Re: Playing Blu-Ray disks?

On Thursday, May 26th, 2011 at 17:15:04h -0600, Danno observed:

This bothers me a bit, it seems the industry is shifting computing
power out of the home, and into "the cloud" (or at least into controlled
environments).

Well, in a way, yes, but perhaps it would be better to say "into appliances".

But this is exactly what most consumers want, so John Hasler should be happy,
as evidenced by the perennial cry of the Windroids "it should just work".

And when the computing system is limited to a highly controlled embedded
system, provided that the firmware has been well written, it does indeed
just work.

Those who prefer more open systems will of course realize that "it just works"
but cannot do much else re customization and enhancement, hence the increasing
open source development on replacement firmwares for proprietary devices eg
DD-WRT for routers, Enigma for DVB receivers etc.

When I consider the amount of computer power it take to, say, rip a blu ray and
encode it to x264, I just can't imagine a 3-watt embedded ARM CPU doing the job.

Not yet ripping and encoding on the fly, but low power chips within TV sets and
media player boxes are indeed currently playing 1920x1080p material.

My Machiavellian side tells me this is a conscious move by industry to entrench
"their" way of managing data flow.

Not really, their way of managing the data flow is by the use of
Digital Rights Management, HDCP copyright protection mechanism etc etc,
and perhaps in the not too distant future via the BIOS of the PC.
.