Re: Is VHS Dead?

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 10:03:30 +0200, ender wrote:

On Sun, 3 Sep 2006 19:44:35 -0400, Phil Yff wrote:

I believe it's more a software issue than a hardware one. The standalone
players tend to do things with imbedded chips that you need to do in
software with the PC versions. In other words, once you read the data on
the disk, it's just a question of decoding it for your player.

The issue is copy protection - Hollywood doesn't want you to watch
high-definition content with your existing hardware - you have to change to
something that encrypts the signal everywhere you'd be able to intercept it
(for this reason, Vista x86 will likely not be able to play HD content,
because the industry fears that somebody'll load a kernel driver that would
capture the video from memory, something that'll be impossible [or at least
much harder to do] on 64bit Vista).

I don't believe there's anything special about the Qosmio other than it is
a power house with a dual Centrino processor. However, there are gaming
laptops with more powerful video cards.

Hardware power isn't an issue at all - both my desktop and my laptop are
perfectly capable of playing 1080p h.264 video (I tested with some
trailers), but neither of them has graphic card that would support HDCP
encryption of the digital signal.

Yes. If you're computer can play high resolution games, it can handle
1080p HD-DVDs. The demands of the game on your computer resources are
greater than the demands of an HD-DVD. There are a few dedicated gaming
laptops that put the Qosmio to shame and just about any desktop gaming
setup will run rings around the graphic performance of the Qosmio.

Where the Qosmio excels is in its multimedia capabilities. There's more
than one model so please note the one I'm talking about is the HDTV model
with HD-DVD drive. The Qosmio can accept HDTV cable or satellite input, it
has a built-in HDTV receiver, and the model I saw demonstrated had the
HD-DVD drive. These components are not unique to the Qosmio. It's just
that today very few laptops have them. However, I've seen a variety of
receivers, video capture cards, and so on that can provide you with a TV
viewing experience on your PC. Note that these are specialized cards that
provide different capabilities from your your video graphics card.

Mata ato de,

Phil Yff

.

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