Digitalwerks

The fight for dominance in the living room continues apace, with a large number of contenders and no clear cut leader at the moment.  Everybody wants their device to be the central hub for delivering content, both local and Internet-based to the masses on their couches.  The major players remain:

• Cable Set-Top-Boxes
• Gaming systems (PS3, Xbox 360)
• Stand alone devices (Roku, Tivo, AppleTV, etc.)
• Digital Media Adaptors (Popcorn Hour, DLNA devices, etc.)
• Networked HDTV’s (DLNA, widgets, etc.)
• Blu-Ray devices with extended functionality
• Home theater PC’s (Windows Media Center, Mac Mini w/ Boxee, etc.)

All of the above have both positive and negative aspects, and none of them have really taken off enough to be considered a mainstream success, at least in the context of advanced content delivery. Cost and complexity are probably the biggest hurdles to wide acceptance for all of them, but we are seeing some interesting moves to increase attractiveness to consumers.  

On Saturday, Richard Lawler on EngadgetHD reported that the first JVC Blu-Ray player to hit the US will be the first such device to support the playback of Matroska (.mkv) files.  The move to support codecs and file formats beyond those required for the official player specifications developed on standard definition DVD players in 2003 and then really took off with the growth of DivX certification thereafter.  The move by JVC is interesting for a few reasons.  First, the Matroska format is not officially backed by any legitimate content creators, it is wholly used for the distribution of Blu-Ray rips among file-sharing communities.  Generally speaking Hollywood Blu-Ray rips at 1920×1080p are encoded in h.264 or VC-1 using the .mts transport stream format, with sizes ranging from 20GB to 50GB’s.  After being cracked, these discs get re-compressed using the open source x264 implementation of h.264 to either 9GB at 1920×1080 or 4.5GB for 1280×720.  The 5.1 DTS or AC3 soundtrack along with subtitles are included as well depending on the particular film.  Without knowing the specifics of the JVC player’s capabilities it’s impossible to say for sure that it could play back these files, but from a horsepower perspective it should not be difficult, though, for the bitrates of the rips is significantly lower than those of the original discs.  It would be good to know as well if the JVC player can play back .mkv’s from burned Blu-Ray discs, from DVD-R’s, from USB devices or from networked sources.  I would suspect yes to all, but until some one gives it a thorough review of the player it’s impossible to know.

Clearly JVC is trying to differentiate themselves from their Blu-Ray player competitors by appealing to a subset of consumers that are downloading Blu-Ray rips but would like to watch them on devices other than their PC’s.  Also interesting is that JVC is not working with DivX to do this, in fact they explicitly say “DivX files” are incompatible.  I wonder if they mean .avi files encoded in DivX or the specific .divx file format?  In any case, this is certainly not a good sign for the success of the DivX Plus/7 hardware certification program, as it was explicitly designed to support playback of .mkv’s on Blu-Ray devices.

From my perspective, I am not sure how successful this particular JVC device will be, or the attempt to increase the functionality of Blu-Ray devices in general (adding Netflix, YouTube, etc.).  Despite the much lauded AACS DRM scheme, Blu-ray rips have been available almost from the first release of Blu-Ray discs, so anybody interested in watching these kinds of files has probably been doing it for quite some time by now, and has their own method of doing so.  Likely that method is watching from an HTPC of some kind.  Once someone connects a PC to their main viewing device, and accepts the cost, complexity and noise issues, going back to a CE device seems like a significant step backwards, in my opinion.  No matter how well JVC (or more likely whomever their ODM is in) implement .mkv playback, or YouTube integration, it is not likely to match the user experience of an HTPC.  That is not to say HTPC’s are generally user friendly, for in fact putting one together is currently far beyond the capabilities of the mainstream, but I suspect things are likely to change in the near future.  Services like Boxee, hardware like the Atom platform from Intel, or the Ion from AMD, the hoped-for improvements from Windows 7 point towards a real opportunity for HTPCs to become far more accepted in mainstream living rooms.  As someone who has used an HTPC for many years, and is currently putting together a second one for the bedroom, I certainly know the difficulties of the process, but that said, I have absolutely no interest in switching to a Blu-Ray player, even with expanded capabilities.  There is no way that a CE device could possibly cover all the things I want to do, all the content I want to watch, all the services I would like to try, at least in comparison to a general purpose PC with a high speed Internet connection.  Maybe if the prices got really, really low ($99 or less) but certainly not at the reported MSRP of $299 for the JVC player.

The first step is to download and install the required software.  This first version of this guide is PC only, but again, it would not take too much effort to replicate the steps shown here on a Mac of Linux computer.  If anybody has specific questions about those alternatives, please just drop me a line.   Read more…