ZDNet: “Think Napster — only for movies”

“A regular consumer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a legitimate DVD movie and one compressed using the new scheme, which is called DivX… What’s more, a DivX-compressed movie is about 400 times smaller than its DVD counterpart, ranging from 600 to 750 megabytes.” I call ‘bullshit’. Firstly, what’s a “regular consumer”? Is that something like “regular” gasoline? Secondly, being someone who’s worked extensively with video compression technology, I’d have to say there’s almost no possibility of fitting a full-length feature film into 750MB, without serious quality degredation. 3Mb/sec is just about the minimum bitrate for NTSC quality video.

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