Microsoft's WMV format may be in volation of one or more Phillips and Sony patents. This could spell trouble for the HD-DVD format, or perhaps it is just Sony's way of getting a stake in Blu-Ray's competing format.
Read. Discuss.

http://www.rethinkresearch.biz/...AF%BC%C2%88%97owo%8F
and
http://www.rethinkresearch.biz/...AF%BC%C2%88%97oww%8E

Matt Jeppsen
www.FreshDV.com

Sounds like typical legal maneuvering to make life difficult for competitors. Unless this has serious merit, I'd expect Bill Gates and his brutal business/legal team to make short work of this, and probably file a counter-suit to boot.

Don't expect this to blow away quickly. It's been in the works for over a year, Microsoft has had plenty of time to respond, and they haven't. I suspect they're gonna get hit, and hit hard on this one. This is also part of why VC1 hasn't been accepted, I think. I could be wrong, but the press releases, industry buzz, and general approach have been that M$ is going down. Sony and Philips wouldn't have partnered up on this one...
It doesn't just affect HD-DVD. It goes much, much farther.

Douglas Spotted Eagle
Author, producer, composer
http://www.vasst.com
"I enjoy music, long walks at sunset on the beach, and poking dead things with a sharp stick."

Don't tell me I have to pull all my .wmv files down and convert to .mov


Colvin Eccleston
manchesterweddingstudio.co.uk

What would be the consequence if HD-DVD does not include any Microsoft codec in their release and includes MPEG-4? Wouldn't MPEG-4 serve the purpose?

In Reply To

Maybe not much impact in the long term, but for now the problem would be that there's widespread support for WMV encoding and playback and very little for MPEG4 (at least on the PC platform). So just about the time we're getting practical distribution options for HD going, that gets hamstrung? Gee, thanks Sony.

"So just about the time we're getting practical distribution options for HD going, that gets hamstrung? Gee, thanks Sony."

Thanks Microsoft?

It's all about sorting out which of the major corporations collect how much of the big pile of money you and I will spend on HD. They'll sort it out and probably raise the cost to you and I so none of them has to give part of their share of the pile.

The H264 codec is also part of the HD DVD standard and it really is not like the MPEG4 we've seen so far and as part of the standard, all HD decoders would have to handle it.