In a slightly bold move, Microsoft has announced that they would not completely support old DVD drives, or in other words, DVD drives that are 5+ years old.
What exactly is this “not complete” support? Well, you simply won’t be able to play DVD videos on it due to the complication of the earlier code and inability of the team to thoroughly test it since the oldest DVD drives are dying out.
I understand that it’s not Microsoft’s fault for the region encoding used by the earliest drives, and I also realize that it will probably not affect many people, but still, I find the excuse of the “DVD drives dying” a bit weak as a reason to drop the development.
Then again, if Microsoft was having enough trouble settling for a good 12×12 pixel icon for RSS perhaps making their operative system a bit more compatible is out of their league. But now, sarcasm aside, I do hope Blue Ray or HD-DVD (whichever steps through) won’t have these issues later on, DVD should already be a lesson to everyone. Death to region-encoding!
Yes region encoding was one of the stupidest decisions ever made. When you are introducing new technology, the idea is to make its ease of use universal, but alas, I’m sure we’ll see similar problems with Blue-Ray
Unfortunately, you’re right, as written on the article I made just after this one ;)