| Author | Message | ||
     Larry Elie (Ldeliecomcastnet) Advanced Member Username: Ldeliecomcastnet Post Number: 86 Registered: 10-2006 Rating: N/A |
A long time ago I posted that I thought the future of 3D would be Blu-Ray. The thread went on for years. Now, on the verge of Sony launching 3D Blu-Rays this year, I'm going to say that Blu-Ray will soon (a few years) pass. Blu-Ray's, and the DVD's, VCD's and CD's that preceded them are just file structures in a sort of convenient format. Over the last 18 months, I have been converting my VHS/DVD/Blu-Ray library to a video-server. My library is bigger than most anyone's (2000 films) as I have been running a free theater for the last 8 years, and I get a lot of material to preview or other submissions. My 3D library is a fraction of that, but still pretty good. This thread is about video servers. I have had 3 so far. They are basically a simple mined over-built external drive. Two of the ones I had were IDE, one was SATA II. All are really a little ARM processor running a Linux shell that has a file utility and a play utility, a remote, a USB-2 connection, and a wired (and wireless) internet connection. CD's, VCD's, DVD's and Blu-Ray's are converted with one of the many DVD 'rip' programs out there like FairUse or DVDFab. The file is transferred to the big hard drive (I use 2Tb drives) and you connect up to whatever you have. I use HDMI or Component video. I find that Mpeg4 (XVID version) is a good choice with as many files as I have for DVD, and for Blu-Ray I leave them in Transport Stream format. When I have more Blu-Rays, I'm going to have to do something more. That way my DVD collection stays on the big library wall in the basement (7' high and 20' long… full too). Between 1,000 and 2,000 films are storable at DVD quality levels on one drive. I'm not storing all the 'extra features' at this point, just the video files. But that's the point. They are JUST FILES. Blu-Ray's are bigger, but at the moment, I only have to keep to original media because that's what the law says. Everything I do is legal; I own all the discs. Other than being able to loan people things, they are just there taking up space. Does anyone think that the future of media will be anything other than files on a drive? Sure, it might not be a hard drive, if huge flash memory continues to drop in price, but it won't be a shiny disc. I can find anything and play it in seconds. I don't have to worry if I've loaned it out or not. The future of 3D video will be just served files. Any other thoughts? | ||
| Tony Asch (Tone) Junior Member Username: Tone Post Number: 27 Registered: 8-2006 Rating: N/A |
In the long run, they'll be files in the cloud streaming to whatever device you like. The rub comes when the cloud company and the transport company have a financial interest in the content you're streaming. Markets have a way of sorting that stuff out, especially internet markets. Most of the technology is in place: I've got 100mbit fiber to the house, although Verizon only rents me 25mbit for internet use, and reserves the rest for video on-demand, both free and paid. I can stream three HD on-demand programs simultaneously and still maintain a full speed internet connection. My LG BD390 blu-ray player streams from multiple video servers in the house ("video server" is somewhat of a stretch... just any computer with a share and Windows Media Player, TVersity, etc...) The BD 390 also streams from Youtube, Netflix, yada yada. The external links are still somewhat of a walled garden, but the technology is there. We just need someone to cook up a business model which keeps movies in the cloud and sells virtual rights both permanently and temporarily to consumers. After all, does the world need millions of dupes of "The Postman" stored on hard disk? From the studio's point of view this should be revenue neutral or perhaps even better. The money that goes into pressing DVDs, packaging, distribution, retail mark up, etc... could instead be applied to cloud storage and peering. Personally, I don't think the studios are far sighted enough to jump on this, but nature abhors a vacuum, somebody will step into the breach and grind down the media moguls' walled garden. Not this year, or next.... but perhaps in 5 or 10 years. Yes, to paraphrase Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston): Movies is files! Do we need hundreds of millions of hard disks and billions of file copies? No. Today's barriers to a cloud based server system are primarily legal (for instance: Cablevision's remote storage DVR court battle with the media companies), finding an optimal business model, and establishing clear license and ownership rights for cloud media that assures both consumers and producers that they're getting similar benefits to buying, selling, and renting hard DVD media. So... yes media will be just something on a drive, but where that drive will be located: in the home or in the cloud is the big question. VRtifacts.com | ||
| Larry Elie (Ldeliecomcastnet) Advanced Member Username: Ldeliecomcastnet Post Number: 88 Registered: 10-2006 Rating: N/A |
