Hacker News .hnnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Back in the DVD era there was a conscious attempt to converge between the PC industry and consumer electronics.

Since then (when they decided that Blu-Ray drives weren't going to be standard in PC) there has been a decoupling. HEVC is a consumer electronics standard, the PC industry is going towards VP9, AV1 and other royalty free codecs.

Up until HEVC most codecs had one patent pool you could pay a royalty to and be good. HEVC had the problems that two entities claim to control essential patents

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Advance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA



It also occurred with 4K Blu Ray, which was a real pain in the neck on PC requiring Intel SGX, Intel Secure Media Path, and a billion other DRM things. Then Intel removed SGX in 11th generation onward, and the Blu Ray developers have basically decided that being unable to play 4K Blu Ray on modern PCs is apparently just fine and haven't done anything to fix that.

To this day, the only official way to play 4K Blu Ray on a PC is to get a 10th gen Intel and play back using Integrated Graphics using one of the internal drives made by a drive manufacturer who was utterly shafted by this nonsense.

(It's got to hurt more though that 4K Blu Ray's new and improved DRM was, despite all this, broken less than a year after release. If you are a drive maker, knowing your drives are useless on modern PCs because of broken DRM that Blu Ray developers still insist is necessary must be the most infuriating thing ever.)


So grateful for the developer of MakeMKV.


we've had DRM'ed media for 20 years and people are still surprised that there's a reasonable chance of being shafted if they invest in the ecosystem?


To be fair USB sticks fill part of the removable media niche.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: