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Self-Destructing DVDs: Son of DIVX
Stavr0 wrote to us with a return of an idea that already had its time. Yes, despite death of DIVX, a company is working on creating DVD discs that will work with existing DVD players but will stop working after a certain amount of time. The process is at least an interesting one: the company has created a special coating that is activated when hit by the DVD laser. From that moment of contact, the disc begins degrading, a process which can anywhere from minutes to three days.
Man for someone who reads "news for nerds" you sure don't have much faith in technology :P
How are you supposed to trust the monitor manufacturer to make a monitor that doesn't explode?
How are you supposed to trust intel or amd to make processors that don't melt, they sure dump some complex circuitry into those things!
Hell, how can you trust any piece of electronic equipment in your house. They are mass-produced and "anybody who has ever seen a mass manufacturing plant knows that no batch of anything mass produced is ever completely the same."
Give me a break, how can someone actually moderate tripe like that up? Not trying to be mean Indomitus, but don't you think you're being a WEE bit paranoid?
I apologize for not bashing dvd in this post, but please moderate with mercy.
Read the discussion, and try to post something that (a) people haven't already said before 10 times and (b) is relevant to the actual thread to which you're posting. Twat.
You've got to be kidding me. You're rationalizing excessive waste. You don't necessarily have to drive your rentals back to the rental store. Keep in mind that most humans have functioning feet, useful for walking and bicycling, in addition to driving.
Firstly, movie companies are not going to spend millions of dollars to make movies for free. All this does is protect their investment from widespread piracy. Perhaps someone in the /. community can come up with a way for companies to release their movies for free and still make a profit similar to what they are now. I'm sure they'd listen if someone could.
/. community. Oh well, maybe ya'll can start gnu movies or something. Best of luck.
On the environmental side, perhaps these discs could be recycled just as pop cans and other recyclables are. Don't even have to wash them out.
I think this would make sense to pretty much anyone on the planet except the
to discourage creating a product like that that is guaranteed to become landfill. Something on the order of $100 per disc.
It only melts in your player, not in your hand.
Free Slash !
Oh please.
Why can't you do with Windows 2000 as you please? Because it's copyrighted! Just like the movie! The shrink-wrap agreement may or may not stand up, but Microsoft can still get lots of money out of you in a lawsuit because you copied their copyrighted product. So, unlike electricity or deodorant, there are laws that govern what you could do with it just because you bought it. Your argument boils down to the incorrect idea that possesion is 90% of ownership. If that were true, no one would be willing to rent out anything! Just because you find a movie in someone's dumpster doesn't mean you can start distributing copies to your friends. There is no valid argument against this. It's illegal to copy copyrighted movies, end of story. In the same sense just because you bought a degrading DVD doesn't mean you can copy it. It will probably be treated in the legal system just the same as a rental, which it is illegal to copy even though it was in your possesion at one time.
I've always been impressed with the open-source community's willingness to abide by laws. If they think that everyone should be able to copy and distribute software freely, then they will write software that they can do just that with. They won't go out and illegally copy software.
This is not so much different from reality except that you have to *marry* the girls. That's when they freeze.
It is informative.
One possibility is the end of movie stores as we currently know them.
I have a friend who rents movies differently than most do now. They are stored in a large vending machine, he has a card that gives him access to the machine. You select a movie (like a candy bar) and then return it x days later. No dealing with annoying blockbuster personnel and shite like that.
Now imagine it spits out a degrading dvd. No hassle, maybe even make the things drive thru. You could store a large number of movies. There would be no more watching what blockbuster (or whatever your local movie store monopoly is) tells you to watch.
I realize I have not bashed dvd in this post, but please moderate with mercy!
DIVX bit the dust so will this. just don't buy it. it sounds like a neat idea, but probably should be applied elsewhere.
1st?
And it just don't stop. They'll keep coming!
I suppose pausing the disc is then out of the question.
Just think of the wonderful potential for the technically inclined to get cheap movies. Just gotta work out a way to remove the coating. Could be some kind of solvent or a very fine grained abrasive. Now instead of paying $20 for that copy of "Pamela Anderson does the West Coast", we can pick it up for $3.
Unless they put the coating on the inside...
"FOR SALE: Previously viewed videos"
But he wants *12* stoen girls. How can he marry them all?
Unless of course he's mormon?
Imagine never having to return a disc to the video store. Imagine the possibilities for data transfer!
:o)
I don't have to imagine it... I have it already..
It's called BROADCAST TELEVISION... maybe you've heard of it?
Pay-per-View is pretty much exactly what you're envisioning, except without the waste management problems.
Unless, as I mentioned above, they put the coating on the inside.
What if say MGM mailed out to everyone in the' US a D-DVD (or whatever they'll be called) that had all of the trailers for their upcoming films? What if the Video-of-the-Month club gave them out to tell about their latest releases? It may not work as a movie format, but there are other interesting possibilities for a short-term-use DVD.
ha--cheeeuuu!
Sorry, dnn't mean to snot on your LD.
Unless the interceptor copyed the disc real quick and made another in its place. If the time period is long enough for you to read it, it's long enough for them to read it.
contragulations
You rhode island sallad dressing redneck
Whenever I hit rewind it chews the rental tape to bits.
Urm, do you live 10 miles from your video store? I don't and I suspect that most other people don't either.
Red would absorb the red light from DVD lasers. Kind of a problem for readability. (maybe)
Anyone else care to chime in, or is self-destructing DVD's just such a flawed n' bad idea discussion of it ain't meritted. (i'd go for the latter)
The reason, which has been touched on in earlier posts is this: Movies Might only come out on this medium. That was the real insult from DIVX. Beloved movies would be released for a period on pay-per-view media, until all the money had been sucked out of that market, and then only MAYBE released on a more permanent medium. This is the evil thing you fear.
You have too narrow a view of renting. Just because you don't return the media, doesn't mean you aren't renting the movie. Sure, you bought the media, but not the content. Just like when you buy commercial software. You're not buying the software, you're buying the media and a licence to use the software.
Batteries are not a good analogy either since you're buying the batteries for the electricity. Electricity has no copyrights (not yet, at least).
Correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't the DVD laser keep hitting the same spots on the disc if its in pause? (ie, it doesn't spin down and keep the image in memory). I haven't been able to read the article yet, but do they have something to prevent a single spot on the disc from getting SEVERELY degraded? These issues need to be addressed before any severe changes to the medium can be adopted. Showing that it works is FAR from is it marketable. Tom
Living in a dormroom conected to a campus wide lan, you would be surprised by what what you can find. As it is there are full length bootleg movies everywhere. Old classics to the movies that were just released. The quality is never the greatest, as they suffer from the same problems as normal bootlegs: people coughing, shaky camera, but I can't say that it really bothers me, only that they are all in the new .asf format and I gotta dual boot to see them.
Tapes already exist that store for $6 per 4GB (4/8mm DAT).
;)
Ok won't have all the convenience of full random access, but you'd have the movies tapes with full didgtal DVD image quality (
The comeback of the tape VCR!
Sheesh, you proponents of this DUMB IDEA are beginning to sound like a broken record (or rather, a broken DVD).
So what, we further pollute the environment because you're too LAZY to return a damn DVD or video? This idea is environmentally disasterous. Just what were you planning on DOING with that defunct DVD anyways? Mmm-hmm, I thought so, you were just going to toss it and pretend it doesn't exist anymore. Or wait, throw it in the magic recycling box, maybe that will take care of it! Right. What? The company that makes it wants them back to be re-coated and 'recycled'? Heh, you might as well just get off your ass and make the trip back to the video store.
This is a super-bad idea. It's also another way companies like Microsoft can FORCE upgrades. Whoops! Your copy of Windows 2001 just expired...please contact microsoft with credit card in hand for a new DVD!
So please, quit with the 'I'm fucking lazy and can't be bothered to return a tape' reasoning...landfills are already filled with the results of this kind of thinking.
Blank CD-R media + s.o.DIVX rental + translation to V-CD format = s.o.DIVX rental + $0.70
This is the only reason I like the idea. Makes copying cheaper. Thus, actual movie purchase prices will go down, instead of remaining the highway robbery ($20-$25/DVD) which they are today.
Yeah, maybe I don't buy my DVD's where you do, but then I don't like to waste my *time* searching for a *reasonable* price on a movie.
$10 for a full-functioning/non-degrading DVD is a reasonable price (no more)
For that price, I might as well see it when it's in the theaters.
You don't have children, do you?
Hmmm.. what happens if you watch a movie on Day 1, then have your girlfriend over Day 3 and the Disc melts just when that one scene is on that you hoped would get her motor running.
I'm going back to 8mm.... at least when that melted, you could smell it.
Devious
I am suprised that nobody has brought up the idea of DVD hardware chages, something similar to the mod chip and playstation. If you could do the same thing to a DVD player, the user would have the ability to read these discs and not have them destroy themselves.
And this is the only way we'll get to see Star Wars on DVD prior to 2005....
I just don't get why this idea is so offensive. With DIVX, there were all kinds of privacy issues because a central authority was tracking what you watch and gathering data about you and controlling your access.
With this, you spend a buck or two and get a crappy copy of a movie. But nobody is gathering private data. Wasn't that the real crime with DIVX?
And you, my fuzzy friend, are an ass. Bringing a movie back late costs the company that rented it to you money. If you don't like it, then get the hell out!
ehhe, I'll have to try that in the dorm microwave...
What do you think an hour will do to it?
Think about this folks: We can now "rent" a movie and NEVER need to return it! Just throw it out. Or recycle like the cans for 5c when you have lots of them!
Wowwwww....I like this great idea!
what about the extra gas, tire wear, brake wear etc. that results from the simple act of returning media?
Man you amaericans are so dumb.
Is it so hard to think for one moment,
1) takeit back or
2) keep it overnight again and not watch it but pay $4
hmmm
Is this why your economy is strong? because its full of dumb MF
let me guess, you have shares in sony/mpaa
Any one making a coment here is never completely unbiased, state if you own shares in the company you are protecting.
I own NONE
I really like this idea, particularly if it could be done cheaply. Imagine never having to return a disc to the video store. Imagine the possibilities for data transfer! This is entirely different from DIVX. DIVX involved a technically flawed system that invaded the privacy of viewers. There were many, many other technical flaws as well. I like it. I want it. Gimme gimme gimme.
We do not live in a NAZI state, what we do in our bedrooms with the door closed and windows shut is OUR OWN FUCKING bussiness, be that making illegal copies of every disc you rent or making 2 tonnes of Ecstacy tablets.
Govt FUCK OFF, we are old enough and mature enough to do what we like.
If they want to convince everyone to go ahead and bootleg their movies this is EXACTLY THE WAY to go about it!
And styrofoam can be recycled, unlike McDonalds paper they now use. The oils, and dyes in the paper make it unrecyclable material. You mentioned the damage caused by oil drilling. Is that worse than cutting down trees to make paper alternatives to Styrofoam? At least the styro can be resued, the paper cannot. Think about that. In the BIG picture, styro *is* the better choice.
You imply that the "green spin doctors" will have trouble with dumping trash in the ocean and have no trouble with radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain. You should actually talk to one of those "green spin doctors" once in a while. You'll find none of them advocating burying U238 in that mountain.
Yes I have talked with them. Their atitude is that radioactive waste should never have been allowed to be created and never answer the question of what to do with it, short of idiotic yells like "recycle it"? (How do you recycle spent Uranium?) They do not offer any answers either. They only debunk the solutions of others. For that they deserve no say on how it should be disposed of.
I suggested oceanic subduction zones. I'm still waiting to hear your proposal......... see what I mean? You remain silent when the hard questions come up.
It is offtopic (the "Moderate this up" post, not the original one).
Everyone seems to forget that you don't need De-CSS to copy the media and watch it. The only thing De-CSS does accomplish is prevent from watching it in an unauthorized player (i.e., one who hasn't paid licensing fees). By stating that De-CSS and illegal copying go together, you are only helping the MPAA's case.
You may go kindly fuck yourself with a cream cheese dildo, wanker.
I live in Seattle, one block from a rental store. I rent about 2 movies a week. I walk. Non-issue. I'm sure there are a lot of people in this country who do the same, or take a bike.
The whole surface goes blue opaque after 48hrs, its like closing your eyes, no laser penetrates
DIVX had major privacy implications. This isn't great, but its a hell of a lot better than DIVX.
Great lets create another completely disposable product so we can be up to our ears in garbage by the year 2010.
Hey, anyone seen ExistenZ?
Not sure it's evil. Wasteful though. We need a laser which can reverse the degrading chemical reaction.
Selling products designed to break may be against trade regulations in some way perhaps.
..is to reverse engineer the DVD encryption protocols, region coding scheme, filesystem layout, and MPEG video format. This is necessary to ensure that freedom can live for another day. As always, should you or any of your IM forces be caught or killed, the EFF and GNU will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck Jim!
I would like to see Budget Rental Car implement the same scheme.
Yep. It's Slashdot.
The scrollbar tells me I am slightly less than halfway down the list of comments to the article, and here's the obligatory anti-Microsoft rant.
I just got my Karma past 50.. thought you would want to know.
I still think you're fucked in the head even questioning the manufacturing process when:
/.?
You don't know jack about it.
You've never been to their processing plant (especially because it probably don't EXIST yet).
You've never even rented one of the goddam discs.
Now why are you running around with a cactus up your ass spreading FUD like that?
"I have the +1 added automatically because others have thought I made more than a few good points in my long posting life on Slashdot."
Oh that is so hard, just run around spouting off how great GNU is and how bad patents are. How can you NOT get a +1 in
If someone sells you a degrading DVD as non-degrading, you're right. But what about when someone sells you a DVD that is supposed to survive 3 viewings, and it only allows one? How do you prove that you only played it once?
Styrofoam doesn't need to be burned or buried. It can just be recycled. THIS is the big lie that's involved here. The notion that it can't be is about apropriate for a Pauly Shore movie and that's about it.
On the issue of "fair-use" don't forget the ugly looming spectre of UCITA which governs not only software but most digitally delivered content. DVDs would undoubtedly have a (UCITA legal) shrink-wrap license which would also disallow (legal if UCITA is adopted) resale after use and, most likely, archival copying. Just a few more reasons to dislike UCITA. For more, check out Infoworld's UCITA page.
Keep in mind that most humans have functioning feet, useful for walking and bicycling, in addition to driving.
Or you can crawl back to the store on your hands and knees, which gives you the chance to kiss Mother Earth every few feet.
And don't forget the skateboarders, or they'll smack you one in the parking lot.
And just in time for your three day IP ban! Kewl!
"BTW, I HATE America's disposable society." That's kind of a blanket statement... ...or do you really keep all of your garbage??
I don't keep all my garbage, no. That would be silly. I do this thing where, when I shop, I buy things that one may recycle. And, instead of saying, "Well, hell. This soup can has goopy stuff in it!" and throwing it away, I take a few extra seconds out of my day to rinse it out, peel of the label, and throw it in a bucket full of its kin, which, amazingly enough, every Monday evening, makes its way to the curb.
I won't blame the older generation for throwing everything away.. it's the way they were raised. As an interesting side note, my grandparents (the ones who lived through the Depression and a few wars) keep -everything-. My grandmother has an entire closet dedicated to fabric scraps "in case she needs to make a dress."
-Dave
The environmental cost (gasoline, paper, etc.) of mailing the disc is probably higher than simply disposing of it. DVD materials are not particularly toxic.
You must learn the proper respect for religion.
Don't type it 'mormon'. You must capitalize the first 'M'. And the second m is optional. (best left off in most cases)
It wouldn't cover the helium in balloons bought at the amusement park.
It would, however, cover the balloon itself.
What the fuck is up with the apostrophe? The disc's what? (The disk owns something?) Or are you making a contraction of "disc is?" What the fuck does it mean?
Go back to elementary school. I am so fucking sick and tired of you apostrophe-S-means-plural people. FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU ALL!
And don't even think about explaining the apostrophe by quoting Frank Zappa. No. Don't do it. I'm warning you!
