Digital media is broken

All the competing multimedia players, formats, and codecs have broken digital multimedia. Is it really necessary to have this many media players, add-ons, and codecs installed to be able to open videos and music? And what about my files in ten years?

Format War

As a end user for digital media I feel that I do not care. I honestly do not care about the file format of the media. What I care about is being able to enjoy the film or song I got on my desktop. But rDRM and just the share competition is slowly braking digital media. Byte by byte.

The HD-DVD and BluRay war is raising questions about DVD collections. I for one have a over a hundred DVD disks. What should I do with them when there are only high-definition players available? In seven years time there will not be anything capable of playing them.

Accessibility

You can open any file you have got today. But can you in ten years? What format do you store your files in to be compatible with the technology as it is in ten years? Will the rDRM work in ten years? Twenty?

Your iPod friendly music will probably not be iBrainWaveMusic friendly and visa versa.

I have no answers. It is upsetting not being able to store the files that are important to you in a format you can trust. Think about your digitalized family photos! Would it not be a total disaster if you never could see them again!?

I hope these questions will make you think about how screwed up digital media really is.

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2 comments

Reason why people want HD-DVD is because the HD-DVD player is also backwardscompatible with ordinary DVDs. Bluray players are not.

So there's your answers on that matter.

There's no other real reason why people would even want to consider HD DVD, when it has less capacity than Bluray.

Comment by Magnus Damli at 2007-07-17 @620.

I wouldn't say broken, just shattered beyond recognition.
I have a huge DVD collection, close to 750 titles including about every major TV-series aired the last two decades. And I've bought a PS3 with Blu-Ray. My problem now will be if I should upgrade a major part of my collection or a few chosen titles …

I for one use OGG or FLAC for music storage. Does it fix anything? Not really most MP3-players can't handle the format, but I still use it since its one of the few open source alternatives.

Comment by Kent Vegard Evjen at 2007-07-18 @250.