UVD/hw acceleration If, when?

[bridgman]

Blacklisting everyone wouldn't be so bad for each individual company, but that's not a particularly likely scenario. The major risk is being the *only* company whose hardware gets blacklisted.

[highlandsun]

Blacklisting everyone wouldn't be so bad for each individual company, but that's not a particularly likely scenario. The major risk is being the *only* company whose hardware gets blacklisted.

Yes, which is why I said "AMD, Intel, and Nvidia". They may be bitter rivals but it makes sense to me for them to stand together and tell the entertainment industry to butt out of their designs.

[bridgman]

I guess the obvious question is why the HW vendors would do that, ie what potential benefit could outweigh the huge cost and risk. We would basically be telling all of our customers and partners "sorry, we know you insist on having these features but we're not going to provide them any more because... (why ?) ".

All that would do is hold the door wide open for a smaller company to come in and take over the high volume PC graphics market. They may not be able to compete in the high end but if all they had to do was implement display and basic video functionality it wouldn't be hard to do an end run around the "big three", particularly since all of the main PC manufacturers *and* ISVs would be encouraging them.

[highlandsun]

I guess the obvious question is why the HW vendors would do that, ie what potential benefit could outweigh the huge cost and risk. We would basically be telling all of our customers and partners "sorry, we know you insist on having these features but we're not going to provide them any more because... (why ?) ".

Because end-users don't want to pay for them. The R&D involved in adding DRM to the hardware doesn't benefit end-users, it just drives up costs.

All that would do is hold the door wide open for a smaller company to come in and take over the high volume PC graphics market. They may not be able to compete in the high end but if all they had to do was implement display and basic video functionality it wouldn't be hard to do an end run around the "big three", particularly since all of the main PC manufacturers *and* ISVs would be encouraging them.

If there were any such smaller company in existence capable of taking up the slack, they would be doing so already.

http://www.tcmagazine.com/tcm/news/misc/483/nvidia-amd-gain-pc-graphics-market-share-q1

Intel 43.5%
AMD 24%
Nvidia 31.5%

Total 99%

Matrox, SiS, VIA combined are less than 1% market share. If any of these companies put out a PC video card with full specs, full hardware video codec, good power efficiency, and no DRM, I would buy it today. The fact is, whatever any of these 3 companies decide to do, it would have zero impact on the overall market. Or, it would take years for any real impact to materialize, and in that time the Big 3 would have plenty of time to react and correct their course.

[bridgman]

Sorry, we're talking about different things. I said that if the big three banded together and refused to implement DRM then any smaller company who *did* still offer DRM would get a *lot* of business from the PC manufacturers so that they could maintain the feature set they offer today, including "legal in all juristictions" DVD and BluRay playback.

The reason there are no DRM-free HW vendors today is that no DRM = no sales into the majority of the PC/Mac market.

I know you can find other ways to play your video content but most users rely on receiving a ready-to-go solution from the PC manufacturer.

[droidhacker]

I think that more to the point, this kind of thing may not be entirely LEGAL. I also don't see much chance of these three actually agreeing to anything -- they kind of really all don't much like each other.

[Kjella]

So let them blacklist everyone. So what? Consumers want their media the way they want it. Do you think, just because the media industry decides not to provide media on PCs the way consumers want it, that consumers will suddenly start flocking back to movie theaters and start buying DVDs again? Not bloody likely.

The more likely outcome of this unlikely scenario is that the MPAA will tell the PC manufacturers to go fish and that as of now only standalone players will do DVD/BluRay. I imagine that can quite easily be done without AMD/nVidia/Intel. Microsoft will choke on it because it'll lower PC sales and probably refuse the "designed for Windows $foo" logo, give warnings on upgrade tests and so on. And for this to work they'd have to stand united first, good luck on getting nVidia on board. Otherwise they'd stand to make a killing after AMD and Intel are blacklisted. And it'll have to be a rather watertight agreement otherwise one will betray the rest and return to DRM for 30 silvers (inflation adjusted) while the others will pay dearly or be shut out of the market.

In short, forget any official change from that direction. What I hope will happen is that we'll get working HTML5 video and that eventually some movie company will let stores deliver it as plain HTML5 streams. But first we need a big HTML5 push, I hope YouTube will help. Blahblahb theora blahblah but I'd much rather get rid of flash and all the other wierd movie playing plugins than wait for theora to take off.

[jonwil]

Given what Google has just done with VP8, the world has moved one step closer to a world free of flash.

[droidhacker]

Given what Google has just done with VP8, the world has moved one step closer to a world free of flash.

Thats nice. How does it apply to the topic of this thread?

[jonwil]

It was in reference to the comment by Kjella about wanting to be rid of Flash and other proprietary plugins.