Yes, will rent it and copy it on the spot to my hard disk (still falling in price), and maybe swap with neighbours - like like a video. will splatter HDD image when next disposable dvd rented. Trouble is, if I wanted, could copy to DVD when they drop in price some more = wont stop piracy. The flaw is cd will contain corrosive muck which is more active in HOT places like Phoenix and UAE, so could destroy the disk before playing is a careless delivery driver lets the van get too hot. Lastly dog and cat like chewing CD's. If they get harmed by toxic muck - I will sue.
If ever there was a Court to do it, it's this one.
DVDs that self destruct? Hrm. The technology is available to rip DVDs and copy them now, by the time this is available should it catch on... one would be able to rip it or copy it before use. Then so what if it burns out... you have your full copy at rental price. What if you fast forward and rewind over an area many many many times until it wears. You could make interesting things with that.. morse code for your freinds. Block out nude scenes.
You're assuming an exponential (I think that's the term - been a couple years since probability) distribution of lifespans. Any basis for this assumption?
This reminds me of a Calvin & Hobbes strip I saw a while ago. (not verbatim) Calvin: Hey mom, can we take the car to the video store? Mom: Calvin, why do you think God gave Man feet? Calvin: To press the gas pedal.
Copy it out to tape, which is pretty cheap. Hack together a program to play it from the tape (or hack together a program to play from the HD, if you need random access, and just keep some empty drive space around to store the tape's contents temporarily while you're playing it). And in a few years, when writable DVDs and DVD-R drives are as cheap as CD stuff is now, you can burn it back out to disc and play it on an ordinary DVD player, too.
The people trading copied movies are already breaking the law. It makes no difference to them whether DeCSS or LiViD is legal or not.
The only people affected by the DVDCCA lawsuit are the legitimate users. That's why I am opposed to the lawsuits.
This reminds me of a Calvin & Hobbes strip I saw a while ago. (not verbatim) Calvin: Hey mom, can we take the car to the video store? Mom: You can walk, or use your bike. Why do you think God gave Man feet? Calvin: To press the gas pedal.
Juuuuuust kidding...
This seems informative!
They don't like the sun/laser light! Bleah! Bleah! Return me to crypt-case! And with emphasis on the VD in VDvd? Well, who wants to buy VD?
So, will, the owners of "Mission Impossible" will be sending the boys round for a quiet little chat...
The whole DVD episode is becoming an increasingly shabby one. I must have given these guys a pretty nice living, when the retail costs of my videotape collection is added up; and I'm still buying the d**n things. _Now_ they want to have disks that wear out after *n* runs. In my opinion that exerts EXTREME negative pressure.
On the other hand, most mainstream US^H^H international movies are largely devoid of good plotting and believable characters that a self destructing DVD is almost a relief!!
--V. Adm A. Coward (ret)
How is that any different from you buying anything else at a store and getting home and discovering that walk you got wasn't what was advertised? The threat isn't any different, as I see it. You can already prosecute people when they sell you CD-Rs instead of the real deal. I don't understand your "technical glitches" scenario. A company would far more money servicing calls and complaints than they would make up in ripping off customers. And then when all was said and done they'd face a class action lawsuit.
then != than
beacuse != because
somthing != something
dosn't != doesn't
its != it is (or it's)
And now for some self-degrading spelling...
Yeah, but you burned it with windows.
Defects are to be expected.
The local cable co bills in advance fro CATV service, then adds "late fees" to the next bill if you don't pay your current bill on time? I've never been able to figure this out. Unless you're over 1 full month late, late you are not.
The best way to sell more DVD's is to lower the price to a level that pirating or even renting is not really worth the extra effort. Would you rather rent a movie for $4 or buy it for $10?
you talk about mutant amphibians like there's something wrong with them.
Um, lasers *are* monocromatic. Semiconductor lasers varry they frequency because of thermal changes, but they still are very nearly perfectly monocromatic.
However, a differnt color laser in the player might do the trick.
So? I make them an offer: they can waive the charge, and I will continue to patronize them
They rented you the video is good faith that you would return it on time so others can see it.
You are now saying that it doesn't matter if you return it late - think about the other people that might be waiting to rent that movie why don't you. The late fee is there to give people a reason to promptly return videos.
My local video store is small and they know the regulars well - I always try and return a video ASAP but on the odd time that I have returned on late, I apologised. Now being a small store and by returning later we're talking about an hour or so here they have always let me off - but I don't expect this and am always willing to pay.
I could have sworn I read an article on a expirimental nuclear power plant that used waste from the normal ones.
They're called Fast Breeder Reactors and they "burn" the spent uranimum along with plotonium.
They aren't that cheap to run though and have the useful side effects of generating nuclear materials ideal for weapons.
Glass door? put the DVD player in a plastic bag and tape the ends where the cables are then fill it with Nitrogen. Thats the cheep GOOD method, and while your at it, do it in the dark with no lite, just IR/camera. Or black sealed bag, garbage bags, and use clear area for the Remote Sensor control
I think (I'm no nuc physicist but I that sounds like what they do at selafield). They have one at selafield in england. It was the site of britains worst nuclear accident (windscale). And minor leaks seem to happen their on an almost constant basis - that is why the irish sea is one of the most radioactive in the world.
I'm so glad they chose DVD-DA as the acronym. "DVDA" would've been too funny.
if you poured hot grits on them and stuffed them in your pants
i still think that this makes sense for very limited purposes like movie rentals. as far as the environment goes, i'm not sure which is worse a) throw away your dvd b) drive 5 miles in your gas-guzzling SUV to return it
Lets say you settle down, start watching the movie, 5 minutes into it a)Electricty goes off...b)neighbor falls off roof and needs to be driven to hospital....c)you are called into work on an emergency (or anything else that would cause you to stop watch the DVD. Now on current rentals, this isnt a problem, watch it the next day. Under this system, you come back and the disc is dead. I give this idea a big poopy!
So what if someone goes to a store or somewhere and uses a tweaked laser pen to do miracles, ie. inscribing the F-word to the disc or other consructive things. Assuming that the products aren't shrinkwrapped. Of course they are.
Never mind!
I wonder if Garth Brooks will advocate a tax on the sale of used DVDs?
Why bother with an extra letter?
"BTW, I HATE America's disposable society." That's kind of a blanket statement... ...or do you really keep all of your garbage?? -thomas
They might not be toxic but they are also not bio-degratable.
No. There are no such laws whatsoever. The constitution still prevails. (For now.)
And as other posters have mentioned, which is worse, landfilling an intert plastic disc, or driving your SUV 20 miles to return the disk to the video rental store?
just make sure you put it on a half full glass of water.
I would just like to ask, why exactly do you assume
that the rental company would *WANT* you to
continue patronizing them?
If I ran a video rental company, I could certainly
do without people who refused to pay fines. You
don't get to make the offer -- you already accepted
their offer by renting the video from them.
I'm quite surprised that all the comments on burning a copy so you can get around the DVD degrading feature as if you all are in the moral right for circumventing the law. What a bunch of losers! Don't you realize that you're renting the movie, not buying it??? Why would you want to burn a copy? Doing so is illegal. What happened to the moral high ground that slashdotters usually assume they are on?
I can imagine all sorts of benefits this new format would provide, not the least of which is me no longer having to pay late fees from time to time. But imagine going to Walmart and, on your way out, picking up a movie for 3 bucks? Or going to a video rental place and having you're choice of thousands of titles! (Because there is no huge up-front investment for the rental place.) Or ordering movie rentals on line. Or picking up a few movies for a long trip, and not worrying about the return date since the DVD doesn't start degrading until you play it. All these things sound pretty darn cool to me. Let's not destroy it by getting carried away by the loser mentality of wanting to burn a copy just because you think (incorrectly) you bought it instead of rented it. It's people like you who stop us from being able to advance with great new technology.
"What about animals that injest the plastic?" What about them? They might die, they might not. Those that don't die will breed new animals that don't die from eating DVD's (or don't eat DVD's). It's called evolution. "Also, I bet there's a lot more petroleum in the disk you're throwing away than the gas to burn to drive to the video store." Good, I'll f**king burn them for fuel in my furnace, then! "Or you can walk or take a bike." Uhhh, I don't think this technology is marketed towards people willing to walk or bike their rented DVD's back to the store... YA THINK?? "If they can be recycled and if the ARE recycled by the public, then the choice isn't so clear." Sure it is, it's PERFECTLY CLEAR. (It's plastic, after all.) -thomas
Well, YuppieScum, at least your nick is appropriate.
"Aren't there laws about producing something that will become landfill?"
And if there was such a law, exactly what would this law NOT cover? That's absurd.
-thomas
Actually, the foam boxes were less environmentally hazardous than the paper wrappers. They were made without the CFC's (the ozone issue). Unlike paper they compacted in landfills, and they didn't leach dyes. Furthermore neither actually degraded in landfills. All of this was discovered by an archaeologist who worked in landfills.
So why did the box go? Because McDonald's took a PR hit from the eco-nuts who hadn't investigated the issue and had assumed that anything plastic must be bad.
Your whole post is based on the premise that the disk can only be read once. That is not the case at all. You have two days to view any portion of the disk.
Actually, read the history of DeCSS by the creators. They talk about how it is easily possible to take a conformant standalone dvd player and hook it to a scsi port, and then just copy the data from the player to another drive. In this manner, the data is decoded by the player before it moves onto the drive, not requiring DeCSS. DeCSS itself was made to allow viewing of DVDs in a Unix environment, where there is no DVD playback software.
A post that is nothing more than a question about an impossible law gets moderated up? What's with that?
Finally someone has seen the light and the problems with these things. They creators are so short sighted they don't even see the huge environmental impacts of it all.
Or do you know something that we don't know about available storage media?
Like there aren't enough AOL cds in landfills lets fill them with tons of DVDs too!!!
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I already get complimentary coasters from AOL.
Why would I want to buy them?
Rafe
V^^^^V
Rafe
Opinions expressed by the author may not actually exist in the wild.
I fear this idea and I can't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it is just my lingering hatred of DVIX, or maybe it really is evil. This seems like a bad idea for a few reasons that I _can_ articulate.
* I think people would rent these and make a copy to VHS. (People do this now with rental VHS and DVD so the Status Quo is unchanged.)
* The coaster factor. Society needs ways to reduce-reuse-recycle. This is not moving in the correct direction
* Will this thing foul my DVD player with its vapors somehow? I don't trust it.
* I wonder if some enterprising chemist/home theatre enthusiast will find some cheap way to remove the coating. It may even be possible to buff the coating off.
If anyone can think of the reason, that seems to be tickling my subconscious, why this actually a product of Evil(R), please let me know.
Why would anybody listen to some piddly little Rhode Island company? They aren't even good enough to be part of Connecticut.
Ok so what they need is one that can be reset. Then they sell the system, to reset the disk and copy from a master to the degradeing disk, to BlockBuster Video as well as all other video rental places. They sign contracts allowing them to make copies of the masters and rent the copies provideing the movie copyright owners with a cut of the rental. You rent the degradeing copy for 2 days and if you don't take it back on time no big deal, no late fee, etc. You could not have been watching the movie as the disk quit working. CD's are cheep so they make money even if you keep the CD's..
Looks to me like a good use for this tech!
Let's ignore the DIVX-like aspects... What I'm wondering is what the heck do they think consumers want? I don't know anyone who says "Well, I want to rent a DVD but I sure don't want to have to drive it back and put it in the little drop box in 3 days, maybe I'll get me one of dem self destructing dvds so I can just throw it away"...
If you don't want to return the disk, rent it over the net (they mail it to you, you mail it back, no problems). What possible consumer benefit is there to this?
I think the answer is obvious -- none. I guess in the end it's whether the movie studios are powerful enough to ram things like this down our throats.
This is silly. People will just get DVD recorders, copy the DVD, and throw out the old one.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I was reading up on LDs just the other day and happened to bookmark this neat page, which shows photos of new dual-layer DVDs which suffer from "laser rot".
Unfortunately I think you're underestimating the laziness of the american consumer. If you can make it disposable my fellow countrymen seem to go gaga over it.
I'm scared that this enormous potential waste of plastic could become popular.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
Why not, when DVD Players have enough market, send out "time sensitive" ad info out to people and give them a full multimedia presentation instead of just a leaflet. And with the degrading coating you can't view the ad after it expires.
the easy way around this is to uniquely identify the dvd somehow... perhaps it could have a red coating, sort of like a blue cdr but it would be immediately noticeable that this was a "self-destruct" dvd.
They won't be out of movies. They'll just run out of bandwidth.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There's another way MTBE is making it into the environment. All the folks with boats and jet skis spill their gasoline in the water. (the engines leak it, it gets spilled when refilling tanks, etc), and the levels of MTBE in the lakes (many of which, in California are resivoirs), have risen alarmingly in the past 3 years.
oops is right.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
American gasoline is pretty cheap, afaik. I think that in Europe, where pollution standards are tighter, "petrol" is around $4 a gallon.
The "idea that cleans the air and fucks up the water" by the supposed environmentalists you are referring to is most likely due to the numerous extraneous, often unrelated crap that gets tacked to practically every bill that goes through congress. If, for example, one put through a bill banning self-destructing DVD's, attached would probably be a concession or loophole for a plastics company to dispose of their waste in some awful way, or a contract for the government to purchase self-destructing DVD's for CIA use. The system is fucked, environmentalists are people who are trying to keep the world a safe place but desperately losing the battle.
Seriously, how many people mind returning a rental?
Gets my ass out of the house... A Good Thing(tm)
That's why I only charge my electric car with power from a solar plant.
I believe that MTBE gas is being pulled. Anyone able to comment on that one?
I never claimed that gas additives were the work of "environmentalists". That is probably a result of some perversion or concession (read env. loss) on some bill.
See Section9's post.
Too many people believe that technology will fix the world. But the world's not broken, we are.
he logistics of collecting them with normal recycling
Thats why when you take 5 back to Blockbuster you get half off on your next rental, or something similar to that. Make it optional to return the dead discs, but give some sort of paltry incentive to do so.
---
Record a disk full of true random numbers on a "3-minute" version of this disk and you've got a multi-GB one-time-pad for cryptography. (A one-time-pad is a list of random numbers against which you XOR your data. The only way to decrypt (as long as the numbers are truly random and you can't guess 'em) it is to have a copy of the OTP number list. If the DVD self-destructs in a few minutes that won't be possible-- if they come and confiscate your system after you encrypt and send the data, no go, and if they sneak into your spy headquarters to copy the disk before you encrypt the data, the disk is voided. Of course, the receiving end also needs a copy of the OTP data :-).
This seems to go against one of the biggest reasons for digital media, information that doesn't degrade. The idea behind digital storage is that error checking can have simpler, more exact algorithms, information doesn't degrade when read, and information can be transfered without lossing any of the original information. I just don't see how something like this will ever catch on.
I agree wholeheartedly. The reason rental shops work is because they can buy one movie and let some hundred of people use that same copy for a limited time.
:(
:)
:( and then pay fees each time they rent it out.
If this terminally-ill DVD is to remain competitive with other DVD/VHS rentals, I'm assuming they'll rent it out for about $2CDN? Since you're the only one besides the seagulls to see this movie, that means that $2 is the only profit the rental shop will ever get from it. Quick calculation: that means the rental shop is paying less than $2 for it! This includes licencing fees, manufacturing, distributing, and bureaucratic fees.
Assuming normal DVD manufacturing costs about the same, if not less than, perishable DVD manufacturing, then the rental shop should be able to get a real DVD for under $2 too! Let's play a little game of math:
price of wonky DVD: $1.50
price of real DVD: $1.50
rental price of wonky DVD: $2.00
rental price of real DVD: $2.00, but unfortunately $0.25 of it goes the production companies
demand for wonky DVD: 500
demand for real DVD: 200
profit from wonky DVD: 250.00
profit from real DVD: 348.50
So even with if there were 2.5x the demand for wonky DVDs (ya, right), the rental shop is getting higher profits with the real DVDs in this example.
Let's assume I'm a rental shop owner...hmm, which would *I* prefer?
Of course the REAL question is: if a rental shop can get it for $2, why can't I?
Keep in mind that I'm not entirely sure on how movie rentals works. I'm assuming rental shops pay a lower fee than the consumer
But, in the end, useless. Who's going to buy a DVD that you can only watch once? For that price, I might as well see it when it's in the theaters.
