Windows Media 9 in Digital Theaters 639
SpamJunkie writes "Feel like watching new releases in 7.1 surround sound with full digital video? It's coming, not with MPEG 4 but with Windows Media 9. Microsoft announced it is bringing Windows Media 9 to 177 screens in Landmark Theaters."
WM9 Is a good codec (Score:4, Informative)
WM9 *is* MPEG-4 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let's give a collective... (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you also never watched a DVD? That video is compressed with a lossy compression scheme, yet it still looks good. Why? Variable compression. Someone just didn't pop a tape into a tape player, hit play, then click the record button on a computer. There are actually people that go through and master these things over a period of weeks or months to make the video stream as small as possible while trying to make it as quality as possible. There are also all sorts of measurement and analysis tools applied to it along the way to remove scratches from the film transfer, and to make multiple streams of audio (for foreign languages, commentary tracks, and I've even seen some DVDs that not only support the AC3 digital surround, but will have a Dolby Prologic encoded stream.)
Re:if the theater is running windows for movies (Score:2, Informative)
Standards (Score:2, Informative)
Variety.com Article (Score:4, Informative)
And for those who hate trial subscriptions, here's the full text:
Landmark going digital
All auditoriums nationwide to be outfitted with d-cinema
By CARL DIORIO [variety.com]
Arthouse giant Landmark Theaters will today announce plans to outfit its entire 177-screen circuit for digital cinema and a related effort to deal directly with filmmakers lacking distribution for their low-budget digital video features.
The d-cinema initiative involves a joint venture with Microsoft and L.A.-based Digital Cinema Solutions. Terms weren't available, but it's believed the unique three-way relationship will shave Landmark's costs to a fraction of the usual $100,000-plus per screen to install most d-cinema systems.
All auditoriums in Landmark's 53 theaters, located in 20 markets nationwide, will be outfitted with d-cinema playback systems based on Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series. DCS will select digital projectors from a variety of manufacturers.
The Windows Media systems are substantially less expensive than other systems, because they essentially represent off-the-shelf technology, officials said. The playback systems will be married to relatively inexpensive digital projectors, because the smaller size of its screens requires less illumination to project an image of acceptable resolution.
Landmark chief Paul Richardson said he doesn't expect a lot of immediate interest from specialty distribs in converting their primary releases for digital distribution. But he believes they may be more inclined to acquire niche pics shot in digital video than previously.
"There's a whole bunch of product that doesn't get picked up at the film festivals because people don't believe it's worth the cost to invest the money to make a master print, which can cost $50,0000-$60,000," Richardson said. "But for $6,000-$8,000, you can encode the film for digital (to) play our circuit, and I think some distributors will be interested in doing that."
Landmark and its joint venture partners will also ante up the encoding costs for some number of pics, he said. "We're not going to bid on films against the guys in the business," the Landmark CEO said, noting he won't be personally prowling any film markets.
"The films we're going to package are maybe a year old and haven't gotten picked up yet," he explained. "Those people are in contact with us all the time."
In the past, Landmark's steered such filmmakers to various indie distribs but now will deal with them more directly in some instances. Richardson said he's not sure how many such pics the joint venture partners themselves will distribute, nor have they identified a likely first release to run through the digital circuit.
"We're starting out on an adventure here, and we really don't have a road map," he acknowledged. "We have a huge opportunity, but we're just not exactly sure where that opportunity is going to evidence itself."
Landmark aims to outfit all of its screens for digital projection by December. "We're starting on the smaller auditoriums first, because that's where these pictures will play," Richardson said.
Landmark and Microsoft previously collaborated on a small number of digital installations in connection with the BMW Films digital shorts series. For that series, which features BMW autos in several digitally produced action shorts, DCS installed d-cinema systems in a couple dozen theaters, including several Landmark sites.
Landmark also used Microsoft-outfitted auditoriums to exhib Artisan's recent music docu "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" in nine locations.
Re:Let's give a collective... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:WM9 Is a good codec (Score:3, Informative)
I've played around with encoding HDTV to Xvid also and the consensus on all the hdtv forums is that Xvid is slightly inferior to wme9 in terms of quality and file size. Although the benfit with Xvid is you can use AC3 sound instead of microsoft's proprietary surround sound codec.
Re:DRM crawling its way as much as it can (Score:2, Informative)
Here [theora.org].
DVD looks like crap on the big screen (Score:1, Informative)
Anyways, it looked absolutely rotten on the big screen. The big screen really brought out some ugly artifacting, especially around background details.
This happened to me on a flight (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Piracy? (Score:1, Informative)
The current state of play with MS DRM from the AntiDRM research labs:
MS-DRMv1 - with-licence system crack, built on DMO whole-library wrapping (like unfuck only without the shitty transcode, grabbing the data as it passes out of the blackbox).
MS-DRMv2 - without-licence system crack, built on a cryptographic attack inspired by Beale Screamer.
Yes, that's right - v1 is stronger than v2, because with v2 they decided they wanted to get something for nothing and embedded the keys with a MAC. Not exactly best practice. In fact, a Very Bad Idea because Multiswap is two-way reversible, has a vastly reduced keyspace, clearly detectable patterns and is overlaid on top of data that contains known structures encoded in ARCFOUR. ARCFOUR, as you may recall if you are in the know, has been roundly cracked for any keysize (not a tremendous surprise - it's just not ugly enough) if you have known plaintext, which of course you do (because you use the first block, with the headers), and if only one pass is used, which it is.
That means a total system break of originally encoded MS-DRMv2 files, without any licence key required - break the first block, use that key on the rest and you get a free (bad) checksum (with MultiSwap's redundancy) to check you did it right. Throw in a ASF packet validator (and decode if you wish) and you have a clean file, chunk by chunk as you want it with zero extra overhead.
Now, a different session key is used for each block in some files (this is noted as DRMv2.5), but that doesn't really help as this attack can be repeated for every block. Best of all, because Multiswap is reversible, after a few blocks you can start to guess the session keys - about 100KB in you switch to brute force with about 16-bits of guesswork left. Then you've got the licence key, and can generate the session keys for each packet as they come... and you get a free (bad) checksum (with MultiSwap's redundancy) in each packet to check you did it right. Throw in a ASF packet validator (and decode if you wish) and you have a clean file, chunk by chunk as you want it with zero extra overhead. Again.
There is no new DRM file format for WM9. It still rips protected content to MS-DRMv1 (because MS-DRMv2 requires a signed key to "provide the service"), and stil supports MS-DRMv2. The formats are the same. Some of the drivers have changed (the blackbox obfuscation has changed - unfortunately Vexmon still eats it alive, as MS are still testing with SoftIce, FrogsIce and IDA32 and have barely even heard of Olly), but that's an architecture tweak to clearly separate the blackbox DRM components from the rest of the player (weirdly, becuase it's bundled in end-user builds).
An end-user tool to crack all MS-DRM-protected files is in development. You still need a licence for MS-DRMv1 protected files (oddly, the vast majority of DRM files in the wild, which are not common anyway; personal "protected content" ripped (badly) using WMP) but once unprotected, they stay that way.
Given that MS actually managed to make their DRM worse with successive revisions, I'm really not that afraid of Palladium either. Bring it on. It'll fall. Everything falls.
WMV9 is NOT MPEG-4 (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the difference is a lot bigger than 30%. It's more like 100% more for MPEG-2, with the gap increasing as data rates get lower.
Did you try to play WM9 with a ref MPEG4 decoder? (Score:3, Informative)
The I- and P- frame concept are extremely old and in use in almost every video codec out there. They took some good ideas from MPEG4, but have been going in their own direction ever since.
Kjella