Sony has always been known for swiming upstream since the days of Beta vs VHS, they won a few and lost a few. As far as using some proprietary video format, arn't all companies known for this, Apple Quicktime is a closed format, Windows Media is a closed format, I think some of the MGP2 stuff is kind of open but neither Apple nor Windows can play this format without buying a codec of somesort.. I find that the whole Codec thing is nothing more than a pain in the a$$ for users.

DD