The media will love this thing (finally, a take-home movie that's pay-per-view) but they won't dare adopt it; the public won't stand for it.
And as much as I hate to use FUD, this one's just begging for it. Would you buy a disk that destroyed itself while it was still in your DVD player?
Consider the production costs and associated polution from processing the plastics and other materials (packaging, labels, price tags, jewel cases?, ink) needed to produce 400 million coasters.
Now increase that figure because those coasters need to be distributed to the stores in the first place, and the stores will want to keep a larger stock of coasters than they keep of movies because the response "that's out of stock, we just don't have it right now" has different implications from "that's checked out right now, but it will be back soon".
Unless there is some licencing issue with creating the media or some sillyness like that, we should expect the price of the media to fall.
This is the same idea as dub plates. ;)
Except with a high-tech gloss.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Poindexter
Exactly. If they have just done this, I would assume at least 6months before it comes to market. In that time, DVD encoder cards will most likely be very affordable. Now this company has just created a cheaper way for us to get the movies we all love. /. user, but I would think these people would just buy the real DVD rather than a degrading one.
Now, not everyone is technically savvy as your common
I see this new invention going the way of the dinosaur even fast than DivX did.
In Vino Veritas
This solves the two biggest philosophical problems the public (or at least I) had with Divx.
- Ownership: With Divx, you had a persistent disc, but the consumer's ownership of the disc was always transient. In it's normal state, you had to continually pay for viewing rights. If you upgraded to Silver, you couldn't loan out the disc or play it on another person's player, without that person paying for viewing rights. You never really owned the disc, regardless of the marketing rhetoric. With these Disposable DVDs, you know and understand up front that they have a finite playing time. Pay $3, watch it, then throw it away (or add it to your AOL coaster collection).
- The Big Brother Factor: The Wired article talks about delivering Disposable DVDs with pizzas, or putting them in supermarket checkout lines, right next to the candy, pop bottles, and other impulse-buy items. That's not nearly as trackable as a Divx player dialing out in the middle of the night, reporting your credit card number and viewing history to some master computer deep in the bowels of Circuit City World Headquarters.
This would be perfect for Bad Movie Nights. Me and my friends like to grab a twin-bill of really bad/cheesy/low-budget videos, supplement it with sufficient pizza and beverages, and do our worst MST3K impressions. With these Disposable DVDs, the discs go out with the boxes and cans, and there's no arguments over who has to drive back to Blockbuster. What's wrong with that?Keith Russell
OS != Religion
This sig intentionally left blank.
Of course, I'm waiting for UCITA laws to be struck down (if and when they're implemented). Seems to me that the Constitution gives Congress (and only Congress) the power to grant to authors and inventors for a limited time the exclusive rights to their creations. Since the States are denied any right given to Congress, they may no grant the authors/inventors more rights than Congress has given. Of course, there's the whole Interstate Commerce thing, which could also be used to have them struck down...
'nuf said.
----
Make the fuckers out of peanut brittle. You watch the movie once then eat the disk... Problem solved.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
...this disc will self-destruct in five seconds...
hiss-ss-ss-ss
Thank god the first time that laser hits the disc it will be in my DVD drive spooling to hard disk through my DeCSS decryption filter.
Then I proceede to burn a DVD on non degradable media.
Enjoy.
There are ligitimate reasons why one would want to copy a DVD, and retain a permanent copy. And completely legal.
I did not advocate any infringement of law. Dont slander me in that respect.
It is the legal uses of such a technology that make the MPAA lawsuits damaging and abusive.
Any argument otherwise is contrary to the law as tried and tested in court.
Someone watched that special on.. Dateline? 20/20? 48 Hours? 60 Minutes?
I dunno.. can't remember.. hey! maybe they can make a self destructing newscaster. Who wants Dan Rather or Barbara Walters around anymore?
--
Insert Witty Sig Here
I would doubt it. It sounds like they set up a wave-length dependent litmus reaction rather than actually burning something. Litmus doesn't smell and I would doubt the reaction is an oxidation type.
You could do the same thing with Silver Nitrate in the presense of natural light. But who would want their CD to decay when exposed to sun light?
You know you do have a point.
From the article it sounds like it is a coating that slowly turns blue after being exposed to the DVD laser. If it is just a coating, it seams logical to me it should be possible to create a bath that would desolve the coating and leave the disk in tact. Unless the coating was made of the same chemicals as the disk was, in which case you are screwed.
If it is NOT a coating, but rather some chemicals embedded in the disks material it self, then you are again screwed.
The article just doesn't have enough info to figure out if this is feasible. Lazy reporters just don't ask the right questions.
Just a guess, but the self destruction will probably act quite different from "laser rot". Laserdiscs use pulse-FM encoding, which has no error correction capability (Aside from "dropout compensation" which just replaces a missing scan line with a previous one). As the signal gets weaker, a digital signal with error correction should appear to be nearly perfect up until the moment it very sharply drops off and becomes completely unusable.
Since DVDs use 650nm and 635nm (red light) lasers, I'd imagine that these DVDs may degrade once exposed to sunlight.
I agree with you, but your gratuitous criticism of socialism is a little weird. The central characteristic of a free-market, a.k.a. laissez-faire, economy, is its freedom from regulation in the name of maximised (short-term) profits. No businessman is going to support the inclusion of environmental factors, because that hurts short-term margins. The idea of communal property, like the ocean, is a very socialist and a very uncapitalist idea.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
I always thought that divx seemed like a good idea, although poorly executed. I is only me that constantly forgets to return rentalmovies? So, provided the disks will actually cost something like a days rent in the system we have today its a good idea in my eyes.
Or are there other issues about it that I dont know about?
For me, not having to return a movie would mean a lot. It's about a two hour drive from my house to the nearest movie rental place. I don't rent movies now, but not having to return them would mean that when I do go to town, I could pick up some rentals instead of always having to buy the movies.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Of coure nobody is going to BUY a distructible DVD, but it would be nice if you could RENT a movie from Blockbuster, and NOT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT RETURNING THE THING! That is the obvious and ONLY possible explanation for creating this DVD format. I sure wouldn't mind something like that, considering my ability to acrue huge fees in late charges.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
This company reminds me of some who watches another person smash there head against the wall, and says "that look like fun" and does it themselves.
Sherm
I have a collection of 60 laserdiscs, and I still buy a lot of imported anime on laserdisc. What's this about laserdiscs degrading over time? Where'd you hear about this?
Well, I guess I can get money to buy these out of an ATM machine. And I'm sure they'll also use this coating on Compact Read-Only CD-ROM Memory Discs too. "DVD discs" -- you mean Digital Video Disc Discs, right? Do writers have any idea what these acronyms mean?
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
info@spectra-science.com
Phone: (401) 274-4700 FAX: (401) 274-3127
Company Officers Nabil M. Lawandy, Ph.D, Chairman, CEO, and President
Rhonda Landers, Chief Financial Officer
Scott A. Tillotson, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
Spectra Science Corporation 321 South Main Street Suite 102 Providence, Rhode Island 02903
Now I have a question: On their web page, they mention that their one-play DVD is "for the mass consumer entertainment and advertising markets." What exactly do they mean by "advertising markets?" Will people be distributing DVDs through the postal service just as another way to send me junk mail?
MTBE is a gas additive that many (not all) refineries used to make gas that will meet California's strict polution requirements. (BTW, some other poster said that Europe had tighter regulations than the US for air polution. Bull hockey. Cars built for the European market are required to go through mondo work before they are allowed to run in the US.) Adding MTBE to gas in California is one of the reasons gas prices are so high in the Bay Area.
Unfortunately, the MTBE is leaking out of the underground gas storage tanks used by gas stations and into groundwater and reseviors. Furthermore, there are some studies which show MTBE to be a carcinogen. Oops.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
"Good Evening, Mr Phelps,
As always this DVD will self destruct in 2 days"
NF
I'm definately not an expert in how DVD works, but... I imagine that from time to time, the player can't read a bit (either from a smudge or a flake of dust or something). There must be some data error check (like a CRC or something) that tells the player to retry that area of the disk again. Of course when it tries to reread that area, it's been blown away already.
This may not be critical during actual playback -- (again, total speculation) the DVD player may just skip over errors while the viewer copes with the decoding glitch. But what if this happens while it reads the menu code?
And another thing. If I pop in a DVD and navigate through the usual 'special section' (deleted scenes, cast/crew commentary whatever), I can only do that once. But when I go back to the main menu, I image the DVD player will attempt to reread it from the disk (boom).
_______
2B1ASK1
.. that a disc melts in there.
the thing that killed DIVX was the implied erosion of privacy
No, the thing that killed DIVX was that it was a stupid idea in the first place.
Seriously, how many people mind returning a rental? I don't, because I usually rent another while I'm there. You've still gotta get the damn things somehow.
This is throwing a lot of effort and technology at a non-existant problem. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I'd be willing to venture that consumers biggest problem with video rental isn't returns, it's quality. I've rented thousands of VHS tapes over the years, and a whole lot of them jittered and sucked. DVD fixes that. I rent DVD's now. It's nice, because the disk is just as good as it ever was. I have yet to get one that won't play.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If there were laws against producing items that would become landfill our entire capitalistic society would fail.
We're consumers. We consume things. We then throw away what is left. A software package comes shrink-wrapped (trash), inside of a box (trash), with a manual (trash), and a bunch of reply cards (trash). Eventually the software is old and it is replaced (trash).
Food comes in plastic bags, paper wrappers, styrofoam containers, all destined for the trash heap. Margarine tubs have such a low decomposition rate that they last for thousands of years.
LPs were replaced with 8 tracks and casette tapes. The LPs became trash. The 8 tracks died (trash) and the casettes were replaced with CDs (cassette trash).
Last year's computer gets replaced with a new one. They trickle down through charity programs and eventually end up as trash.
Everything we do creates trash. There is no way you could outlaw it by saying that producing an item that will become landfill is illegal. That would include just about everything, unless you want us to go back to being a strictly agrarian society.
So that we can just download Degradable DVDs and not have to worry about the disk going bad sitting in the bathroom.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Albert Einstein
What short straw do you have to pick at archaeology school to get stuck with the landfill assignment? Wow...I thought my job sucked.
-B
As much as this is a crappy solution, I think I would buy these things. Two weeks ago I rented American History X on DVD, which I hadn't seen before. About a dozen times during the movie it would skip ahead a few seconds or generally screw up due to scratches on the DVD. This stuff was happening during important, dramatic parts of an otherwise excellent movie. Rental VHS tapes may have lower resolution, but at least I'm going to see the whole movie. Having a virgin, although self-destructing, DVD would solve that problem.
They touched on it in the article, but I think this technology is going to get killed by corporate greed before consumers even have a chance to kill it. The big rental chains aren't going to go for this because they make something like 30% of their profits from late charges. Also, they have no objection to renting me a DVD that has been demolished by the 100 people before me who rubbed sandpaper on it. The article mentions that places like Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut could sell these coated discs. When people want to rent a movie, they go to Blockbuster or some other video store, not to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is big enough that maybe they could pull it off, but Pizza Hut is not set up to warehouse and distribute hundreds of different movies. What they could do is offer two or three very popular movies that they could buy in volume and sell at cost (like a buck). People that wanted pizza and a movie would buy Pizza Hut pizza over other non-movie-delivering pizza places.
This post started as a solution to scratched rental DVDs and ended up a suggestion for Pizza Hut's marketing department. Oh well.
-B
Your desire to dump waste into the ocean (or anywhere cheap and hidden) simply puts off the cost of that decision until future generations have to contend with it. It is flawed economic reasoning and morally selfish.
He said subduction zone. The stuff would get sucked into the earth's core, where it would do nothing. By the time it came back up again (if ever), it would most certanly be non-radioactive
Let's see nuclear generated electricity compete with solar power on a level playing field. No legislated exemptions from liability, no free fuel from gov't uranium mines, no socialist sharing of disposal costs. In a free market, the cost of dumping YOUR problems into our oceans would be prison.
Hrm, I think the cost of solar engergy is somthing like $5/kwatt-hour. This is vs about $0.10 for current systems. if you pay about $50 in electricity a month, your costs would go up to about $2,500.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Put it this way: right now, hard drive space is less that $30/GB. That's based on an 18 GB Ultra-2 Wide SCSI drive I bought a few months ago for about $600. It's probably less now, not to mention how much less it would be for bigger, slower IDE drives.
Ahh, you've paid far, far to much money. First of all ATA66 is prettymuch just as fast as scsi. And second of all 40gb IDE HD is only $350 or somthing like that. Less then $10 a gig. You could only store about 4-8 DVD movies on that, I don't think many people would want to do that, though
(on the other hand, you could store about 38 VCD movies...)
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, thats not what there doing. They sell a disk that becomes unreadable after a certan amount of time after the first playing, not after x numbers of playings. And you could certanly get a record of when you baught it.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, you could simply just record it to a VHS tape as well. VHS is just a little more exspensive, and even the lowest qualty tapes will look better then a VCD.
you might have to get one of those MacroVision remover things, but it still wouldn't be that difficult...
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Won't people still have to make that 6 mile round trip to buy the disposable DVDs anyway?
Yes, but you only need to make the round trip once. To buy it. Instaid of twice to buy and return. Do you know how to read?
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
you don't need De-CSS to copy the media and watch it.
Yes, you do. If you want a direct DVD copy, you need DeCSS. If you just want to capture the video signal, then that's another issue, but it would require ether exspensive MPEG encoding equipment, insainly large hard drives (into the hundred gig range) or an enormous amount of time on your hands. (capture 3 minutes, encode, repeat). You could also copy to VHS, but its kind of hard to email a VHS tape...
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, I like it, and I didn't like Divx. There are a lot of benifits that Divx didn't have.
:P
:(
A) no phone line, invasion of privacy
My player dosn't need to call into the home station to let them know I'm watching a movie.
B) Uses the same player
It uses the same player as a regular DVD, so the market cost of entry is a lot cheaper. If you've got a DVD drive, you can play these little things
D)avialable everywhere.
With Divx, the only place you could get discs was at Circut city, beacuse of the propritary format. The divx people had complet control of every movie that got played. But you could sell these things anywhere, and everywhere. Gas stations, supermarkets, you could even mail them out to people, or whatever. C)ease of piracy
With divx you'd need to mod the player, since you probably wouldn't be able to read them in a standard DVD drive. With these, you just stick in, DeCSS (then VCD, or encode with better video codec), and your done!
Like I said, I like the idea. Just beacuse it's Like Divx in some superficial ways, dosn't mean its bad. This has all the positives of Divx and none of the negatives.
sorry about my spelling, my computer just tanked out, and I havn't goten around to installing a spellchecker
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
pop it in the microwave and melt it off,
Have you seen what happens to a DVD in the microwave? it ain't pretty.
On the other hand, while they could make it 'tamper resistant', I'm sure with enough care and equipment you can get the data back off. Like you said, use an electron microscope. but then just take the data and burn it directly to another disk...
Not really a good way to send Encryption keys...
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You don't necessarily have to drive your rentals back to the rental store. Keep in mind that most humans have functioning feet, useful for walking and bicycling, in addition to driving.
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me you walk/bike to the video store? The people who are going to buy these thigns arn't going to be the the people who bike all around town.
Sure, it's posible for people to get to the video store on foot, it will still be possible for people to not use/buy these disks. Nothing changes, whats your point?
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
People want to collect movies. They don't want disposable disks that self destruct
Oh, is that why so many people rent movies? Obviously not every one cares about owning movies. This could posibly be cheaper and more convienent then Renting a movie. And unlike divx, you don't need a special player to play these. I don't see whats wrong with someone developing a technology. If people want it, fine, if they don't fine. I want it. And I'm sure other people do as well.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If I pay for something and feel that I own it, I expect it not to just go off and die on me. I do not beliece that these should be consumables, like milk or bread... If I buy a bunch of plastic with a movie on it today, I don't want to end up with a useless coaster tomorrow...
Well, that's fantastic. I'm glad we know what you want. But, why should we care? If you don't want to use this tech, then don't. How is droping this disc in the trash any diffrent from droping a netflix in the mail? You can't use a rented video after you return it, can you?
