Minidiscs were rad at the time, but few are exactly clamoring for their return in the age of ubiquituous digital audio players… short of companies who are still trying to run businesses selling variations of the format to consumers.
VMedia’s one of those companies, and they are taking a novel tack in marketing their strange, obsolete format: it wants to market mini-disc like media drives in netbooks and MIDs.
Why they think this is better than existing (and smaller) SD and microSD card slots that are a matter-of-course for netbooks: with no codec standards for the media you can put on an SD disc, there’s the slim, almost nonexistent chance someone won’t be able to play media they insert into their Eee. But if everyone just used Vmedia drives, the codecs would be guaranteed!
It’s a dumb, dumb argument, since the OSes of things like netbooks usually do a pretty good job of handling all the common codecs. In short, Vmedia is trying to get the industry to adopt a proprietary hardware solution for a minor problem that could be (and is) cheaply and easily handled with software.
Best of luck with your business model, guys.
Vmedia’s mini-optical coming to netbooks and beyond [Laptop Mag]
Electromechanical media?
Seriously?
and Finster shaving at his age? -and TATTOOED?
-but I digress.
But it’s so dang cute!!
I went there expecting the hook to be capacity, with full blu-ray movies and the like … and find that the storage offered is only a gig?
What is the meaning of this?
But you know, if the disks really are super cheap compared to flash, I could see this happening: the netbook makers get paid to include them, and then it’s simply up to content providers to get it out there.
Like UMD, but (hopefully) open.
I seriously doubt the disks are cheaper than flash.. 1gb SD cards are flirting with $5, retail, even less on sale.
I am going to create an alternate-reality sci-fi genre, kind of like steampunk… except minidisks are the format of choice, people play games on their 3DO consoles, and pay for everything in Flooz.
I still have my HD minidisc player, now so quaint as to be considered steampunk. The 1gb discs were around $7 or $8 when I bought them a couple years ago; looks like flash has finally come down below that.
Is it a DRM play of some kind?
I like where you’re going with this.
I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.