Video Asylum

Posted by David Aiken (A) on June 06, 2008 at 15:52:43

In Reply to: RE: I was afraid of that. posted by clarkjohnsen on June 06, 2008 at 08:04:50

The problem is that video is becoming a digital world and the expectation seems to be that people will have at least 2 products in a chain that can deal with some problems. Take upscaling of standard def video. It can be done by the player, the receiver, the receiver, or you can even add on a separate video processing unit to handle such functions. There's a lot of redundancy around on that issue.

With lip sync it's been handled in receivers for some time now and with HDMI 1.3 an auto lip sync capability seems to have surfaced which is certainly available in some receivers but I'm not certain about displays.

I don't know whether Sony left lip sync functionality out of the PS3 because they expected it to be done elsewhere or simply in order to keep costs as low as possible so they could keep the PS3 price as low as possible.

One problem is that things are reaching a stage where no matter what happens, the customer loses. If Sony leaves lip sync out of the PS3, some customers like you have a problem they can't fix without spending more money. If they put it in the price of the PS3 goes up and those customers who can deal with the problem elsewhere get charged for something they already have, with no options about paying that extra. Quite a lot of people lose either way.

The problem started long ago when manufacturers started adding features to one sort of product to fix problems with a different sort of product. Upscaling ability is like that. Logically you can argue that it should be done at the display because it wasn't needed until someone brought out the first display with a higher than normal resolution. That first display had to be able to do it in order to work with existing sources so why shouldn't that capability be left up to displays, or to stand alone processors if people want something better? But no, first it got duplicated in players and touted as virtually a necessity if you had a high def display, with the player manufacturers carefully omitting to mention that your display could already do this if it were required, and then it got triplicated in receivers. We only need it in one place yet we pay for it everywhere.

So now we get problems with lip sync and we see the start of the same thing. I'll bet that soon displays will offer the functionality for people who don't have receivers and players will offer it for those who don't have a receiver or display which offers it, and we'll end up paying for it everywhere and more money and resources get wasted producing redundancy.

I do think there's a place for such redundancy in the early days of introduction of something new but there's no reason that manufacturers can't agree that equipment produced more than a agreed period after a new technology introduction should expect that certain functions will be provided by a specific component. We don't need to have functionality duplicated forever so why shouldn't there be a cut-off date for duplication which is useful at the start but becomes ridiculous down the track?



David Aiken