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The DVD hack could be a coating, placed on the DVD by the user, that absorbs (or reflects) the portion of the spectrum that turns the built in coating into another color
Um, you'd have a hard time playing the disc then, since only one wavelength of light is emmitted by the laser.
If you really want to keep the movie, just pump it into a VCR... I don't see whats so hard about that...
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Uh, the black coating does absolutly nothing. Other then make the disk look black. It has no effect on the IR laser used in a CD player. Remove the coating, and the disk will only look diffrent.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Whoever came up with it is a complete jackass.
Why? I think for many people this would be better then renting. Just beacuse you don't want to participate in somthing dosn't mean its a bad Idea, its not.
"Subtle Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
of course, i could always just drive my EV-1 electric, non-poluting car, to the video store..
oh wait... the amount of air pollution from the coal burning plant to make the electricity, the losses incurred in the powerlines to send it to me, and the inefficiency of electric motors in 2000 would actually be multiple times higher than the near-zero poluution that all post-1995 cars get at speed.
Buy DIVX and save the fucking world.
You know... "environmentalists" would be funnier if they didn't make the price of gas go up when they get an idea that cleans the air and fucks up the water.... jerks.
-don
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
This message will self-destruct in one minute.
If it really is oxidation that degrades it, all you'd need to do is spray-paint the disc with a clearcoat before first using it.
This goes to say that I assume they arn't stupid enough to require oxidation, or maybe they are...
You can't get a blank DVD media for that price. It would cost $25 per blank DVD disc.
IOW it would be less costly to just go buy the movie on DVD from Best Buy for ~$20
But as soon as DVDs overtake VHS in popularity, this will no longer be true. DVDs will then follow the release schedule of VHS, where it comes out to rental centers first, at a cost of ~$90 per movie. Then after a couple months, it drops to the ~$25 range you find at Suncoast, et al.
So after renting it ($3.00) and the blank media (even if it doesn't drop from $25.00), you'd have a total cost of $28.00 (+the hour of making the copy). You still come out ~$60 ahead. So your $500 (Assuming no price drop) DVD recorder pays for itself in < 9 movies.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. -- HS Thompson
I keep hearing about the 'Blockbuster won't want to pass on late fees' argument, and I would like to know, is there anybody here that knows what percentage of a video store revenue comes from late fees ?
I've been renting for 10 years at least, and I have been late no more than twice, am I the only one ?
-- the cake is a lie
According to the "manual" that came with my CD-R drive, CD-R's actually last _longer_ than stamped CDs, by something like 7:1.
Okay, I don't know if I believe that, but that fact might be outdated, and based on early (or cheaper) CD stamping technology, when CDs weren't selling well. Some discs I've seen that were stamped in the early-mid 80's were starting to fray around the edges and peel on the surface, about 10 years after they were made. They still worked, but definitely showed remarkable wear from age for what was once hailed as THE audio medium.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's only about 5 years at best. Just in time for them to sell you your whole movie collection all over again in whatever the new technology of the moment is.
Hmm, well VHS lasted for quite some time before DVD came along... It even fought off videodiscs for all concerned except the most hardcore of entertainment system junkies. I bet it'll still be around for a while, and DVD won't ever quite take over.
(Then again, I didn't own a CD player until 1994, and that was a CD-ROM drive, so I was bit behind the curve.)
As for this DVD-DA thing, I see it as even less likely to take off.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I mean, COME ON.. DIVX. Suing a public-domain reverse-engineering software author for a decoder that simply exploited a stupid hole by a stupid licensee/encryptor. Now this.
I've been intending to plunk my hard-earned cash down on a Sony 550 and shifting my VHS library to DVD. The main reasons I haven't so far has been economic (waiting for prices to come a little lower) and political (not wanting to support a group all too willing to pursue rash and ignorant solutins to inherent problems of their system). The movie industry seems highly intent in not making the DVD format a success. I sure wish they would make up their damn minds whether to support it or not.
-'fester
Blank DVD media + rental = more than price of movie.
Maybe in a few years they'll have to worry, but not yet.
--
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Actually, I use netflix.com and it's pretty cool. If you sign up for their Marquee program you can keep the disc for as long as you like for $4. Then you drop it in the mail, all done.
-dave
What?
Ya know, just because the people making DVDs would like it if it were so doesn't make DVDs software and buying a DVD a license to use that software.
I'm even skeptical that "Click to Agree" license agreements for Software would be legally binding if someone had a good lawyer and there wasn't a law specifically adressing the issue.
Anyhow, I've bought DVDs before. I've bought a DVD player before. Not once did I ever agree to any license agreement, therefore no license agreement applies.
Copyright law still applies, but I do not owe my eternal soul to a movie studio just because I purchased City Of Lost Children on DVD.
>2) I always spend too much on late fees.
You also probably don't pay off your credit card bills each month, and let people take advantage of you tha way, too - right?
This is a personal decision - *rent when you are actually going to watch* - and find a decent vid store. One that gives you five day rentals, and perhaps three days on new releases... as I mentioned in another post, my local Hollwood Video rents *all* DVDs for 5 days (and they don't charge as much as BB).
I have to completely agree with you on the enviornmental aspect of it... there's nothing to be gained.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Consider this, you and your date sit cuddle up on the couch to watch a destructible DVD. Well the movie was better than you thought because in half an hour you've forgotten the movie and are either stumbling to the bedroom or on the floor in front of the couch making little geeks. After you and your date have used up a little excess energy, she decides she wants to see the rest of the movie. Well damn, it already blew up. Guess I'd better go spend more $$ to get another one. Think of what this could do to single men everywhere! WE'LL BE RUINED!!
Now, if they could figure a way to turn the coating back to transparency with some special laser, so landfills don't get crammed up with this suckers, I'd be all for it.
Think about it... you could be sitting at the checkout line in a grocery store, see a movie you missed and buy it for $3-4 without worrying about special players, returning times, and all that crap...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
After reading the comments, I have to come in on the pro side. If the disks are cheap, this is a great way to see movies you KNOW you're never going to watch more than once or twice. It also makes those "rent from the web" schemes a little more sensible, since the disks don't have to be returned, and the renters don't have to worry about the disk getting damaged in transit or by the renter.
My major objection to DIVX, not that I ever had it, was that it seemed to be poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and abuse-prone, with the phone line and everything.
I agree with the piracy argument, but if the studios are willing to take the chance, why should we argue? They're taking all the risk. Besides, for the time being at least, DVD-R blanks are still going to be more expensive than buying the "real" DVD.
And if it doesn't sell, so what? At least this time no one is stuck with orphan equipment.
Now all we need is a recycling policy for old CDs and DVDs. Maybe we can glue a whole bunch of them together around a core and make light-poles out of them.
Some readers are saying that driving rentals back is more damaging to the environment than the trash that would be created by this. I disagree. Chances you are going to drive somewhere for something else. There is a good chance that you'll be driving very near the video rental place. When I'm home from college I rent from the video store just across the street from the grocery store. I'm definately going to keep eating so I'll need to go to the store and why not synchronize my trips to kill two birds with one stone.
If DVDs were rented via mail there would be packaging to throw away also. I believe that the postal service probably uses lasers as a part of the routing system so packaging may need to protect discs from early damage.
I think that waste material like this is a dumb way to destory our planet not to mention disrespectful to the other inhabitants of Earth who would like to keep living.
- enarT
Using a technique similar to ones used to defeat IR laser guns used by the police, i.e., to defeat the IR laser a coating that absorbes the laser frequency, but no others, is used to cover reflective vehicle serfaces and is not obvious to the casual viewer in normal light.
The DVD hack could be a coating, placed on the DVD by the user, that absorbs (or reflects) the portion of the spectrum that turns the built in coating into another color. It should work, so long as usable frequencies can get through to read the disk (yes, laser is supposed to be one color, but we all know that is not the case in real life).
The other option: DeCSS on the first play and then cut a new disk.
Thought for food.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Could it be used to limit the number of installations of software. Set the degradtion to say 3 hours. Enough time to make sure you installation on one machine went ok, but not enough time to install it on a friends.
Bah. Hate this idea already. The first thing I would do would copy the DVD, just in case.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Besides the high quality video and audio, it really is nice to be able to jump from anywhere on a DVD movie to another place, instead of waiting for fast forward on VHS. If they make a disc play once or whatever, what good is it?
But you forgot that the company that sold those disks sold them in the full knowledge that fair use doctrine gives the licensee the right to do backup copies in order to *gasp* protect against media degration.
The coating that is added begins to cloud, degrading the picture. I have faith that there are just as many chemistry "hackers" as their are code slingers....*somebody* will come up with a way to remove the clouded coating.
It did... pay no attention these people ;)
(the other problem being incompatibility with some DVD players, IIRC)
Actually DivX didn't play on normal DVD players. You had to buy a DVD/DivX player for an extra $100 and it just wasn't worth the extra money. I don't see this as being much better, but at least you don't have to pay extra for the privledge.
This has nothing to do with any coating "breaking off". What an absurd idea that would be. The coating turns blue after a predetermined period of time after exposure to the atmosphere. Then the dvd player can't read it anymore. At least until somebody figures out how to buff the coating off.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Yes that is what the article said. The only problem with this is the fact that the article is WRONG. It is indeed exposure to the atmosphere that causes the degradation to begin. So now all these people worrying about pausing the player, or watching a chapter and not being able to see it again are talking about a non-issue. I posted a correction with the url to a much better article on this yesterday.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
This might be the obvious next step were it not for the fact that the layer has to be exposed to the atmosphere in order for it to work in the first place.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
In fact this idea was probably created by the Cult of Cthuhlu in order to hasten the destruction of the human race and the return of the Old Ones!
Ia, Ia, Cthuhlu Phtagn!!!
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Ahem, why can't we just put DVDs in special mailers we get from the video store and mail them back? I mean, heck, the Post Office has been worried about being replaced by Email, this would be something new for them to do, and it is so simple. (I mean eventually DVD will replace CD, and I'm pretty sure we're going to all get about a billion AOL DVDs.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Now we have our "degradable DVDs" the store gets in about 2 copies, after all the store isn't expecting much demand for it and they need the shelf space for 100 copies of the Pokemon movie. I buy one copy, but since no one else looks for it until six months later, the store decides not to restock. The other guy buys the remaining copy, and now the store have more room for the latest Earnest movie. Our copies degrade, only two people see them, and the store never has an incentive to restock them.
I also have a really hard time believing that video rental stores would want to switch to this model. Think about it, with DVDs they can buy one and make money off of it indefinitely. With Degrado-DVDs they have to operate like Sam Goody, they have to buy a lot of stock and if it doesn't move, they probably will have to eat some of the losses. It might be better for the DVD manufacturers to do business this way (though perhaps not, what if they get a cut of each rental?) but is it that good for Blockbuster? Won't they have to rebuild their stores to make room for the stock they now have to keep in the back? Well, just some random thoughts.
Oh, and there are also going to be the cries of, "But they tried that with Divx." People don't realize this but after the great video game crash it was almost impossible to shop video game consoles around (Nintendo managed an amazing thing) people didn't want to touch anything that resembled something that failed so abjectly.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
So, the first time you play one of these self-destructing disks, you play it in a DVD drive and save it to a DVD-writer.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I could be completely wrong here, but, I figure large chains (like Blockbuster) make a killing off of late fees.
To rent at Blockbuster, where I live, it's $5.28CDN taxes in. A little steep. BUT, it's also another $5.28 for every night that I forget to take it back. And without doubt, almost every time I go to block buster, I have a late charge.
Now, with blockbuster pulling in double for late charges, and usually with sufficient overstock anyway, why would they want to go with a technology that could end up not making as much money. If you ask me, rental stores will shun this technology. And that's just one reason that it won't ever make mainstream.
So? I make them an offer: they can waive the charge, and I will continue to patronize them, or insist, and lose my business that time. I've never had any place insist more than once.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
I never do. I tell the cashier that I have no intention of paying the fine. If they insist, I leave the movie and any drinks/snacks on the counter and walk out.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
I refuse to pay them, they always remove them from my record if I bitch enough.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
Problem is that the DVD companies are currently doing their darndest to stop anyone from making any copies at all - fair use doctrine or no fair use doctrine. At the moment you cannot make any copies of a DVD without doing some sort of hacking (eg De-CSS, screen capture, etc) and with a replacement for CSS planned, it doesn't look like this is changing, and won't unless someone actually goes to court using the fair use law. So the reason the DVD companies are not worried about DVD writers becoming commonplace is that these DVDs (like all commercial DVDs) will not copyable using consumer hardware, fair use or not (I don't count hacked firmware or whatever as consumer hardware).
:-)
(And yes, I realise "DVD companies" is a bit of a generalisation, you know what I mean
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
"This DVD will self-detruct in 5 seconds. Good luck copying it, Jim!"
Wouldn't recycling these discs consist of removing the old coating and applying a new one? I'm not in favor of it at all, but that seems to be one way to go...
aside from that, I don't think that people didn't use Divx because it was only sold by Circuit City. I think it's because the public at large know when they're being *REALLY* ripped off, even if they do prefer a little convenience for a little more expense. Most people are at least enviornmentally conscious to understand that this would be a really crappy thing to do.
Daniel
coal-burning power plants are cleaner even than (reg-old-gas) cars because they are optimized for a particular burn rate. cars could be made cleaner _if_ the engine ran at a constant rate (which can be done by using a flywheel for deccelleration and accelleration). so, except for the eventual disposal of the batteries (after a long and productive life), electric cars are still more umwelt-fruendlich than gas-powered cars.
You've just destroyed your customer base. No one will buy an addition to their video library they can't reuse.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I would expect that the "coating" isn't on the outside of the disk. It's in the middle of the sandwich, next to the data layer.
In the article, the reason for this is listed as check-out stand displays for impulse buys, or mail-outs like AOL CDs.
Sure you can only read the disc once, or twice, but if you can copy the DVD (no DeCSS required) isn't this going to provoke the pirates ?
Go to Wal-Mart, spend $3 bucks and make a copy you can watch over and over again. Essentially the same as going to Blockbuster, renting the DVD for $5 and doing the same.
Are the manufacturing costs of DVDs low enough to warrant selling throw away discs ?
Is there a way we can boycott, ignore or otherwise stop this ?
I emailed SpectraDisc, asking very simply why they wanted to pollute with a throw away product, and here is the response:
From: "Info" info@spectra-science.com
Thanks for your comments. We have been sharing your frustration
as the press has failed to report this product will be a
recyclable. Just a drop in the bucket next to the butter container
and milk bottle. - and by the way, avoid the pollution of a car trip
back to the store.
We appreciate your concern.
SpectraDisc
IIRC, your divx player had to contact a master server somewhere via your phone line to get the key to decrypt the video data. This, in my mind, was the WORST part of divx. It made all sorts of nasty possibilities come to mind, like central tracking of when and what divx releases you watched. Not to mention that if the master server in your area went down, you'd be out of luck (imagine building a divx library of a hundred or so discs while the format was popular only to watch the format fall into disuse, leaving you with a hundred crappy coasters). Oh, there were other bad things about divx, too, but this one stuck out in my mind as *really* bad.
Yeah, or even better: Rent the disk, pirate it with DeCSS (according to the MPAA this is what everybody does all the time) and then throw it away. ;)
;)
Just joking. But you've got a point there. The idea is pretty nice. Saves both the rental stores and the customers a lot of hassle. Just rent the disk and throw it away. No worrying about getting it back on the customer side. No worrying about people keeping disks on the store side.
Just my 121 bytes of wasted storage space on slashdot's servers
AOL would just eat this up. Now they can send you a crappy 2 gig browser "custom made" just for you.. And of course you get your free 90 hours (or whatever it's up to now)..
Great -- this is all consumer society needs -- more products that degrade over time and have to be disposed of. I think one of the most important things we should consider when we make new stuff these days is "how long is this thing going to last?" -- we need to make stuff that:
I would hate to see this idea work, simply because of the waste involved. *sigh* This "throw away" society really worries me a lot. Stupid, stupid, stupid idea. In so many ways. I hope they fail miserably.
