Posted by jet_jaguar at d199-82.larue1.ucdavis.edu on September 10, 2001 at 12:55:14:
In Reply to: George Lucas and RDVDs posted by Pope Will on September 10, 2001 at 12:25:33:
: Any thoughts on George Lucas stating that not enough DVD machines have been sold to warrant release of the Original Trilogy? When Recordable DVDs come out (which cannot play old DVDs), then enough of those have to be sold to warrant release. I am no longer holding out. A buddy bought Behind the Magic, a CD ROM which contains all of the missing scenes, including Han making out with a chick in the cantina. So the DVD is moot.
: I remember thinking thank God nobody I know bought the Dogma DVD when it first came out, since there was rumbles of a special edition on the way.
: Now that looks like a worthwhile investment.
: But how long will it be before all DVDs become paper weights thanks to RDVD? Anybody know?
I doubt that RDVD (is that a separate technology from DVD-R, which has been around for years?)will do much to make DVDs moot. You see, the whole appeal of DVDs for the producer is that they are difficult to pirate. Yes, it's possible to do so by ripping the video via software, then compressing it with the Divx codec to get something small enough to burn onto CD, but that only gets you the video. If commercial releases were suddenly put on RDVD it would make copying the disc merely a matter of breaking through the decoding and copy protection (and history has shown us that eventually, almost any form of encryption used by the entertainment industry will eventually be broken).
And of course, you have the challenge of convincing everyone to not only buy new PLAYERS for this new technology, but, if the players are not backwards-compatible as you stated (which would be beyond stupidity), to re-buy their entire DVD library on a new format. Either that, or keep using both players, which would be similarly retarded.