
There is still heated debate regarding how much of a hit the record industry took from music file-swapping, but the figures for movie file-swapping are certainly not as significant.
The DVD format has been a blessing for the movie industry. Sales of the format have been astronomical since its introduction. People are re-buying titles they owned on VHS, because of the superior quality and extra features offered with DVDs.
Several products like DVDXCopy (parent company went belly-up after being sued by the MPAA) have been released, designed to simplify the process for consumers, but none have reached the "insert disk and click" simplicity of CD encoding. This process also takes much longer than CD encoding, depending on available processing power, and the files produced are extremely large.
DVDs, having multiple recording layers and thus containing more data than conventional CDs produce movie files that can be several gigabytes in size uncompressed. Uncompressed music files are around 50MB depending on track length. This astronomical size hampers the portability of these files, so obviously the solution is compression.
By sacrificing debatable amounts of quality, it is possible to reduce a full length movie to less than 1 GB in size. The process for doing this is not only complex, but can require an immense amount of time and processing power. Although significantly smaller than its lossless format, compressed movie files still restrict file portability.
Broadband is finding its way into many homes across America, but many are still limited to slow dial-up speeds that would require several days to download a full-length compressed movie. Even broadband subscribers may have to wait several days to download such large files through P2P services depending on the bandwidth afforded by the source. Although there are alternative means of downloading these files in a speedier fashion (BitTorrent, etc), many have not found their way into the mainstream, and are primarily utilized by advanced users.
There is still heated debate regarding how much of a hit the record industry took from music file-swapping, but the figures for movie file-swapping are certainly not as significant.
The DVD format has been a blessing for the movie industry. Sales of the format have been astronomical since its introduction. People are re-buying titles they owned on VHS, because of the superior quality and extra features offered with DVDs.
