Edshugeo The GodMoor

Not this blog. I've just been lazy chillin'.

DRM for music downloads.

The last major label will throw in the towel on digital rights management and prepare to fight Apple for valuable download revenues.

Sony-BMG are dipping their feet in the waters of the DRM free market by starting to offer some of their music.

About iTunes and their competition, it is said;

Still, no service has yet been able to offer DRM-free music downloads from all four major labels. Amazon could yet become a contender.

If a store becomes a popular place to shop, then of course it makes sense to have your music available there, if you can. However, it isn't necessary for the consumer to have only one website to get all our downloads. It's not like having to travel a few miles to another store. Most of what I buy comes from eMusic, everything else is either "found" or bought on CD, though that's more of a rarity for me nowadays. Though I still think 99 cents is too much for a MP3, I have come close on a couple of occasions to buying music on iTunes (Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon) and Amazon (a compilation from Nine Inch Nails, Still), both of which are priced at about eight bucks. And both DRM-free.

If, as a record company, one doesn't like iTunes, there's no reason why Sony, Warners, or any other big company can't sell DRM-free music on their own sites, as long as they aren't stupid about it (there was that Sony site a while back that only worked on Internet Explorer). Plus they would make whatever change that would normally go to iTunes/whoever.

Also Dead?

HD-DVD

As prices started to come down, I came close to getting an HD-DVD player, but came to my senses. Now it appears that Warner's is supporting Blu-Ray, leaving HD-DVD with about 30% of the Hollywood studios on their side. A while back, I was rooting for HD-VMD, but they were a long shot even before the price drops.

Folks are declaring the format war over, though it might be best to wait and see. Also Blu-Ray player prices are not where they need to be, yet. Especially for full spec players. Many of the players on the market only contain few of the features of the Blu-Ray spec. Typical of Sony in the last few years to release hardware that does a little bit of what it's supposed to do. Some would say, all it really needs to do is play the movies. Sure, if it was a machine costing less than 200 bucks, but right now they're much more expensive than that.

PS3 is still a non-issue for me. I'm not exactly starving for games for my XBox 360, so until Sony's "superior technology" actually does something interesting on the gaming front, I'll have no need for it.

Speaking of the XBox, I rented the movie, Ratatouille from XBox Live last week. I was curious as to what Hi-Def content looked like on the console, especially since the sizes of their movie files (4-6 GB, generally) would fit on a standard dual layer DVD. The resolution of Hi-Def on XBL is 720p vs. 1080i for most hi-def on Cablevision (sports on cable tends to be on 720p, though). The movie looked very good and I noticed no quality difference between this and a movie on Hi-def cable. Except for the lack of pixelation. There was none of it during Ratatouille. On a hi-def channel on cable, there's plenty of it during fast motion action, or during scenes that contain flickering lights. I initially thought this might be a limitation of my relatively cheap Olevia TV, but I doubt that now.

I'd been using HDMI on my Xbox and component cables on the HD cable box/DVR. The tv has only one HDMI input. Today (Jan 5th '08) I switched the HDMI cable to the set top box and watched a little bit of Yuen Wo Ping's Tiger Cage 2 (which was on the DVR) and noticed an improvement on motion scenes. Just a tiny bit of pixelation in one scene and they (the pixels) were much smaller. It was a worn film print, so I wasn't able to notice any picture improvement, and more time will be needed to see if HDMI really has reduced the pixelation issue. Jury seems to be out as to which is clearly better, but it seems to depend on the equipment. I may have to get an HDMI switch, but I'll wait till I get a Hi-Def player of some sort. Now to see if the XBox 360 suffers from component cables...

I won't be downloading much in the way of movies from XBL, though. 480 points, translates into about six dollars and change, plus tax. I didn't time the 5 Gb download, but it took a while.
Downloading to hard drives is great for rentals, but bad for owned content (and the only good use of DRM). If they bring it down to 3 bucks, I'll do a lot more of it.

Standard DVD still wins. Until a decent Blu-ray player (not the half ass shit that's out there) hits at 300 bucks and below.

Labels: kung fu, movies, music business, PS3, technology, XBox 360