[MacDV] Re: iDVD3- does it work w/ non-Apple superdrives?

[Shane Walker]

O.K., here's my request to Apple, so tell me what you all think.  If you've
purchased the premium product, DVD Studio Pro, that has the drivers/plug-ins
and licensing "hooks" for third party drives, give us a 'special version' of
iDVD for quick one-off DVDs as part of a bundle.  How's that sound?

As for the idea that Apples got their hands tied by other industry/business
considerations and that precludes them from building in third-party drive
support, I don't fully buy that.  It's the same argument the PC vendors use
to NOT include firewire on their boxes but do include USB 2.0--it's all
marketing and relationships (and in the case of Apple, they just want to
leverage iDVD and built-in SuperDrives as a 'point of difference solution'
for new equipment sales.)  The firewire licensing is pennies per port,
folks.  How much exactly is the MPEG licensing?

IDVD does what it does and does it on only built-in Apple drives.  Making it
work with other DVD-R equipment does nothing to alter it's basic
functionality nor it's user base...they're still Mac users.  There's no
bearing on the content protection issues or more than a savings of a few
dollars per copy of the program that I can see.  Let ME pay the licensing
fee in the way of a plug-in or special version of iDVD...hey, what about
just building it into this iLife at $49, the stock and packaging over
downloads doesn't fully account for the list price, does it?



On 3/3/03 9:11 AM, "Michael Winter" <winter at mac.com> wrote:

> 
> On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 07:21  AM, Gerhard Kuhn wrote:
> 
> Not wanting to start a flame war on a Monday morning, but I keep
> wondering...
> 
>> On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 03:23  AM, Charles Martin wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>> I really, really wish Apple would get off this idiotic kick of
>>>> shutting out
>>>> 'upgrade' customers.
>>> 
>>> This is not the reason they do this. They do this because they have
>>> to pay a hardware-based licensing fee to the MPEGLA group to do
>>> MPEG-2 exporting. That's their deal with them.
>> 
>> They could easily rectify this by providing a plug much like Quick
>> Time Pro that you get by paying the licensing fee, which is relatively
>> small.
> 
> How do you know this? Everyone assumes that Apple is allowed to do
> whatever they want, but there are several other interests involved,
> including the MPEGLA and the entertainment industry. I don't think some
> people understand the hoops Apple has to jump through to keep everyone
> happy. That includes trying to keep "digital rights management"
> software/hardware to a minimum. Yes, Apple may be able to add the
> capability for little $$, but the tradeoff could be worse.
> 
>> They choose not to because they make more money on new hardware rather
>> than upgrading loyal costumers.
> 
> I'm assuming your just guessing about this, or do you have any real
> evidence that that's the reason? I'm not saying you're wrong, I don't
> have any evidence to the contrary. It just seems that for everything
> Apple does, someone is there to say the only reason they're essentially
> "screwing" their loyal customers and trying to force them to upgrade to
> more expensive systems. In fact, there are still people who believe
> that the "new systems won't boot OS 9" line is because Apple wants to
> force people to upgrade to X. It couldn't possibly be for engineering
> reasons like the fact that its getting harder and harder to add new
> hardware support to an old OS.
> 
> On another note, I've always expected the manufacturer of any drive I
> purchase to provide the software to use the drive. From the time I
> bought my first 2x CDR drive, I didn't expect Apple to furnish the
> software. I clearly expected that the people I bought the drive from
> would provide at least a bare minimum of software to fully use the
> drive, and if I wanted advanced features, I'd have to purchase a 3rd
> party product to do so. Why is it we now expect Apple to cover this
> territory at no or little cost to the user?
> 
> -Mike
> 
> 
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