The issue for commercial cinemas is not necessarily handling storage and playback of DCinema packages - it’s the DRM that the studios insist upon playing nice with the projectors. Most cinemas converted their screens at least a decade ago, financed partly by distributors, and the industry is sort of stuck in time as a result.

The fastest decoder there uses the GPU, not the CPU.

The fastest one that runs on a CPU, Kakadu (proprietary), is far behind.

> The fastest decoder there uses the GPU, not the CPU.

How does that matter? It was a reply to your incorrect claim:

> it's decoded by (no doubt extremely expensive) hardware

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32136471

CPU or GPU it’s still commodity hardware.

Commodity hardware doesn't require Windows...

Though lets be honest, they'd probably use Windows anyways and that probably would happen.

A couple months ago, I've been to a 2020 anime feature film in a cinema here in Estonia. To my amusement, after the credits I was greeted with the VLC interface for a brief moment (though they've turned off the projector very quickly after that).

Edit: obviously, that's not how most movies are shown here :D

I wonder if that was because that film's distributor is relaxed about DRM, or if the cinema just decided not to care about licensing it assuming that an Asian (I guess) IP holder would be unlikely to find out or take legal action against a small cinema in Estonia?

It’s almost worse than that - the common commercial playback servers I’m familiar with run Linux 2.6.x and fail in all kinds of weird and wonderful ways!