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微软为什么支持HD-DVD,这里提到了部分原因
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=11405184&postcount=2796
So you asked about our motivations in this business. As a company who makes a few dollars on the side , we are not as motivated by dollars as some other companies. As such, our top goal has and will continue to be strategic. But there is also a revenue component to it which I will get into at the end of this post.
On strategic front, we had one high level goal: to make these formats friendly to PCs and home networks/Internet (the project started when my group lived in Windows division). As you know, every PC ships with built-in networking. And PCs are almost always connected to the Internet. They also have a ton of storage courtesy of continued capacity increases in hard disk storage. Yet the most commonly used video format, DVD, disallows copying to hard disk, and streaming to other devices (although this part was remedied last year). So our initial foray into this space was to see if we could make the next generation formats friendlier with things that we cared about.
First up was the video compression. We lived and breathed WMV (precursor to VC-1) since MPEG-2 was not suitable for internet delivery of content and was super expensive to boot ($2.50/copy). We saw an opportunity to have VC-1 be in the format and with it, have a shared video decoding standard between the PC/Internet and CE devices. I won’t repeat the history here but we managed to get VC-1 adopted in both HD DVD and BD.
Next up was dealing with copy protection in these formats. Fortunately for us, a new group was formed – AACS – to deal with this for HD DVD. Due to our work in content management, we received a nice invitation and joined up as a founder. First up was establishing what all the parties cared about. As you can imagine, content folks wanted a much more robust system than DVD. In our corner, we asked for managed copy. That is, the ability to make a copy of disc. We thought that by allowing this copy, we could let customers stream content on their home networks. And of course, benefit the PC to some extent since it has storage and networking built-in (note however that managed copy works on any device, not just the PC).
After that was the application layer or interactivity. Here, frankly speaking, our main motivation was to reduce support calls! DVD had turned out to be the cause of many support calls for Windows, costing us millions of dollars per year. Title compatibility was a pain (as were myriads of A/V decoders which would cause each other to crash or do weird things). So when we heard people talk about turning these boxes into “virtual machines” and “program them,” it scared the pants off of us. We feared that we would see poorly written and tested application on these discs, which would result in substantially higher number of support calls.
So when Disney came to us asking for such an application environment, we set out to design a system that provided the benefits that they were asking for, but with a level of simplicity which would avoid much potential for grief. I am not sure we have fully succeeded in this goal , as HDi also has its challenges but this was our motivation. Next, we put a bunch of smart people and next thing we know, they designed an elegant system we now call HDi .
The other strategic goal beyond the layers of the cake being right, was growth of HD optical business. At the time, there was malaise setting in PC business with people wondering why anyone would need a PC faster than 1 Ghz. They said MS Office ran just fine in machines even slower than this so nothing faster was needed. This got us worried about the growth of PC business in the consumer business. Seeing how HD playback would require much faster PCs, we thought that if we could accelerate development and delivery of HD optical, we could increase PC purchase rate.
When we dug into both formats, we got quite concerned when we saw the difficulties BDA was facing with manufacturing of their discs. At the time, they could not even master BD-50s, let alone manufacture them. We talked to every replicator, visited both HD DVD and BD plants and it became obvious to us that BD process itself could stifle the growth of this business with slow roll out of the disc. HD DVD on the other hand, with advanced codecs, was ready to go. This together with loss of design win for HDi and addition of BD+, pushed us into HD DVD camp.
The other reason for backing HD DVD came to human interactions and process. It was difficult to get a board seat in DVD Forum but once there, we were welcomed nicely and we managed to have an influential role. Together with studios such as Disney and Warner, we managed to get a lot done form interactivity to codec selection (audio and video). In contrast, we found BDA quite closed and with a tier system that made it clear who had power, and who did not. Our experience in getting VC-1 adopted there was challenging to say the least. And HDi made it worse in that their technical group voted for it, but their board overturned the decision and went with Java. I won’t repeat the BD+ story but that was another example of difficulty in dealing with the organization and companies involved.
The above may not seem significant but I venture to say that half the reason there is a format war and companies take sides comes down to those interpersonal factors! I am sure Talk would be in our camp and singing the benefits of HD DVD, had DVD forum not soundly rejected Java in favor of HDi. On our side, I still remember the day BDA companies told us to get lost because they had Dell and HP on their side and had no use for Microsoft since they had our hardware partners there. And they would simply ship BD drives and as such, make us have no influence whatsoever. Wonder what they think of that statement now .
So that is probably most of what went on the strategic front. On financial front, as part of our collaboration with Toshiba to help them ship their first gen HD DVD player, we wound up with a pretty good implementation of HDi. We further refined this when we shipped in Xbox 360. We license this implementation today to companies who wish to build HD DVD or dual format players. Of course, people can go and implement HD DVD interactivity from the spec as PC companies have done for example. But if they want a quality/performant implementation we have one for them. Given the the small market today, this business doesn’t amount to a lot royalties but over time, it might pay for a few of us to hang around here and answer your questions .
There are some other tidbits here which I am probably forgetting. But this should give some idea of why we are involved in this space.
I told you it was not a short post .
__________________
Amir
Microsoft (HD DVD insider)
VC-1 video codec insider in BD/HD DVD
Ask me questions about HD DVD here
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楼主: pigo
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发表于 2007-8-24 14:55
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