And it really does seem goofy, doesn't it? The thing that bugs me is that, until recently, when I bought something it was mine. In my mind, I ought to be free to do whatever I wish to my property. But apparently, it's not my property. So we have to look at a new way to define this thing I have:
Is it a movie, or is it media containing a movie?
Do I in fact own a piece of the movie by paying for the media? Or, can I never own a movie, in whole or in part, unless I have paid a director, cast, and crew money to make it for me (I'm ignoring the possibility of making a movie by oneself)?
What *IS* a movie, exactly?
If it's digital, does the file format change what it is?
How do you buy the rights to intellectual property if the original owner is dead?
That's how I feel rationally. Emotionally, it's much simpler. Tell me that you don't want me to have it, and I'll never stop trying to get it.
I assert ownership of all trademarks and copyrights on this page.
I mean, what does "degrade" mean anyway? It sounds like this "coating" will actually break up and come off the DVD *inside* your player! How much coating is there? Will it build up over time?
The AC's point was that the waste should be put into a *subduction* zone one the seabed. This is an area where two tectonic plates meet and one is forced under the other. Anything you put here will get drawn under the Earth's crust.
Of course there are concerns about what would happen to the stuff before it gets recycled into the magma, but the point of the post was not to just dump it somewhere out of sight.
The AC's point was that the waste should be put into a *subduction* zone on the seabed. This is an area where two tectonic plates meet and one is forced under the other. Anything you put here will get drawn under the Earth's crust.
Of course there are concerns about what would happen to the stuff before it gets recycled into the magma, but the point of the post was not to just dump it somewhere out of sight.
I got funding....
Yup, I got funding to develop SuperGel(TM).
SuperGel(TM) will allow you to apply a gel coating on self-destructing DVD.
The SuperGel(TM) patented Gel will merge with the DVD coating to prevent it from degrading when the laser beam hit it.
SuperGel(TM) will be availlable when the first degradingDVD will hit the market.
It will cost only 50cents per application. SuperGel(TM) will be sold in yet to be develop package that will hold enough SuperGel(TM) for 2^4 applications.
"We think it gets around what killed Divx," said Nabil Lawandy, Specra Science's CEO. "There's no phone line, no credit card transaction, no special player needed, and no Big Brother element to it."
Some people just don't get it do they? DIVX didn't die because of some "Big Brother" complex. It died because it was stupid. For the most part, people who own DVD players are "videophiles". They spend a great deal of money on DVD players and the home theatre to adequately showcase DVD movies. Then they go out and buy the movies they want to watch. Occasionally DVD owners rent movies, but the current lack of DVD title selection at most rental stores has really made DVD a buyer-preferred medium. DIVX failed because most of us DVD owners would rather buy DVD movies than rent them. We don't need a new rental scheme to make renting easier because we don't plan on doing a lot of renting.
If Spectra-Vision (or anybody else) wants these rental schemes to succeed, maybe they should wait a little while longer. DVD player prices may have dropped significantly in the last year, but since DVD is basically no better than VHS without a somewhat decent home theatre, the overall price of DVD is still pretty high for most consumers. Once the cost goes down a little further and DVD becomes more common, then Spectra Vision and whoever else can create nifty little rental schemes to appeal to a mainstream audience. I think they're jumping the gun on this one, and they'll probably go the way of DIVX unless they can get widespread studio support for the format.
Yes it's just a "few grams of plastic" but those few grams would at up to quite a lot after a while and that plastic and its packaging are not recyclable at all. The other major problem is the fact that all these extra disks have to be transported to the video store constantly. This greatly ups the cost and pollution of said disk.
Secondly there is the problem of independant films and older films. Will they really constantly produce every film ever made just to replace those that are taken off the shelve every now and then?
seriously though, perhaps a small return deposit, say $.50 off your next rental if you return the 'dead' disc for recycling would reduce the trash impact.
hey, when did they take the 'cents' button off keyboards? I just noticed it =)
Allow me to point out one small problem with all this... the laser in a DVD drive is a visable spectrum (680nm?) red laser. The disk's "clock" would likely start the instant it was taken out of the foil wrapper.
as it is, my burner has me with about 30 bad discs, and now i will have a stack of divx discs?
http://www.fsckin.com/
Okay, let me see if I get this right...
You take a DVD, which costs $2 to produce. You spend $0.33 to coat it with Magical Degradation Coating. Then instead of selling it for $20, you sell it for $3. It seems to me the manufacturers are paying for the ability to charge less... doesn't make much sense.
Or to put it in other terms, the margin on a normal DVD is about $18, and the margin on one of these will be $0.66. You need to sell over 25 of these for every normal DVD sale you lose to break even, never mind to make money from this.
I don't see the manufacturers hopping on board.
[TMB]
No more late fees,
Which is exactly why the movie rental companies will make sure this fails. It's a little known truth that rental companies make a great deal of their money off of late fees - I've even heard that late fees bring in more money than the original rental charges themselves in some areas. The stores aren't going to be happy that a major revenue stream is being eliminated.
Am I the only person who sees the potential cool-factor in this?
/. This disc will self-destruct in 5 seconds."
"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to seek out and destroy all Natalie Portman trolls on
Hey, someone had to do it.
the material is a coating, and effectively, the coating turns opaque after laser exposure. nothing says that mister spy cant pull your key disk out of the trash, wipe off the coating (or peel of the layer ) and get the data underneath.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Imagine knowing that you'll only have one DVD play. So what's the first thing you do when you bring it home? Burn yourself a copy. Imagine how gleefull the DVD-R producers are, everyone scared that their DVD will deteriorate, making copies.
Maybe it'll even finally push the price down.
After reading some more info from the company orginating this idea I have to agree that it might be a good idea. They're not targeting the rental industry at all. I think it would be cool to have a rack full of movies at the check-out counter of a drug store or grocery store that you could buy for a couple of bucks to watch once or twice and then throw away. I would probably watch a lot of movies that I might otherwise pass up if I had to return them.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
They say that after the laser first hits it, it takes a certain length of time (from minutes to days, which can be set by the thickness of the coating), to change color and become unusable.. So what makes it change color? Let's assume oxidation, because I can't really imagine what else would do it. (opinions on this?)
It wouldn't be terribly hard to store a DVD player in a nitrogen atmosphere. Take your standard entertainment center with a glass door, seal off the back, make sure the glass door makes an airtight seal. Kludge something up with a nitrogen tank - maybe put a valve in the front to attach the tank to, and a one-way valve in the back to let air out.
That's still a lot of work, though. It would be easier to store the disk carefully. You'll lose time while it plays, but not while it's in storage. Storing it immersed in distilled water might be all you need to do. Or seal it with one of those cheap vacuum storage machines intended for food.
It's number 6011772, "Machine-readable optical disc with reading-inhibit agent".
Good points:
1. Content sellers get the DIVX like stuff they want.
2. Consumers appear to get privacy. Pay cash, take home, watch, forget about bringing it back or fooling with weird authentication scams, er, schemes.
Bad points:
1. This, not DeCSS, would seem to encourage piracy more than anything. Joe Random Customer: "Hey, I paid for it once, why can't I play it again now? That does it, next one I copy.. or get a copy that isn't Broken As Designed."
2. The privacy bit is moot. Pay cash for a DVD that stays good and you still have all the privacy that a degrading disc would appear to provide.
3. Conspiracy time: Content sellers could could issues only on these auto-defective media.
4. What does the degrading do to a play or drive if left there for an extended time? What about me, is there any gas emitted that might affect my health? Or substance on an "aged" disc that I don't want to be touching?
It looks like another DIVX from here, if consumers have a choice (which may not be the case). Content sellers want to sell over and over and this may seem a boon. It is not. The one thing you should never do is make your customers mad at you. This looks to do just that, and likely very very well.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
You also have to remember that the return visit is important to video stores as well. Customers are likely to rent a video on the return trip, which works like the shampoo cycle:
1. Rent
2. Return
3. Repeat
I just don't think this is going to work out for the rental business. The person who suggested using this for encrypted material has a good point.
I'm also concerned about the environmental concerns. I disagree with the people that say that throwing away a disc is somehow better than driving down to the store. For one, I assume that most people go to the video store when they're running other errands, so it's not like a disposable DVD will cut down on people driving. Of course, there are probably some people who will get out their 8 mpg suburban assault vehicle and drive just to return a video. But these people would probably drive to the end of their driveway to throw the DVD away in the trash anyway.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
But seriously though, it should be obvious even to these people that this is a technology with a small niche, and will never fly when it comes to standard DVD movie distribution.
----------------
Overheard: "Aww, why'd you go and install Windows on a perfectly good machine?"
That's btw. 8$/Gb making it 32$ for your dvd-movie. Still a little more expensive than buing the tape, but this is for 7200rpm ata/66. a 5400rpm will be much cheaper and actually a quick check at pricewatch reveals that 40Gb 5400rpm ata/66 sells for 252$. I mean 6.3$/Gb, a far cry from your 30$/Gb. That's 25$ for a movie, now! I'd say within a year or so you can back up a rental movie on your HD for less than the cost of buying it(that's less than 18.99$) and yes I included the rental fee.
All this just brought back memories from the times when a brand new 512mb scsi-drive cost ~500$. That's 1$/Mb.. and it was never going to fill up..
In the future I will endeavor to make my posts as relevant and original as your post.
Not to mention as polite.
Yea now we get something that breaks as soon as it's out of the box. Somehow I don't think that'll go over well either.
Hmm... good point. This doesn't really have a justification. It isn't strictly exponential. An exponential decay function describes a population whose individuals are equally likely to die at any given age. It is unlikely that old and young CD-Rs are equally likely to break; however, it doesn't matter. It's still rather unlikely that a CD-R's life expectancy is less than 10 years.
It's fairly reasonable to assume that age doesn't make the CD-Rs less likely to break; that would be absurd. (Am I wrong here?) If age does in fact increase the chances of the CD-R breaking, then that merely strengthens my argument that the life span of a CD-R must be greater than 10 years.
Simply: If age increases the chances of a CD-R breaking, then the probability of a CD-R not working after a year will be less than in the prior calculation. Hence, the probability of all 40 CD-Rs working after a full year would be even less than in the last calculation.
Expanded (I was pleasantly surprised that the last argument applied; note the "less" and "greater" qualifiers): If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to ?(infinity), Integral?(2^(-x/h))dx < 10, so h/ln(2) < 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of a CD-R not working after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is less than the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong :-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a CD-R is not less than 10 years. So, even if the CD-R is more likely to break as time goes on, the argument still holds.
In my last post, I established that if old and young CD-Rs are equally likely to break, then the life expectancy is not less than 10 years. The last paragraph established that if old CD-Rs are more likely to break than young CD-Rs, then the same argument still holds. Finally, if you can show me a CD-R that is more likely to break when it is young than when it is old, I'll quit my argument :-).
I should really start studying for my English midterm...
Daniel J. Peng
BTW, why does slashdot insist on mangling all my properly-escaped character entities (delta, infinity, integral, quotes, less than signs, greater than signs, etc.)??? I've got stuff that looks like <strong>></strong> in my code.
Daniel J. Peng
If age increases the chances of a CD-R breaking, then the probability of a CD-R not working after a year will be less than in the prior calculation. Hence, the probability of all 40 of my CD-Rs working after a full year would be even less than in the last calculation. Since all 40 of my CD-Rs do in fact work, the probability that the life expectancy of a CD-R being less than 10 years is even less than in the last calculation...
Daniel J. Peng
Now even if it was bonded at the molecular level, the NSA could bust out a scanning electron microscope or whatever and read the pits that way. But that's only the binary pits; it doesn't tell the software how to read them so they make any sense.
Plastic, lots of plastic around just for your traffic problems... go walking! the 90% of the gas from your car is still "reduceable" by the environment. Your blown out cds are thousand year lasting. Anyway, I'll ask pirates for an everlasting copy. F*** the DVD. Too many problems yust to watch a movie...Let's make a new opensource standard.
Ummm...I don't think they will put the corrosive layer on the outside. 911: "Yeah, whaddaya want?" DVD watcher: "Ah...I was watching The Little Mermaid, and now the disc seems to be grafted to my skin." 911: "Right. You want an ambulance or something?" DVD watcher: "No, get me Johnny Cochran. I'm goin to DisneyWorld!"
Now look, Anybody can buy a cd-r drive for less than 200 bucks. Many people like myself buy them just for the heck of it. Others for backup and others for other reasons. it is only a matter of time before we get DVD-R and RW. What happens then. People (not me of course) make illegal copies of music CDs with discs that cost 3 dollars. DVD-R discs won't cost too much more in a year or two. Even if they put some sort of protection on it, I haven't seen protection that wasn't hacked by somebody. What people will do is one person buy/rent this disposable crap and like 20 blank discs and then make copies and sell them for 5 bucks a piece. It won't work unless you sell it for like $1 a piece, then you make no profit if you are a legitimate company. How about just sticking to regular DVD that doesnt' self destruct. You will make more in the long run and the company that doens't sell disposable will come out on top.
If you want my respect, give it first...
If you don't want my respect, expect mine before you give it.
He's a moron. Or worse, a DVD association troll.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
Yep, just sounds like the same old shit. What happens if [I] watch chapter seven on the DVD a couple of times and then try to watch the whole movie again. Does it stop at the end of chapter 6 or just skip 7 cuz it's unreadable?
Let's hope this dies a well-deserved death.
I'm not native English, but I believe the Americans have a phrase for this that I think sounds appropriate:
'Are you out of your fucking mind!!'
.
Your desire to dump waste into the ocean (or anywhere cheap and hidden) simply puts off the cost of that decision until future generations have to contend with it. It is flawed economic reasoning and morally selfish.
The cost of a product should include all phases of it's life-cycle. Unfortunately, because of tax-breaks, subsidies (like using the US military to prop up petro-corps) leave all of us consumers ignorant when it comes time to make a decision at the store.
Let's see nuclear generated electricity compete with solar power on a level playing field. No legislated exemptions from liability, no free fuel from gov't uranium mines, no socialist sharing of disposal costs. In a free market, the cost of dumping YOUR problems into our oceans would be prison.
Where do you derive the moral authority to use a common resource for you own personal enrichment? You wrote about the subduction zone as if you know what's down there and what the actual consequence will be of flooding it with toxic/nuke waste. Perhaps you should have a solution in place to deal with your waste (not dumping it in the ocean) before you run ahead with your next great idea, Smilin' Joe Fisson.
A few municipalities have passed recycling laws that focus on the trash once it's at the curb. Those are foolish.
The only way to address this problem is to charge users per can of non-recyc waste while picking up the re-cyc trash for free. This creates the incentive for users to purchase and consume goods (and their packaging) that can go into the recyc bin.
These discs, although plastic, are hardly ready for any existing reuse/recyc processing stream. 99% of them would most likely wind up in the landfill. As taxpayers face increasing fees for landfills, the reality of those costs should be removed from society at large and focused on the users of those landfills.
One problem might me rampant fly-dumping, with people littering the sides of roads with their hefty bags. We'll of course have to raise the offense of littering to a felony and pull some state troopers off drug details to catch criminals who actually harm our society.
That would be a godsend...back in the old days it was no big deal to swallow the little strip of paper with a 5 character passcode on it, but have you seen the keys these days? The really important stuff is encoded with MEGABYTE encryption keys...we're losing agents to ink poisoning!
The horror...the horror...
-evilWurst
(OK, pardon me for being a late-comer, but we antipodeans are always behind the times)
At long last, those digital artists who re-write archaic tomes on magic will have a medium that reflects the content: not only will the pages delete themselves as you read them, but the disc goes blank before you get the chance to recover them...
On another thread: I'm pleased to read that so many of you are concerned about environmental impacts. Balance the responsibility between yourselves (as consumers) and the producers. Pressure companies to think more responsibly, and make it clear that you prefer permanency. If they don't listen, don't buy it - they'll listen if they go broke (ah, I love capitalism)
I feel sorry for people that want to make thing impermanent: aren't they proud enough of their achievements to let them stand the test of time?
