Formats

In the future, I think you'll be able to identify the era in which you grew up (or "the era up in which you grew"?) by how you like your data. Me, I'm a cassette and video man. A few years later and I might have formed a bond with CD and DVD for albums and films respectively. I hope, though, that this isn't the case and that I am not just blindly drawn to nostalgia, because I believe I have a good reason for my choices:
Tapes and videos may not have had the best quality in the world, but the quality was good enough. Even now, when I watch a video, I don't think "thank God for DVD, this quality is awful". No, in fact, I don't think about the medium at all, which is a good thing. I hit 'play', fast-forward through the logos and things, and then forget about the fact that what I'm watching is now considered obsolete technology. When I watch a DVD, on the other hand, I get myself all riled up. For starters, I can't skip the crap at the start - technology means "the man" can force me to sit through a variety of copyright messages that I make a special effort not to give him the satisfaction of reading, followed by a logically flawed short film about downloading in which I'm asked: "You wouldn't steal a car, would you? So why would you steal a movie?". "Well", I reply to no-one in particular, "I might download a movie because, unlike a tangible, physical object such as a car, a movie is simply information that can be copied without erasing the original". Yes, it's still illegal because I'm getting something for free, and it's probably not morally wonderful, but the comparison with car theft just doesn't work. Damn, I've gone all tangential - back to the problems with the actual DVD.
Once I've finished fannying about with unskippable pre-movie rubbish (I include over-elaborate menu screens in this), I start watching the actual movie. For a while, I'm impressed by its visual sharpness compared to my preferred format, but soon the rented (ie. scratched) DVD begins to skip and I stop caring about how clear everything is because however clear it is, it's still bloody unwatchable and I don't remember this being a problem with videos. The worst case was a recent film in which the plot built steadily to a presumably beautiful, emotional climax that lasted about two minutes - the two minutes that were rendered unwatchable by a scratch. Of course, once we hit the scratch, the player got very confused and stubbornly refused to rewind and have another go. Cue the off-and-on-again treatment for the wretched machine, followed by a navigation of the movie via the menu's 'scene selection' utility - a utility which helpfully gave away the ending with pretty preview pictures of each scene, including the one after the one in question. If you had mentioned the beautiful sharpness of the image to me at this point, I would have shown you the beautiful sharpness of a kitchen knife to the belly.
Perhaps I'm taking something of a subjective view of this, but to me a video is centred around providing you with the film - the thing you wanted to watch when you bought or rented it. You hit play, you watch the film, the film ends, and however much you bash the video about in between, the same thing will happen next time.
Of course, the format is actually perfect. Why sell films on chunky, reliable, expensive-to-produce videotapes that will last forever when you can knock out lightweight plastic discs for next to nothing, wait ten years until a slightly higher resolution format appears and everyone's original copy is scratched to buggery, add some pointless gimmicks like commentary or a making-of film, call it a 'box set' and sell them the same bloody thing again? Genius.
However, just imagine for a minute that we lived in a perfect world, a world in which stuff was good. Imagine a slim plastic square, roughly the dimensions of a CD box. A protective flap guards a digital connector. You insert the plastic square into the player. When the flap is lifted inside the player, the player can connect to what is inside the plastic square, which is....technology. It doesn't matter what. Some kind of memory. The point is, this plastic square format can keep getting better - you just brief the engineers to fit as much memory as possible into the box. So far, two problems solved: no need to change your player every time the film studios decide you need more pixels and no easy way of damaging the data. Next, instead of putting unskippable crap at the start of the movie (and this is the really clever part, so pay attention), you.....don't. You just don't. Radical, I know, but perhaps in ten years when blue-ray and HD-DVD are declared obsolete, the powers that be will realise that my idea is what everyone really wants. But it's not about what we want, is it?

Epilogue: Crikey, that was quite a long one. I was going to have an early night but the anger just flowed. An issue that didn't seem to fit into the rant was that I hate the way we're being brainwashed into paying for music downloads that are nowhere near CD quality. Music should be uncompressed and the internet just isn't fast enough for that yet - hold your horses, download industry. Oh yeah, sorry for my bad use of single and double quote marks - I'm pedantic as hell about some areas of English, but for some reason I've never understood quote (or quotation?) marks, and I felt like I used them a lot in this entry. If someone could explain, I'd be most grateful. Finally, it's late so I haven't read through what I've written. I bet it makes no sense. On a personal note, my life is very boring right now, which is why I'm reduced to talking about data formats. As soon as something interesting happens, I'll let you know, unless lots of interesting things happen, in which case I'll be far too busy doing interesting things to sit on the internet alone, typing things for strangers to not read. BED.