[ExtractStream] Re: Tivo capability in a PC

[steve bryan]

At 4:10 pm -0800 1/3/02, Makhratchev, Konstantin wrote:
>What stopped Microsoft? Copyright/MPEG licensing issues? Possible lawsuits
>from movie companies? Exactly the same reasons might hold chipmakers from
>releasing DivX;-) chips.
>
>I'm quite sure the reasons we don't see DivX;-) chipsets are political, not
>technical.

At risk of moving even further afield I'd like to suggest there might 
be another reason that DivX has not conquered the world yet. I 
suppose this might be considered a 'political' reason but there is a 
huge collective investment in MPEG-2. It is used for all DVD's, all 
satellite digital TV (DirecTV, etc), and all HDTV formats. This 
involves investments all along the video production food chain. This 
gives MPEG-2 an enormous economic advantage over rival compression 
standards. Personally I wouldn't consider DivX a useful archiving 
format compared to MPEG-2. With properly mastered MPEG-2 material you 
have a good chance of playing it on a DVD set top player or an 
arbitrary computer with a DVD drive.
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