In my opinion, the major problem with DIVX was that it required a special player to run them. If these folks can make a degradable disc that will run in any normal player, I think it wouldn't be such a bad idea. Ecological implications aside, I would much rather not have to worry about having to return rentals, especially seeing how lazy I am. Maybe a once every 20 rental trip to get the discarded hulks recycled instead of 20 trips to return them.
It makes you wonder what will happen when DVD writers finally become commonplace: under fair use doctrine, it's ok to duplicate your media to guard against unintended distruction (ie backups). Just copy the self-destructing DVD to a normal DVD disc, and you're all set
I think it doesn't really matter. The point of these self-destructing discs is to save the lazy the trouble of returning rented discs. Most people won't be interested in duplicating the discs - they just want to watch it once and forget it, and not have to return it. Going into the trouble of duplicating the discs sort of defeats the purpose (which is laziness)
<IANAL%gt;
The shrinkwrap licence is a contract. If a contract contains illegal terms, then it is not binding. (If it says in small letters "You must jump out of your office window after using this product" You dont have to)
Of course "they" are lobbying to make various evil terms lawful. See DMCA </IANAL%gt;
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Who actually wants this product?
p ort/pjb/stories/03064261.htm )
We can look at a few parties that might (but wouldn't, IMO):
The consumer -
Well, I for one am environmentally conscious enough that I wouldn't do this. Certainly it seems more Draconian in enforcement - I _like_ having the flexibility of returning my movies late if I don't get around to watching them. Besides that, it would have to catch on before it got cheap, and that's a huge barrier to entry - most people still rent VHS, and apparently DVD's cost about $1 to make - add that onto your rental charge and I say nuh-uh.
The rental store -
Nope. 15% of their money comes from late fees (according to the article someone else pointed to at http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/frame_it.cgi?URL=/re
Besides that, again, higher rental fees, etc. Perhaps there's some reduced overhead from returns, but there's added overhead of a steady flow of incoming discs, *plus* some customers (For environmental or whatever) reasons would refuse to use the throwaway kind, so many stores would end up providing both.
The content provider -
What helps the rental stores helps the content provider. I can't see any reason that these companies would want this.
Seems to me to be a perceived market that doesn't actually exist. DIVX sounds like it tried the "right" way of doing this (though I don't know much about it) but couldn't make it cheap. Now people are making it cheap, but it just doesn't sit right with me.
Too many problems to be feasible, and _no-one_ wants it that I can think of.
-Rob Ewaschuk
these things can still be ripped, can't they? I mean..if the DVDCA really wants to crack down on piracy you'd think they'd fight any attempt to create this kind of thing. I mean, why spend $25 bucks on a movie if you're just gonna rip it anyway? Why not spend $3?
I think it's a pretty good bet that at least 25 people would rent for $3 for every person buying at $20. This also has the potential to cut out the middle man (Blockbuster).
If this becomes a real product (I have serious doubts) we may see just how much clout rental chains have with the Motion Picture Industry. Know why Blockbuster started giving away free popcorn if you brought the movie back by 8? It's not because they can put it back on the shelf -- chances are it will stay in the bin for a few more hours after that. It's because, if you bring it back by 8, the store's still open, and you can rent another movie.
They WANT you to go back. Every time you go back to drop off the movie, you might rent another movie.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
There's a little problem (actually more than one little problem) with your scheme. 1) To burn a disk in the amount of time a consumer wishes to wait would require a very very expensive DVD mastering system. I don't think many consumers would hang around for the 30 minutes to an hour it would take to copy a DVD. 2) Unless you charge the customer who has a copy of a DVD for the length of time they have the DVD (i.e., 1day=$2, 2days=$3, 3days=$4 etc.) there would be no incentive for them to ever bring it back. You would be basically selling DVDs at a very low price. Jackalope
Don't be ridiculous. The media companies would take the issue to the courts, and the courts would support them because it's piracy plain and simple. If you have bought an auto-expiring DVD in the full knowledge that it is *meant* to be usable only for one day, and that a condition of the sale is that you *will not* make a copy, then you simply do not have a leg to stand on.
Sure, if they make you sign something when you buy it, agreeing not to use it after x days, then the original poster's plan would be illegal. However, unless you sign something, their legal power to enforce the "agreement" would be just as dubious as with any other shrink-wrap license.
You're right, actually. I was thinking that the allowance to "make one copy for archival purposes in case of loss or destruction of the original" was part of US statutory law. Then I realized the reason the phrase came to mind: it's part of standard End User License Agreement boilerplate. Obviously, no such phrase would be part of a license for a disposable DVD :)
Err... my bad, that phrase I quoted doesn't come from fair use doctrine, it comes from EULA boilerplate. Clearly, no one would be stupid enough to grant such a license in the case of disposable DVD's. Oh well, it was still an amusing thought.
===
-Ravagin
Karma: T-rexcellent.
If you warp enough of them properly, you can set a matrix of parabolic mirrors. Not sure what that's good for; bound to be something...
Centerpiece
Menorah (with a little work)
Really Big Sequins
Hats
Bike Reflectors
Hubcaps
===
-Ravagin
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Its karma, Kramer.
They should make an auto-degrading movie of William Gibson's auto-degrading prose poem Agrippa (that will probably be just as bad and sell just as poorly)
I am totally in love with the idea of 'perfect' digital media being forced to rot. I'm sure some of you have heard of the 'disc rot' problem with some Laser Discs and CDs. This coating technology means I can produce time-based art. With some experimentation, you could tweak the error-correction of the DVD and get different effects and artifacts as the disc starts to die.
I have always sought out the imperfections of digital media to make art from it. Now I will have a tool to take this idea even further.
This would also be popular with artists who wanted to make work available to fans that was 'ok' but that they feel wouldn't do them justice if it was a permanent record. Coil's Song of The Week Mp3 experiment would be a good example.
-- Your ad here $20 --
I believe that the CIA have been doing this for some time with CD-R's.
IIRC they use a beefed-up laser in the CD-ROM drive which sits "behind" the normal laser and erases the data that has just been read by melting it.
An excellent point. It's well proven that disposable products tend to promote disposal. The last thing we need is more solid waste so some ungodly wealthy cocksuckers can make more money off of the laziness of the average consumer.
As I recall, there was a big to-do with DIVX and rental companies like Blockbuster that the supposed benefit of "avoiding late fees" was something completely abhorrent to them?
Blockbuster made $516 million off of late fees last year, according to an article referenced up above. Does anyone really believe that they're blithely willing to let that kind of money go for an unproven technology that has already flopped bad once in the market? I mean, come on!
There are certainly uses for this idea, but they need to get it through their heads that they can't charge us for every viewing of a movie. Bloodsuckers...
"Honey, it's not working out; I think we should make our relationship open-source."
Forget disposable stuff...think about pirating!
Heck, why pay $20/$25 for a DVD to copy when you can now do it for only $3/$4! I mean, just wait for the DVD-R to get cheaper media (like around $5 to $10), and I can have a movie perminately for $8-$15 what I normally would have to pay $20-$25 for! And who says I have to make just one?!?
Personally, I think it's ignorant of them to think they can get by piracy issues by making the disk self-destructable. Whether I copy it the first time I read the disk, or the 100th time, either/or, it's still pirating the media.
And who says I'd have to make a copy in the first place? The report said that this was a physical aspect of the disk where the disk could change color and become unreadable. What if we found a way to change it back? If there's a will, there's a way. Put it up to a black light? Dump it in really hot or cold water? Give enough people a chance, and I'm sure you'll find a work-around!
This is a good point, but when's the last time you can remember the vast majority of Americans looking at something rationally. As a nation, we are far too eager to latch on to whatever BadThing(tm) the media feels like doling out on the evening news and protesting it untill we're blue in the face.
However we will just as quickly drop a cause as we picked it up as soon as ABC/CBS/NBS/TLA stop telling us about it. When's the last time you heard anything about high-tension power lines? Anyone who ever studied basic E&M knows that they don't produce enough of an EMF to reach ground level, yet for a couple of years they were practically the end of civilization, right up until the media moved on to something new.
Americans have the nasty habit of becoming very angry and very vocal at the drop of a hat, and I believe if anything will kill disposable DVD's, this will.
Jeff
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
This is actually a really good idea. (Not the dissolving discs, but what Jbrecken said.) If it were easy to tell whether a disc had been used, then perhaps stores could accept returns again?
Dr W.
ridiculous the amount of effort and money corporate sorts put into something that will be at best a temporary hack to satisfy their short-term, profit-driven motives.
I am, therefore you think.
What are they planning on doiong, sell you a dvd that is going to die in 3 days?
That to me sounds like the easiest way to get rid of your customer base. Who in their right mind is going to lay out that kind of money, even if they are cheep, at that rate.
Divix was a good idea, it seems to me like the execution of that idea was what failed. You coud buy a DVD movie, that you may or may not have wanted to see, try it, and if you didnt like it, you were only out 5 or 6 bucks.
On the other hand, a dvd that degrades, would be pointless. You would by it, and after you play it, its gone? How much do they expect to charge you for it? A dollar? 50 cents? I know that I wouldnt pay a penny for a movie that i could watch once, and then poof gone.
On the other hand, I do see one market/use for this kind of media. The transfer of documentation that you want to destroy after it has been viewed it. Remeber the exploding tapes form Mission Impossible. Here is the new interactive version, pop in computer, load, get the info, by the time your done the disk is trash...Maybe Bond could use one of these in his next movie!
You can't get a blank DVD media for that price. It would cost $25 per blank DVD disc.
Add to that the nomimal cost of the DVD-RAM itself (only $500 or so) and you have a dauntingly cost ineffective home grown piracy job going. IOW it would be less costly to just go buy the movie on DVD from Best Buy for ~$20.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Sure its technicaly feasible, but so is uberhighspeed bandwidth to every home in america, and we all know how common that is.
The only market for something like this is for rentals, but return visits to drop off a rented movie make up a large precentage of sales for rental shops.. 'Hey, I'm here anyway, why not rent that other movie I've wanted to see.'
Also, it's probably cheaper to have a few copies of a DVD that remain in circulation, then to pay for the infastructer to ship in 30 more copies of the latest disney flick every 3 days.
This new tech is nothing more then a "hey look what we can do" invention, and I doubt it will have any major impact on the home entertainment market, certainly not like DIVX would have.
NightHawk
Normally the rental store buys some dvd's (about $20-$30 a piece) and hires them to the people for $1-$6.. So now they want 'em to buy a new disposable dvd every time someone wants to hire it. Let's see, the disposable dvd's won't come cheap since they are manufactured over again every time so they will be at least cost the rental store $3-$6 a piece. So if they want to maintain the current profit margain on the dvd they have to turn up the rental price on their "disposable" dvd.. More money will flow directly into the arms of the big moviecompanies this way, they'll get a fee everytime. And less money will go to the rental stores, and more money will come out of the pockets of the consumers.. and lets not forget the company that has the patents for disposable dvd's..
Regards,
What a brilliantly *crap* idea.
Besides the fact that consumers wont go for it, it's just another facet in our wonderful throw-away world - so what do you do with the damn thing when it won't work anymore - chuck it away.
sigh...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
So just where on the disc does this layer live? If it's on the surface, can I polish it off and replace it with a inert layer? Chemically alter it? Does it become opaque across a broad spectrum, or just the few nm specified by the DVD standard?
It's not software, does DMCA and UCITA apply? I'll probably get a court summons for thinking these thoughts....
Temkin
Each rental store should have a big stock of dvd-rw media and single copies of each movie they store on dvd. When somebody wants to rent a movie, the store copies the disc and sends the customer on their way (they'll keep a cache of burned ones so you needn't wait). Since it's only a copy, they just need to return the disc the next time they come in for more movies. The beauty of it is that if it's on dvd, they can rent it to you, they never run out of stock. It's about time stores started using some of the technological advantages of this medium.
the obvous problem is that a lot of ppl have a PC-with-DVD, and thus if they can read it once, they can take a backup once, and lo and behold, they have a non-degrading copy. But another question is if it wouldn't be possible to re-coat the DVDs ?
Some clever hacker just might find out that smearing your DVD with a mix of hairspray turtle-vax and paint will create a permanent coating that works just fine ...
On the legal side, I suppose it is possible to form a licence-agreement that says something like: You've only paid to watch this film 5 (five) times. Please sign on the dotted line.
That would, ofcourse, be much more restrictive than a rental-movie, but then schemes that have only "common sense" as their security model, tends to change once you try to implement them digitally.
Personally, I hate the idea too. I do, however, wish to take this opportunity to play a quick game of devil's advocate. Think of all of the enviromental affects that gasoline over-usage causes. Smog, the increased liklihood of an oil spill to the increased demand/output of oilwells, and depletion of a non-renewable resource are all the penalties we pay for such things.
If 200 Million people (roughly 2 out of every 3 people in the United States) rent only 2 movies a year, and it takes them 3 miles to drive to the video store and we assume they get 40 mpg (hah!), then that means 30 million (400,000,000/40 * 3) gallons of gas per year would be saved by this invention(return trip gas alone). Not to mention that dvd's are made of plastic and could at least be recycled.
If you want any sort of longevity, you'll be forced to copy the DVD. Maybe you wouldn't have bothered to get a DVD writer otherwise, but now that you have it, you'll want to make use of it, to get your money's worth. So you'll copy even more DVD's than you would have had they not come up with this silly idea.
So what were they trying to accomplish, anyway?
Were we are, we punch two small holes on the opposite sides and the use a paper clip to attach the disks together. It makes for great Christmas wreaths. This years run is about 200' long. We are critial in what CD are included in the wreaths, only software upgrade disk this year.
Would this not be a situation like most comercial software? You purchase the right to use the product not the actual product it's self. This is a horrendous situation but unfortunately the way things are. I hope this technology does not get anywhere.
If people keep breaking the encryption then the powers that be will keep trying to find ways to protect their product. If we could just use them on Linux then there would not be attempts on the encryption. Bit like the proverbial chicken and egg I guess.
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
Not that I'm an expert, but couldn't it be more hazardous to the environment to drive your rental back than recycle your dvds.
I bet the coating stinks burnt rubber when the laser hits it.
Sometimes the best way to kill a bad idea is to play fear on the masses. Even though its bogus, all you have to do is spread the rumor that these DVDs can "Ruin the Integrity of the DVD player", and that "This was not the made for the players original design". After what ppl pay for the DVD player, the smallest scare will kill the industry for the one shot wonders. -Yes im cynical, I worked in a PC repair shop! Im supprised the human race can tie its own shoelaces at times! ;)
Or
"DIVX will never make de grade."
zorba
JOHN CAGE (strapped to table): Do you really expect me to conduct this antiquated tonal system?
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: No, Mr. Cage, I expect you to die!
Assuming the process could be used on computer DVDs - Degrading DVD + DVD required to run = Nagware IIRC Nagware is software you have to pay for by number of uses or time used. Nagware has failed so far partly because it's difficult to enforce... But this would make it simple and easy. And who doesn't hate nagware? I hope I never see software that uses this technique. Although this would make great demo/beta versions.
I think if it would be economical, wouldn't it be great to purchase a RW DVD one time, have the rental place write the movie to your DVD, coat it to corrode within three days, and be able to repeat this process? No more late fees, and money could be saved by not having to produce millions of discs. Instead, the consumer could pay something like $50 for the initial disc, plus $3 per rental. Of course, writing is still a lengthy process, and I'm sure the waiting line would grow too large, but it would be a neat idea.
I can't believe, 90% or more of the postings here seem to be against this idea! Come on, guys: you call yourselves nerds? You're supposed to be techies, you're supposed to appreciate evolution when it makes our lives easier! Read the article, think about it. This is here to stay.
Let's see the arguments raised against this technology:
Piracy: Nonsense, you can rent a DVD tonight, copy it and return the original. Just as illegal as it will be to copy one of these DDVD's.
Environmental concerns: Maybe here we have a problem, but the supporting plastic won't have to last as long as the one of a DVD, so it can be a different material, one that degrades (I mean chemically) after some time.
