I attended the CEATEC Conference in Tokyo on October 6-8.
CEATEC was a fascinating experience for me. It was interesting to see how technology is sold to the Japanese market.
I was surprised to see so many uses of the word ubiquitous. It was everywhere. I think that most people in the US do not know what it means.
If success is determined by the quality of the design of the booth and the number of pretty girls, then the HD-DVD format will win over Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray booth also had fewer movie and information displays. Sony has the most to win from the success of Blu-Ray, so I was surprised that they allowed the booth to be so weak.
Toshiba had an exhibit in its booth for Content Protection. This is a feature that Hollywood wants, not consumers. The other manufacturers were quiet on this feature. Toshiba has taken a leadership position in DRM. At Lucasfilm, we would say that Toshiba's journey to the Dark Side is complete.
Transmeta is a company with a flexible CPU architecture. They were demonstrating a Linux-based framework for home media center applications. They were unaware of the impact of the Broadcast Flag rule on their product. This is a case of honest engineers building a good product that will be illegal to sell in July because of Hollywood's political influence over the FCC.
I saw demonstrations of 4K projection, and 8K projection. The 8K was very impressive. It looked a lot like Showscan, a 60fps high resolution film format developed by Douglas Trumbell. It came closer to looking like real than any other projection system I've seen. The market has not fully adopted 1K television yet, and we are already feeling pressure to go to 4K and higher. I think the very high end of the market will go to 4K projection for home theatre applications. I think that 1K will be adequate for most home applications, with 2K limited to very large displays.
I saw Scott Smyers of Sony speaking on DLNA, the Digital Living Network Alliance. It was founded in June 2003 as the Digital Home Working Group by 17 member companies. They now have 182 member companies. They are developing guidelines for the use of existing standards for integrating networked devices in the home. In June, they published version 1.0. The cost of the report is $500.
| Media Formats | JPEG, LPCM, MPEG2 |
| Device Discovery, Control, and Media | UPnP AV 1.0 |
| UPnP Device | |
| UPnP Architecture 1.0 | |
| Media Transport | HTTP 1.0 |
| Network Stack | IPv4 Protocol Suite |
| Network Connectivity | 802.3 |
| 802.11 |
This may turn out to be the solution to the remote control problem. There are some things I like about it:
There are some things I do not like about it:
I want to watch DLNA more closely.