Tony, you are right about this in a 'rational' way. We aren't always that rational. Rationally, why do we need a million copies of a newspaper? Or a million copies of a book? Sure, online newspapers and books are thriving, but the printers aren't going out of business yet. Assuming that bigger drives get even cheaper, or flash grows into the TB range, that arguement gets even stronger. I have already said that I don't think I will keep a shiny copy, but owning something, even if it's only a bunch of ordered bits, might be something that some people like me want to do. In the computer? In the server? On the net? How about all of the above? | ||
| Tony Asch (Tone) Junior Member Username: Tone Post Number: 30 Registered: 8-2006 Rating: N/A |
Larry, actually the printed newspaper is headed down the path of the buggy whip. Just ask the thousands of laid off writers, editors, advertising salespersons, etc... Blame the forces of the internet and the unintended consequence that consumers prefer twitter size editorial chunks rather than long form. (I just realized that the root of the word twitter is "twit") Practically speaking, the average consumer won't really care whether their media is stored on a local server or up in the cloud. Whatever's cheapest and easiest. Either way, it has to be completely a black box... the average Joe/Jane doesn't know from server admin. The second essential piece of this transformation is: information. People will want instant access to detailed info about the media they're watching: instant access to IMDB, Wikipedia, review sites, etc... Can't be a walled garden. They will want to be able to interlink this info in personalized ways, i.e. what else have I seen by this director? Can I find another movie where Adrienne Barbeau appears topless? Think analogously to Google Goggles, where I pause a film, drag a bounding box around an actor's face, and the system instantly recognizes the face and context, and dumps reams of interlinked information back at me. If my Droid can already do this today, why can't my media system? Why do I have to aim my phone at the TV to get the juicy stuff? Finally, the old school concept of "channels" will fade. Am I interested in watching that post-apocalyptic episode of the Simpsons, or do I want to watch channel 505? Servers and streaming imply unscheduled viewing. There's no need for channels as we know them. Instead, information and personal preferences come into play. I like Julie Kavner, so I create a Kavner channel starting with the Simpsons, Tracey Ullman, Hannah and Her Sisters, etc... I could care less that they're "on" channels 505, 1427, and 903. Our initial discussion pits the cloud vs. local storage. We as consumers have to become more comfortable and trusting about the cloud, and SaaS vendors have to work hard to engender that trust. Google's success with Google Apps shows us that consumers and business will adopt Saas/cloud based solutions to their computer needs. TV and film are on a long 100+ year road from complete vertical integration to complete fragmentation. In many ways, the 3D craze of the '50s was atavistic; an attempt by the film industry to stave off the media industry changes threatened by television. But I digress...local vs. cloud storage? Doesn't much matter. I tend to lean towards the cloud because it will be easier to interlink personalized information. Also the cloud unburdens the consumer from server maintenance. However, either way, I'm looking forward to that brave new world. VRtifacts.com | ||
| Larry Elie (Ldeliecomcastnet) Advanced Member Username: Ldeliecomcastnet Post Number: 89 Registered: 10-2006 Rating: N/A |
Tony, I didn't really mean to bait you by throwing 'newspapers' into the mix, but it worked out well. Note I said 'print' was thriving. Price a textbook... Newspapers are dying because of the price of advertising which cannot be spread as much as they would like. So it's really about money. Network advertising is doing quite well, as seedy as it is. If I want something in the 'cloud' and even if I want to pay for it I get to watch advertising, perhaps just in the form of previews. Oh, and the advertising comes first, which I consider a total waste of bandwidth. Yes, I have a fast connection too-- except that the movie site I go to watch tonight has a gazillion others trying to access... and their adds have to come first too. So I prefer to own my bits. Most things served to me I capture, at least for a time, in some sort of buffer. Some I keep, some not. In either case, I just don't expect to keep shiny media in a few years. Just files. No, I don't horad old newspapers. But for legal reasons (and because of the theater I run and it's licence) I DO have to hoard DVD's. There's the pity. | ||
| Fronzel Neekburm (Fronzel) Member Username: Fronzel Post Number: 44 Registered: 7-2009 Rating: N/A |