Inconvenience: Sure, if you compare a DDVD to a DVD you buy, but you shuold compare it to a DVD you rent. You don't have to return anything. The chrono starts when you start to see the movie, no sooner, so you can buy a dozen titles and watch them as you please. Great for people who don't have Blockbusters just around the corner, or those who live in small towns where it's hard to find art films or oldies. Think of the ease to buy over the internet, in a supermarket, gas station, you name it. They could be given to you at no cost in promotional events or shopping seasons. Studios would slip DDVD's under you door with 10min previews of new movies.
Coat removal: The plastic layer on top of the data could be extremally thin or even nonexistant, again, because there is no concern about durability. Maybe this coat would be enough to hold the cristals in place. Tha coat can be made so that removing it destroys the data.
Frankly, aren't we getting kind of too skeptical when something appears that will change the people who make money out of our needs?
-------------------------
-------------------------
"People ask FAQs all the time". - David Allen
I don't really think the video rental stores will like self-destructing disks! At least no single store in my country, Malta, would be able to sustain such expensive media! Imagine them having to buy a disk per rental! They would all have to close down. This holds also for other parts of the world I'm sure.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
If they are going to spend all of this time and money coming up with a system like this, you would think that they could find a way to recycle the disks so that they can put another movie on them or at least restore the movie that was originally there.
-----
This scheme is different from DIVX. It is worse. It practically guarantees that the disc will be thrown away. With DIVX there was always that possibility of paying to watch the movie again, or turn the disc into a full DVD. That probably tended to make people keep the DIVX dics around.
Here are some further thoughts, some of which have already been mentioned numerous times:
The point I am making here is that this is overall good for the movie business and consumers, so it is likely to happen. What we need to do now is figure out how to keep this from creating a huge amount of waste.
If it is possible to recycle the materials cost-effectively, perhaps a retail price of $6 per disc, with a refund of $3 per disc would reduce the waste. That way people could rent videos for the same price they currently do without having to return them at any particular time, but they would have a good reason not to throw it away. I think this scheme would work well. It is pretty convenient, because you could just bring the movie back when you went to rent another one... and you would (on average) only have the additional cost the first time you rented, because you could use the credit for the old disc to rent a new one.
Regarding the first bullet point, this scheme does not make piracy any cheaper or easier than renting a DVD and copying it.
I would expect that the "coating" isn't on the outside of the disk. It's in the middle of the sandwich, next to the data layer.
Sorry, nice try. A DVD is a sandwich of two polycarbonate discs, with a layer of glue between them. Each of the discs has pits stamped into one side, then covered with a reflective material like aluminum. The pit side of both discs are toward the inside. In the case of a single-layer disc, the second disc is a dummy, and is often stamped with a picture. (There are rumors that scrap discs are used for the other side on a few DVDs, but you'd have to remove the label paint to know for sure.)
You can't put anything between the disc and the data layer, because the data layer is the inside surface of the disc.
This only leaves two other options. Either put it in the polycarbonate, or paint it on the outside surface. You can't control the thickness of the plastic, and the thickness of the degrading material can be controlled, ergo it is painted on the outside surface.
I think the real problem with making a "backup" of these discs is that they will be featureless pan & scan transfers, with no extras, probably not even a menu. And maybe even with wonderful uninterruptable 5-minute promo ads in the "FBI time" after you insert a disc. Bleah.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The DIVX business model relied on replays after the original playback period expired. This was where they were going to make all their money. Not by having you throw out the discs, but by having you turn your own home in to a "branch office" of the rental store.
It probably failed because most renters just want to see the movie once, and never again.
So this scheme is going to have to have a lot lower manufacturing costs than DIVX if it is going to break even. Maybe they can save a quarter by using paper sleeves instead of cardboard "jewel" boxes, but they still have to press a DVD-ROM either way.
And since DIVX was software only, there was no materials cost involved in the scheme (beyond the support in the player, which customers paid $100 for, another strike against DIVX!) other than the CPU time to do the encryption.
But this new scheme requires the processing of actual atoms, so it has an inherently higher cost of production. It will cost more to create a disk which will generate less potential revenue than DIVX.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
But this surely affects the quality. I bet after the first day of viewing you'll notice some artifacts. I have much better idea: a built-in time bomb. After exactly three days since the moment it came with a laser contact, DVD blows into pieces. (a viewer is expected to take all necessary precautions ...) I leave the implementation details to more technically inclined Slashdot readers.
Trashcans filled with unusable DVD's. What a bright future.
The way this *should* work is with free DVDs -- like teasers. Get a freebie teaser in the mail -- you could watch it for 24 hours -- but if you want to own it, you gotta buy it.
I mean, imagine freebie Criterion DVDs. You get 10 hours to watch the movie once it's opened. But, hey, if you *buy* the disk, you can watch the film all you want.
The freebie route is the only route that makes sense -- not the "rental" route.
Why are we worring about dvds that degrade. DVD is already an out dated technology.
We should be looking into storage means with no moving parts
Moving parts is what makes cds and dvds out dated and also why they are susseptable to damage.
Bring on 50gig storage "crystals" the size of a pen.
You can record pay per view tv. This DVD idea is horrible. Whoever came up with it is a complete jackass.
A decent Network is finally here.
I worry about whether they have managed to miss the whole point of why DIVX failed. It was never that there were technological problems; it was that most consumers found the idea idiotic. Lots of reasons were advanced why consumers ought to want DIVX, but they never managed to overcome the inherent goofiness of the idea in most peoples' minds.
On the other hand, the new tech does sound like it has one advantage over DIVX: it doesn't require consumers buying new equipment. If this actually works in conventional DVD players, then it shouldn't meet the deep consumer resistance that DIVX hit; they may only have to convince Blockbuster to support the idea. Still, I doubt many people will pay a premium to "buy" a self-destructive DVD instead of renting and returning a conventional one, so this process had better be cheap if it's to succeed...
People want to collect movies. They don't want disposable disks that self destruct.
This is true, but people also want to rent discs. This would be much more convenient for the increasingly lazy market if they don't have to return the them. The technology isn't and never has been a problem. Human nature is.
If you pay for DVD and don't have to return it, you feel that you own it, and it just feels wrong to buy something that won't last.
I quite like the idea. I could buy a disc, watch it, immediately, and then give it to a friend to watch if he has enough time.
This sounds like the only reasonable way to do it. That way each renter would have, say, 3 to 5 of these special DVD's which they could reuse again and again by going back to the store WHEN they want to get another movie. You could even rent in advance this way, and then not watch it until you're ready.
The main difficulty I see is [1] keeping the blockbuster employees honest (so they don't give you extra days for free, or to their friends, or to themselves -- a computer could track this though) and [2] the big problem which the original degradable DVD's have: people will probably come up with their own way to reset the DVD at home.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Yeah, it's patented and the DVD Consortium is the watchdog which sues anyone who tries to make it without a license.
This was the reason CD-RW disks were originally $30 to $40 apiece; the company which licensed the right (no pun intended) to manufacture them decided to charge exhorbitant licensing fees and require manufactures to charge above minimum set prices.
As you can see by today's pricing, CD-RW's really only cost a little bit more than CD-R's to manufacture.
At the time, rewritable CDs did not have much competition in the 650 MB rewritable/archival quality storage business (3-4 years ago) except from Jaz drives and SyJet which cost $80+ apiece (though bigger). Why charge cost plus when people are willing (or dumb enough) to pay much more?
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Western Drive Caviar 30.0GB, 5400 RPM, EIDE Hard Drive: $223.97a sp?registered=0&dept%5Fid=2&pf%5F id=101
.com/Product.asp?ProductId=80260
http://store.westerndigital.com:80/store/product.
Seagate Barracuda 28.0GB, 7200 RPM, EIDE ULTRA ATA/66: $199.99
http://www.computers4sure
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 27.2GB EIDE UltraDMA/66 5400 rpm internal hard drive: $191.99
http://www.egghead.com/ca tegory/inv/00041912/02351925.htm
Maxtor 40.0GB EIDE, ULTRA-DMA/66, 5400 RPM, 9 ms: $252.95
http://www.buy.com/comp/product.as p?sku=10227545
So, basically, $7.47, $7.14, $7.07, and $6.33 per a gigabyte. A single-sided DVD holds 4.7 GB (which most movies come on). Thus, it will cost about $35, $33.50, $33.20, or $29.75 for the storage space to keep a single DVD on each of the above drives, respectively.
I'm not sure about how effective software data compression programs will work on MPEG-2 encoded video, but that could be a further means to reduce space (thus cost).
Basically, the price per gigabyte of hard drives is not yet where it needs to be to make DVD backup cost effective, but next year it will be.
Anyone else care to present an analysis?
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Since the present DVD system doesn't support this technology, it will fail (why use something that becomes useless after use with no means to regain use).
In a couple of years, the DVD Consortium will have used de-CSS to convince our legislators (in the U.S.) to allow 128-bit (at least) or greater encryption and they'll no longer use MPEG-2, but instead a compression method which only they know (and own the patent to).
This will be implemented hardware-only with the highest possible (with regard to cost effectiveness) data-security in place. Then what remains of the DIVX idea and this self-destructing DVD idea will be combined.
An on-board modem (software only) will be part of this new optical disc reader which uses blue-laser technology. Consumers will buy discs locally or over the Internet (by mail). These discs will not work until the user gets online with their next-generation DVD player (NG-DVD) and buys a set period of viewing time or number of screenings. A single viewing may already be included with the purchased disc, but the user will have to get online before it is activated.
Usage will be bought, sold, and tracked over the Internet. Because of future reductions in hardware cost and faster processors, the addition of this technology will not cost significantly more (like DIVX did) and this technology will be integrated into the standard from the beginning so all NG-DVD players will play view-limited disks.
The clincher (which you can infer from above) is that the degrading feature will be reversible by logging onto the Internet and using their system. The problem of users somehow doing this themselves (chemically or phreakin' the hardware) will be solved in the mega-encryption combo compression scheme, which will not be active as well unless the Corporation's machine on the other end of the Internet has a record of your viewing rights.
So, the blocking dye'll be a secondary deterrent against unapproved viewing, with hardware encryption/compression being primary.
Yes, the machine will have to be online whenever you watch a view-limited movie.
You will still be able to purchase regular discs at the standard industry price and view them as often as desired without being online.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
The opaque silvery plastic bag that Pokemon cards come in would probably prove adequate. If it wasn't durable enough to prevent shopwear, put the bagged CD in a cardboard sleeve.
They might know something about this type of coating and what can be done to prevent it from degrading. One thing comes to my mind and that is to open the disk in a nitrogen enclosure, then coat it with something that prevents the atsmophire (oxygen or water) from touching it. Mark Allyn
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
I just went to install microsoft office this morning from a cd-r that i burnt last year.. can only read from some of the files now, although they all appear to be on the disk.. i guess the table of contents is fine.. but the rest of the disk is hooped.. can only read from 50% of the files.. as an experiment i'll see how many i can read from in a month.. the disk is in perfect condition, KAO 'long life' - burnt with an HP burner..
----------------------------
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Between failed burnt CD's, free mag CD's & now disposable DVD's, at least I'll never be out of drink coasters.
Now, not everyone is technically savvy as your common /. user, but I would think these people would just buy the real DVD rather than a degrading one.
Two things...
1) I used to buy VHS tapes without worrying overmuch about whether or not I really, really wanted them. *sigh* Actually *bought* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 ($8.99, damn you, Wallgreens!) With DVD, I notice that I'm tremendously more discriminating in what I'll buy vs. rent. A quick poll of the cube-farm indicates that my coworkers are similar.
2) I always spend too much on late fees. I hate being limited to "next day" or whatever returns, since I often can't find the time to watch a rental right away cause something comes up. I like the "When you start to watch, your rental time starts" aspect of this for that reason.
The only thing I don't like is the idea of what to do with the depleted disks. Can they be returned ala coke bottles of old for a nickel deposit and then refurbished? I think they'll do wonders for the time constrained and the lazy, but I don't wanna see the earth rendered into a polluted wasteland just so I can avoid returning "Mystery Men" in the middle of a blizzard.
What about the environmental waste this will create? One time use DVD's? This will create mountains of unbiodegradable DVD's. Then again, I guess this suits our throw away society.
Dr Fgets Strikes again!
This isn't such a bad idea, and the reason why has nothing to do with DIVX. Consider people who have sensitive data ("This message will self-destruct...") that is not meant to be kept around. A self-destructing DVD-ROM is a great way to transport lots of data without leaving a trace of its existence afterwards -- other than the fact that it was actually used.
As long as any movie I want to keep is on media that doesnt burn up, cost more money to watch, or whatever the next gimmick is I'll be happy.
let me PAY to make a coaster ... i think this idea might catch on!
That's exactly what I thought about Divx when it came out. I never saw any news stories even mentioning that angle in the piles of other things wrong with that format (and this one it looks like).
Consumers being inconvienienced, that's a story.
Planned environmental pollution, not a story.
The article says that the amount of the coating they put on the disc determines how long the disc will last. How are we supposed to trust that the manufacturer put 3 days worth of coating on the disc instead of 3 hours worth. oops. Even if they intend to put 3 days worth on, anybody who has ever seen a mass manufacturing plant knows that no batch of anything mass produced is ever completely the same. With the minute amount of material (200microns I believe it said) one batch could vary anywhere from 3 days to 1 day to a week and there's no way to tell until you watch it.
Of course, why the hell would you want your advertising circular to _expire?_ You'd want it to be permanent. You wouldn't pay an extra 2 cents for the tech to make your DVD quit working. That's crazy. Now for the evil part- brace yourself ;)
If you can sell disposable DVDs at a profit of a penny for $3.00, and the degradation tech costs a penny and all of shipping and distribution costs a penny and the entire content costs a penny, then making your advertisement DVD as a disposable will cost you $2.96 for the media. On the other hand, it costs less to make the permanent sort of DVDs that are sold for $20 and up...
Isn't it interesting that this proposal reveals the true profit margins for the industry? The media clearly costs well under $3. So why are unit costs higher than VHS tapes, for which the media and duplication costs are drastically, drastically higher? Something stinks here.
I just hope we (as in, the public) end up eventually being able to do things like make little films or advertisements using this type of media, and being able to distribute them. It concerns me that these people on the one hand are successfully maintaining a trust holding the cost of DVD media at many times its free-market value (it should be _less_ than VHS, with some allowances made for additional media, but duplication and media costs are orders of magnitude lower than VHS), and on the other hand are also wanting to keep access to this technology out of our hands so only they can produce the media. That's just wrong, wrong, wrong...
Surely this could be challenged on environmental grounds? Aren't there laws about producing something that will become landfill? Or are the disc going to be bio-gegradable too...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
True, I don't (I'm a college student). But even if I did, consider the cost of theater tickets for oneself, one's spouse, two kids, and don't forget the refreshments. For that price I can just get a DVD I can watch again and again; after several viewings it ends up costing less than it would have with the disposables. And if you have kids, you know they're going to want to see the same movies many times.
Thanks for the mathematical argument. However, IIRC, it only applies during the "useful-life" phase, not the initial "early-life" or final "wear-out" phases. From their "useful-life" behaviour you might calculate a 10 year life expectancy through probability of random failue, but that doesn't mean their "wear-out" phase won't begin next week.
Meanwhile, I'm going to try and get references for my colleague's CD-R life expectancy theory. Watch this space.
Regards, Ralph.
Not quite, the manufacturing process for plastics (ie one of the ingredients in a DVD) generates waste, uses petroleum etc.
It's like the old argument against electronic cars being true "zero emissions" vehicles - even if the car itself produces no waste, you don't help the environment if you power it from a plant which burns coal to generate power.
At least with DIVX, the disc was still reusable if someone was willing to pay $2. This would result in huge piles of useless crap in landfills.
Ahh, you've paid far, far to much money.
I can't really argue against that -- I clearly paid a heavy premium for an arguably-marginal benefit -- but then I also can hardly complain about the price I paid: $30/GB still seems pretty cheap, when you can almost remember it being that much per MB, even if I could have had it four times cheaper. I guess the value you put on things like that is pretty subjective. For one thing, SCSI has less CPU overhead. Also, I now have a floppy, CD, Zip, and three hard drives in that system -- they can't all be IDE. Plus, I figured that the disk is by far the biggest bottleneck (other than the internet connection) in the system, so why not max it out? It seemed like the right decision at the time, given my priorities, even if it wasn't the best price/performance tradeoff. The thing is, the hard drive bottleneck keeps getting worse, because they keep getting bigger and cheaper, but not much faster.
