Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Question about PCM lossless and optical cable

You hit the nail on the head, they don't want you to be able to share it as easily. Plus think of all the costs they will cut... no physical inventory, no shipping costs, no damage product or returns to deal with, no theft, no loss due to fire or other natural disasters to worry about. Remember, the future is all about their profitability, not your convenience!

Yeah, I can see the upside for the companies, but consumers still dictate what succeeds, which is why it's discouraging to see downloads making headway.

It's not like BD is much better--yeah, they can't remove it from you, but they certainly lock down features like crazy--and I'm not just talking about copy restrictions. What about component video? They completely killed it. It's definitely good enough for 720p (possibly 1080i/p?), but it's simply not allowed. Why do electronics companies let content creators dictate how their products work?

Even with BD's restrictions, I can still share them with people, and I don't have to rely on someone's remote storage of my content. That being said, you're right that nixing component as a viable output option was just stupid. As for why electronics companies bow to content creators... I imagine it's because the content is why people are buying the electronics in the first place. If they're not on board, good luck getting the devices to sell. Right? Maybe. I'm getting a little tired in the brain.

Same here. I agree. Look what happened recently with Amazon's Kindle. They pulled a book and remotely deleted the title from hundreds, if not thousands, of customers completely without warning. Even with the refund they issues that would really piss me off. It became a PR nightmare for them.

Given the behavior of the movie studios, I wouldn't put it past them to decide to suddenly change the terms of the agreement and remotely expire or delete titles unannounced and as they saw fit.

In other words, digital downloads with DRM leave the big-brother factor in play. I don't mind that on its own, but I do mind it being in the hands of the movies studios - which to date have repeatedly shown fairly poor greed driven judgment when it comes to dealing with consumers.

To a certain extent maybe. They might give consumers the choice between two new formats and let us decide which of those formats succeeds... like introducing VHS & beta, and we chose VHS. Or recently giving us HDDVD & Blu-Ray, we chose Blu-Ray.

But when they really want to steer away from something they don't give us a whole lot of say in the matter. For instance I don't think the general public really wanted vinyl to disappear, there is still a strong vinyl following today. But they moved away from it and simply stopped producing records. Then there is the recent switch to digital television... that was overwhelmingly the telecommunications decision to make that move because it was so lucrative.. The general public was so against it that the switch over date got pushed back and back and back some more (the original date was sometime in 2005). But they finally got their way and basically said to people without digital tv's, "tough luck"!

So I have no doubts that if they really want to go in this direction, they will give us a few choices on WHICH download service we want to use, but that's as much choice in the matter as we will get. The players will all have the ability to hook-up to the internet and stream the movies all by themselves, people won't even have to own a computer.

There's just too much money to be saved by moving away from physical inventory not to do it really. I'm not saying I want it any more than you do. I'm just saying from a business standpoint its going to save studio's a TON of money. Not to mention the ability to control piracy, which is enemy #1 in their eye's.

Yeah, consumers dictate what succeeds, but only among the choices made available to us.

Whoa, off topic.

Your best bet would be to stick with bitstreaming the DD5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks. If you go down to 2 channel then you are losing all the discrete surround effects. I can't tell a difference between HD audio and the DD and DTS lossy versions. The differences are pretty dang small. Remember also that BDs use the full bitrate available to DD and DTS while DVDs used more compression. So, your BDs, even in DD and DTS will still have higher quality than most DVD audio.

When you are removing the surround encoding by downrezzing to 2 channel, you are losing a lot more than a bit of dynamic range audible only to golden ears, you are losing 3 full channels of positioning information and that is most certainly noticeable even by untrained ears.

Errr... isn't it mandatory to steer a thread off topic on page #3???

I guess I'm new