[Rants]
Stunting Our Video Future

So what do we all stand to lose in the digital video future as dictated by BPDG?

Well, here’s one thing on the chopping block: affordable 100-inch high-def video screens in your living room within a year or two. (OK, OK, I mean “affordable” as compared to today’s “big screens”.) This stuff is on the horizon, and will be arriving at stores near you quite soon.

That is, unless BPDG has its way and imposes a whole lot of pointless engineering hurdles in the path of the enterprising video innovators who want to bring it to you.

For a glimpse of the future (ignore the sticker shock for a moment; prices do nothing but fall in the electronics world), check out the video projector built by the American high-end electronics company, Madrigal.

Built on a new digital imaging technology known as D-ILA, this projector delivers image sizes and quality that used to require much more expensive CRT projectors (you know, the ones with the three big lenses that look like eyes). And the news gets even better. Using a technology known as DLP, other projector manufacturers like PLUS are delivering big screen projector joy for $3k or less. (Deep breath. Remember Moore’s Law. It’ll be cheaper soon.)

In order to obtain best results, however, you need a “scaler” that processes the video image into the D-ILA projector's native panel resolution of 1360x1024. You could use the $4.5k Faroudja Native Rate scaler.

But wait, since we’re talking about image processing, why not get some enterprising software guys to do it on a generic PC. Yeah. And these software guys, they’ll just give it away for free. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Sure enough, there’s dScaler, a free, open source PC-based image scaler that’s pretty good, according to the reviews.

So, what does all this expensive toy envy have to do with BPDG? Well, first off, dScaler would be BANNED under the current BPDG draft standard. Why? Because open source software is, by definition, insufficiently “tamper resistant” for BPDG’s tastes. After all, some enterprising hacker might learn the source code and figure out how to divert the digital video into some unprotected memory buffer. From there, the Hollywood fever-dreams of universal global Internet piracy take over.

And all those next-gen products by innovative companies like Madrigal, Faroudja and PLUS? Well, their future products would held up by the need to implement whatever restrictive output technologies BPDG would like to mandate on the marketplace. You can bet this will slow down the pace of innovation and increase costs, as projector manufacturers, image processor folks, and video source vendors wrestle with all the unnecessary “standards” foisted on them by Hollywood via BPDG.

So, how many extra years do you want to wait for that 100" video screen showing HD video in your living room? How many hundreds of extra dollars do you want to pay to watch your own DVDs and super-TiVo, just to assuage Hollywood's fears? How many great FREE open source software products do you want to replace with $4000 sealed boxes from Faroudja?

Don’t believe me? Find a high-end video hobbyist. Explain BPDG to him or her. See if outrage doesn’t pour forth.