The future... Maybe one day there will be no media and movies will be completely distributed as a file, maybe not? You could already get movies for download in 2004, so what's actually future about it? Just the resolution? I'd rather hoard movies on DVDs than on a HDD. Call me old fashioned, but I've been through that, done that. It's cool to have 1000 movies on a HDD, but it's really uncool when it breaks without further notice and everything is lost. Of course you could built up a mirrored system with several devices that get you redundancy, but seriously - i lack the use of that. I don't have thousand movies (Not even 100), i don't have a theater and i usually lack the time to watch movies very often. I recently deleted loads of movies from my HDD - wanna know why? because i already watched them. Imho of today's movies only few are that good that i wanna watch them again. Maybe one day you can only get movies as a download or maybe not even as a file - login to the movie site and watch your Super-HD movie streaming like on youtube. But when i have a virus, forgot my password, broke my internet modem or just threw my PC out of the window I'll definitely think back to the days of hoarding DVDs and how it wasn't as bad as it looked back then. | ||
| Tony Asch (Tone) Junior Member Username: Tone Post Number: 31 Registered: 8-2006 Rating: N/A |
Fronzel: It's even cooler to have 100,000 movies on somebody else's hard disks. That's why the cloud model is so appealing, maximum content and minimal maintenance. They (Google, Verizon, Netflix, Comcast, etc...) handle all the crashed disks, viruses, and flying PC issues. I agree... watching movies on your computer isn't much fun. That's part of the appeal of internet enabled Blu-ray players and cable/fiber set-top boxes. There's plenty of HD streamed content available on Verizon's FIOS, much of it free. Netflix streams HD direct to blu-ray players as do several other sources. Verizon's cloud implementation is simple, but each customer gets a dedicated fiber optic line all the way from their home to the video servers in their COs. Verizon may have messed up on many other aspects of their FIOS TV, but the raw streaming capacity is awesome. No modems, no passwords, no viruses, no PCs. It's a start. VRtifacts.com | ||
| Larry Elie (Ldeliecomcastnet) Advanced Member Username: Ldeliecomcastnet Post Number: 90 Registered: 10-2006 Rating: N/A |
Yes Tony, but what about the 100 hours of 'home moveies'? Well, I have substantially more than that. Or the 50 hours of literally 'one-of-a-kind' films that you may have the only copy of? Before you say that is unlikely, I have prints from 16mm that were never released on VHS, let alone DVD. Someone somewhere has to have the original content. Oh, and what about all those 3D slides? Good grief, I even have converted Viewmaster slides on drives. Besides, there are a half-dozen ways of watching content other than off some PC. Yes, my tiny servers can only handle about 2 peaople at a time, which is a lot less than Verizon. How many people can they let watch the same film at one time? A lot more than me I'm sure, especially for 'recent' releases where they keep multiple copies just for such a time. Yes, and they get to do the backup too, instead of me being stuck with it. Hmm.... I wonder if they will serve the 2K and 4K theatrical files when we have left 1080p in the dust. They too are just files. I wouldn't want to keep too many of them with this generation hardware. They really are big. | ||
| Fronzel Neekburm (Fronzel) Member Username: Fronzel Post Number: 46 Registered: 7-2009 Rating: N/A |
I think both sides (hard media vs cloud computing) have their ups and downs. My dad and me have had several disc crashes in the past year and while my dad is a big "backup" fan i just have way too much crap and lack the time and hardware to do frequent backups. Cloud computing would be a solution for me if i had much faster internet. I can download a max of 300 KB per second because they don't wanna spend money for the big lines here in the furthest outskirts, so with a normal resolution video this might work fluid with some luck and buffering, but for HD content i would definitely need a faster line. I tried some of the youtube HD stuff and its no fun as i can click on pause and wait ages untill its all buffered or live with seeing 1 second fragments after each 10 seconds buffering. Yeah youtube buffering is soooooo clever... -.- Call me this conspiracy theory guy, but i have bad feelings about having my whole HDD on some distant cloud computing platform. Even if they claim they never look at it I'd feel like the "transparent man", at least not comfortable. And when your internet is down, computer broken or your verizon contact expired? I don't think they'll send me like a 2 TB HDD and be like "here's your stuff, sincerely your ex-provider". SO at least if the files have a remote value the idea isn't too far off to have a local copy of it. And here it's again the 2000 DVDs (alas, i just try to imagine it) or the mirrored HDDs. And now that we're back to the mirrored HDDs it would be uncool to stream it from the internet if you already have it on your own harddrive, eh? But maybe we reach this state one day, where the normal person trusts googles (or verizons?) cloud drive more than your own hdd and its safe and seecure and backed up and full of privacy and extremely free. And you have internet always everywhere in awesome speeds, even your wristwatch has full HD broadband. Is this the distant future, will i be old then? Probably not. If you look at music the market already starts shifting from CD sales to mp3 sales. And itunes really heavily caught up with TV series, starting to heavily compete with the classic "TV series on DVD" concept. I guess it's just a question of time when it will be more popular to buy a classic avatar 3D HD directors cut from itunes instead from amazon. |
