Look out Divx round two may be near! (1 Viewer)

[Thomas Newton]

I pretty much made my opinion clear that I thought it was a bad idea that has already failed miserably once (ala, Divx).

Twice, if you count DataPlay. Let's take an easy-to-lose disc with less storage capacity than CD, load it with DRM, shove on several "locked" albums on top of the album that the sucker^H^H^H^H^H^H customer gets to use -- and charge as much for this as for a CD.

No, the world was NOT eagerly awaiting DIVX-Audio.

 

[Travis Olson]

I think anything like Divx was is a bad idea. But if they were to provide a pay-per-play delivery system via the internet using encoding like DivX or some other flavor of MPEG-4, I might be interested. It would be convenient as well environmentally friendly to just download a movie with near DVD quality, watch it in the allowed time and delete it. MPEG-4 has come a long way. Though not as good as DVD's MPEG-2 for picture quality, it's damn close.

 

[James E]

The solution of corse is a 200GB harddrive and software from tigerdirect

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Jeff, they intend on selling these pieces of crap in airtight packages? Wouldn't it be fun to run a long needle down the center through a stack of them! They'd all be toast before they were even sold!

Also, and just for fun, I think I might go for this if the price was $1.00 That I could handle.

Glenn

 

[Olly Dean]

Do the people who come up with these ideas actually learn from previous experience? Why would I want to buy a disc that I can only watch a couple of times before it's rendered useless? It's a much better deal to do a conventional rental not to mention far less wasteful.

 

[Jussi Tarvainen]

The amount of waste this would generate troubles me much more than the potential adverse effect it might have on prices of retail DVDs.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

Heh heh heh... Now the suckers are going to have to sell me a DVD player that has a built-in internal clock to make sure I can only watch the disk for 48 hours. What they don't know is that my current player will be around for years and I never set the clocks on any of my gizmo's (Just ask my VCR).

 

[soop.spoon]

From an environmental stand-point, this concept sucks!

In this day and age there's got to be a better way to distribute media (read: VOD) than disposable plastic discs coated with chemicals.

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

I forget where I read it - someplace like CNN.com I'm sure - but I heard that several states including Calf. were discussing bills to ban these things. The idea being that they would just lead to landfill waste, etc. since they "are not reusable".

That's good news.

 

[Kristoffer Nobl]

I have got a great DIXV story. While I was in college I worked for CC. Of course like any self respecting home-theater enthusiasts, I HATED DIVX. Everybody from management to fellow employees would give me a hard time about it, but I always stuck to my guns and never strayed to the DIVX side despite the HUGE discounts we were offered on DIVX DVD players (sometimes almost 75% off). But anyways, the cool part of my story is on my very last day, which was about 2 months after they had announced the cancellation of DIVX, my manager asked me if I would help destroy all of the DIVX disk!!!! Who better than a DIVX hater to do the job. Well, let me tell you this. Divx Disk don't like sledge hammers.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Heh heh heh... Now the suckers are going to have to sell me a DVD player that has a built-in internal clock to make sure I can only watch the disk for 48 hours. What they don't know is that my current player will be around for years and I never set the clocks on any of my gizmo's (Just ask my VCR).

It has nothing to do with a clock. It's a chemical reaction with the oxygen in the air that causes the coating to turn opaque so the laser can't read the disc

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

It has nothing to do with a clock. It's a chemical reaction with the oxygen in the air that causes the coating to turn opaque so the laser can't read the disc

I thought it was a photochemical reaction that is caused by the laser. It doesn't start until you play the disc.

Anybody remember my old anti-Divx webpage? It still exists at http://members.cox.net/wbundrick/nodivx.htm

 

[David Lambert]

Actually, you're both right. Both versions exist.

 

[Peter Overduin]

Bring it on!

Things were never so exciting around here as they were during Round #1. I was priveleged to be a part of Round #1.

The road may be long, but...in the words of someone else we all know..."the outcome is certain."

Why are some people intentionally stupid? Last time it was a bunch of lawyers. Who's next?

 

[Malcolm R]

Could the "opaque coating" version be defeated by a Disc Doctor? Don't they essentially scour a layer of plastic off the disc to remove scratches and such?

Just throw it in the DD to scour away the layer that has oxidized, then you have another do-it-yourself 48 hour window. Just repeat whenever you want to watch until the plastic is entirely gone.

 

[MarkHastings]

They could market these discs by having their first release be "Mission Impossible"

Once you open the disc, a voice chip would say: "Warning, This disc will self-destruct in 48 hours"