Anyway, it looks like hard disk storage for a DVD movie would currently be about $30, which is not quite practical, when the movie itself is about $25, but it's even closer than I'd realized: less than one doubling away, rather than the two or three that I'd estimated. Better yet.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Who says I'm "only licensed to view it for one day"? Sure, that would have been their intent, but if I bought the physical disk, rather than renting it, what license is there? Even if they put a shrinkwrap license on it, like with software, would it be valid? The part about not reproducing and redistributing it would, I guess, but it seems that the exception for archival copying would still apply. If I own a copy of a work, I'm entitled to have a backup.
They may have sold it to me at a reduced price on the premise that I would only be able to watch it once, but that's their problem; I don't see how I would be bound by that. Try this: what if, instead of ripping it and making a backup, I found a way to prevent the disk from self-destructing (put some kind of coating on it, a player with a special laser that didn't trigger it, or some such thing)? Would I be "stealing" then? Surely they'd like us to think so, and the "best justice money can buy" might agree with them. I realize it would be overly optimistic to think that this would actually work, but I don't see any moral problem in either case.
Oh yeah, you're right that the original form of Moore's Law (about transistor sizes) does not apply to disks, but they seem to be following roughly the same growth curve.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Though self-destructing DVDs are pretty stupid for mainstream purposes, I can see a few uses - mainly for sending large amounts of sensitive data (with a short time delay), so that if the disk was intercepted enroute it would quickly be rendered useless. Maybe in a few cases movies or other media could be delivered that way, but I really don't see any advantage.
The difference is that this is just a misguided but mostly harmless copy-protection scheme, while DIVX was an evil, privacy-invading monster which only had the purpose of artificially separating users from the content they wished to purchase.
DIVX was far worse, bar none.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I hate it too, of course, but I have to admit loving it in a sick sort of way. It's so....nerdy.
Does anyone besides me wonder about the popularity of Mission: Impossible on this new medium? Oooh, I know. They should make an auto-degrading movie of William Gibson's auto-degrading prose poem Agrippa (that will probably be just as bad and sell just as poorly).
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
That's not the problem. The problem is that the greedy studios will use this opportunity to NOT RELEASE the movie in "non-degrading" format, so you won't have the choice.
This was one of the biggest gripes about DIVX; the studios figured a digital disc was a digital disc, and DIVX gave them a cash cow rather than a one-time sale, so many movies were never released on DVD until after DIVX died (like Di$ney stuff).
This would DEFINITELY get me to buy a recorder though. I bought DVD *because* the discs last forever. I got tired of buying the same tapes that I'd already bought because they'd gotten unviewable.
Remember that you STILL have the right to make backup copies of all software you own. The fact that the media is auto-degrading doesn't deprive you of this right.
Don't be ridiculous. The media companies would take the issue to the courts, and the courts would support them because it's piracy plain and simple. If you have bought an auto-expiring DVD in the full knowledge that it is *meant* to be usable only for one day, and that a condition of the sale is that you *will not* make a copy, then you simply do not have a leg to stand on.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
This isn't just for you Jared, it's a reply to all the others who responded to my previous post.
This is all just plain wishful thinking on your part.
All of you are forgetting that the sole purpose of the product would be to expire after a day's play. Even an idiot can surely see that if the user is allowed to make a backup copy then the product would not be sold in the first place. If an idiot can understand that then I believe the courts would too.
You're also forgetting that the law protecting you right to make copies is about "fair use" copies. This is not a "fair use" copy because it would allow you to keep a recording permanently when it was licensed for only one day's viewing. There can be no "fair use" justification for making a backup when the thing only has to last one day, for crying out loud!
With regard to contract law, IANAL and I'm not certain about the US in particular, but in the UK at any rate, when a sale is made there is an implied contract which does not require any signature. This is the basis for consumer rights so I imagine there is a similar provision in the US. What this means is that shrinkwrap licenses are legitimate - at least as long as the terms are displayed on the outside of the packaging.
So, as long as there is a prohibition against backups printed on the outside sleeve of these one-day DVDs, any laws about the right to make backups would be superseded.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Btw, IAAL.
LOL! I thought I'd never see that!
Pity you weren't working for the EFF. Looks like *their* lawyers were outnumbered (I'm trying not to jump to conclusions about their competence).
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Of course, once DVD-R discs hit the market and the combined price of a degradable DVD plus a blank DVD-R falls below the price of a regular DVD, the studios will drop this idea like a hotcake.
Remember that you STILL have the right to make backup copies of all software you own. The fact that the media is auto-degrading doesn't deprive you of this right.
If this came to pass, a smart person would amass all the titles of the DVDs they wanted at bargain prices, put them in cold storage, and wait until all the factories that are currently churning out 99 cent CDRs convert over to churning out 99 cent DVD-Rs. Then they'd start opening the discs, make PERFECTLY LEGAL backup copies, and keep the degraded master discs as proof of purchase.
This pay per view scheme hasn't been thought through very well.
- John
Right. A nitpick, though, is that Moore's law doesn't apply to magnetic media. Although we have seen big increases in HDD sizes and decreases in cost, it's not the same thing. Monitors have gotten better and cheaper, too, but it's different.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
So what happens if the phone rings or you have to take a crap while watching a "this disc will self-destruct in ten minutes" DVD? And what kind of shelf life does the coating have? Will DVDs need a "freshness date" on them?
Please. No. The discs will be sold in vacuum-sealed containers, and only when opened does the degradation begin. The (patented) process can be formulated to give you a lifespan of anything from a few minutes to a couple of weeks. Two days is currently considered a likely time.
Besides, do people really want throwaway DVDs? Sure it can be a pain to return rentals, but you
eventually have to go back to get more rentals anyhow. One big problem with DIVX was that you had to go all the way to Circus City, of which there might be one or two in any given city, rather than a local video rental place, of which there would likely be one within two miles of where you live.
The idea here would be to sell them in the drugstores and department stores and such. Since these will play on regular DVD players, they may not run into the resistance that the original DIVX did. In fact, I think they have a pretty good chance of succeeding.
One question that nobody's answered (in my hearing/reading/viewing) is whether the things are recyclable, 'cause that's a whole lot of nasty environmentally bad stuff to be adding to landfills if it succeeds and isn't recyclable.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Ref NPR Here & Now 1/19/99, the coating is activated by exposure to air, apparently not directly oxygenation but something to do with airpressure. Spokesperson was not a tech.
Besides, you could put a vaccum-sealed wrapper inside the cardboard sleeve. I'm thinking here of something like a packet of peanuts or potatochips.
Alternatively... Pringles come in a cardboard tube, and are vacuum sealed.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I meant, of course, 1/19/2000, ie, yesterday.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
FYI, NPR is National Public Radio. I'm saying that according to an interview with a representative of the company, it was exposure to the atmosphere. I'm not saying anything about any web article. Which source you choose to believe is not my problem.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Are you kidding, or what?
Personally, I'd always sided with the Movie Industry during this whole fiasco. After posting a bunch around here, it seemed to be made clear that the only reason that this technology was created was to enable playing DVD's under Linux and other OSes that weren't being supported.
What I'm getting at here is that if you rent a DVD, or purchase one that is specifically engineered for ONE TIME VIEWING, you're breaking the law, in that you have no right to do that. You have no right ro back up that data to watch it once (again), just as you have no legal right to sell your older versions of software after using them to upgrade to newer version.
The more people like you talk like that, the more I can see specifically why the industry wants to kill DeCSS, LiViD, whatever. And I sympathize.
Just because of comments like that, part of me hopes that the DVD industry succeeds in blocking the software decryption from being distributed, publishes their API's instead. Or creates royalty-free read only libraries. Or something like that.
This is a hell of a lot more pro-piracy than the Linux DVD player project. Whereas the DVD player project could tangentally have its worked exploited by pirates, this project actually encourages people to make copies.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Imagine a degradable-DVD vending machine, filled with the most recent big hits. The machine could sell the disks for cash. The owners just need to maintain the machine, restock it, and collect the money. They don't need to sink capital into "priced for rental" DVDs, and they don't need to spend money chasing down people who don't return movies on time.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
I hated divx from the beginning. I also hate this from the beginning...
Besides the obvious, think of the ripoff potential...unethical video stores (online OR b&m) could sell these as real DVDs, although that wouldn't last very long. But stores could also sell partially used (returned early) timed DVDs, and blame the early failure of the movies on "technical glitches". Dumbness and abuse potential...ah, the beautiful results of invention and greed mixing.
</rant>
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Ideas like these really seem to show how much high DVD prices and high music CD prices are real ripoffs.
It will not be any easier or cheaper for the companies to produce self destruction media, in fact they should be more expensive due to the fact that there are now research costs to recover. Yet, they want to sell these for less than current DVDs. How much is the mark up on DVDs?
This would not be so bad if there was competition but since the recording and movie industries have presented united fronts, there is no free market competition to bring down the prices. Isn't price fixing illegal?
I think there is a huge untapped market for cheap movies. I go to the video store and there are a lot of older movies I can't find. Same with old music. I think that it probably would be profitable to sell to this market in the traditional manner we look at profit and loss. but the limiting factor, the reason they want such a strangle hold on the market, is the eyeball factor. Each person has only so much time to be looking at movies, advertising and the web. I think that companies want us focused on the new stuff with the huge advertising and merchandizing tie-ins.
Maybe I don't want to buy into the hype. Maybe I want to spend my entertainment budget on new movies. Maybe I would rather spend my time and attention on movies of the 1940's. Yes, there is expense involved in producing a larger variety of offerings, but I think it should be possible and profitable,but they want to steer comsumers toward new stuff as much as possible. They don't want to lose eyeballs. Companies won't pay as much for product placement if there are fewer comsumers watching. DVD's that last forever are bad to this industry, because they let consumers view movies even after the hype has subsided.
Broadcast networks faced this situation. Once they had the monopoly. I have heard that streets were emptied when Milton Berle's show came on. No time shifting, if you wanted to see it, you had to see it then. Very sweet for networks and sponsors alike. Then came cable. Then came VCRs, etc. The recording industry and hollywood don't want the same thing to happen to them. They certainly don't want to provide their own conpetiton bu making it easy to consumers to timeshift viewing and keep old media forever.
The competition for eyeballs is fierce. Companies will do their best to focus as many eyeballs on what is the most profitable for them. Competiton should mean cheaper prices, but it has not fr the recording industry, and for the movie industry. Something is very wrong. This product is a symptom of a sick culture.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
While IANAL, I should point out that (I believe) that there is no specific doctrine allowing the copying of media other than computer software for archival purposes, but one could easily say that the spirit of the law allows for it.
The specific clause that places making archival copies of software under "fair use" comes from the U.S. Software Act of 1980, which explicitly allows the making of archival copies. Nowhere else in copyright law is this right explicity allowed.
Of course, one could always argue that DVDs are computer software, since the information on them is stored in digital form and processed by a microprocessor, much in the same way a computer does...in fact a DVD player is really a computer....
My journal has hot
This could be a new form of copy protection for DVD-ROMs, as well. Install a program and the disc self-destructs... that's not so good.
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
Not that I like the idea of degrading videos to start with, but here's an e-mail I got from Spectravision when I sent them a complaint about the waste that would be created:
Thank you for your comments. We have been sharing your frustration as the new reports have failed to report this product will be a recyclable. Just a drop the disc in the bucket next to the butter container and milk bottle. It also eliminates the car pollution of returning the movie to the store. avg. 10 miles and 1/3 gallon of gas.
We appreciate your concern.
SpectraDisc
Now this I don't understand. To my knowledge the metal center wouldn't allow for easy recycling.
On the other hand, most DVD players now allow for layering, with the first layer being on the metal disk, and the second layer being semi-transparent and actually in the plastic medium. This recyclable statement leads me to believe that they may well be doing away with the aluminum center alltogether and simply putting writing all the data to the plastic. This is all speculation, don't take my word for anything.
You probably can't just remove the coating to reuse the disks because they would get scratched during normal use.
Even if you could reuse the disks (so The Matrix stays The Matrix until it's recycled) the logistics of collecting them with normal recycling would be a nightmare unless everybody took them back to the video store...
What about animals that injest the plastic (birds eat stones to digest, could easily get a chunk of disk)?
Also, I bet there's a lot more petroleum in the disk you're throwing away than the gas to burn to drive to the video store. Or you can walk or take a bike.
If they can be recycled and if the ARE recycled by the public, then the choice isn't so clear.
Many people have noted that by law you can make backup coppies of something you own. But what if when you buy one of these disks it is stated to be a rental, with an unlimited rental period? Then you wouldn't be able to legally make a copy for yourself...
I don't really like the idea of them myself - I think it would make it all too easy for movie companies to slip into the habit of making DVD's with no care at all with no special features and no letterbox versions. I wonder if they have figured out that was the OTHER reason why DIVX failed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or would you rather burn gasoline/alcohol to return the disc?
Two major points of law:
1. It's legal to make copies of something you own for your own personal use (like mp3ing a CD you own).
2. Once you buy something, you're free to do pretty much as you please with it (Established when a foreign automaker bought a Ford and reverse-engineered much of it).
Therefore, it's perfectly all right for you to buy one of these disposable DVDs and copy it, because you are buying not renting it. If it were a rental situation, and you did not own it, the situation would be significantly different, because the DVD would not be yours to copy. However, the whole premise of this is that it does away with traditional rentals which you have to return. To conclude, it sounds like a very good idea - unless you're a studio trying to make a profit. Why buy a normal DVD when you can copy a "disposable" one?
Other major issues, already touched upon:
If it degrades when exposed to heat/light, wouldn't that mean that these things are inherently perishable? I seem to recall that one of the major advantages of digital technology was supposed to be its staying power...
And why, exactly do we need to throw everything away? Is it really that terrible to reuse things? Ever since environmentalism passed from the public eye, people seem to be rejoicing once more in expending non-renewable resources for silly things like saving a trip to the video store. Regardless of how you feel about the issue, the fact remains: we're running out of resources. As far as something this lame being worth contributing to our eventual exhaustion of resources and whatever repercussions that entails, I don't buy it.
So, yeah, basically, this won't fly, and will probably just engender more DeCSS-type lawsuits as the company scrambles to try to _make_ it work. Whatever.
---sig---
this might not be worthwhile for M$, but there are time sensitive data distrubutions (ratings information is one we use) that could use this degradable media. But outside of that...
...I'll be buying this for all my entertainment needs, nothing like pausing a movie only to come back and find the disc turned blue and unusable! Why use something an infinite number of times, when you could only use it once? I throw out toilet paper after I use it, why not storage media? Sign me up for 20 copies of Dumb and Dumber (comes free for every idiot who buys one), I can't wait.
+&x
Well, except that this doesn't bolster the rental industry at all -- it completely bypasses it. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video aren't going to want to sell the things:
Rental DVD
Self-destructing DVDs
I can see this making it to market, but it would be playing to a completely different audience than "conventional" DVDs. Kind of like those bins of grade-Z tapes and CDs you see at drug stores and gas stations. These aren't any threat to anyone.
I seem to remember several attempts to do this with VHS tapes back in the day. Some kind of gizmo that wouldn't let you rewind the tape more than X times comes to mind, as well as something that would slap a magnet against the tape after X plays. You can see how far those got!
(BTW, I'm a Netflix Marquee man myself.)
Ya' know, that's a REALLY funny idea, but there's something wrong with it. Would you pay the price of a rental plus the price of a DVD-R blank when the legit movie itself costs less? There's no way DVD-R media's going to come down in price for those reasons. It's not like it's expensive to manufacture now.
(BTW, I HATE America's disposable society. At least this isn't that horrendous disposable cell phone idea.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Almost all archaeology is done in land fills of a sort. What people throw out is often the only indication of how people lived and what they used. The odd thing about the guy who excavated this landfill is that he chose something so recent.
Vaccuum-sealed containers? They mentioned cardboard sleeves at Walmart (like AOL CDs). That hardly sounds vaccuum sealed to me...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>buy for a couple of bucks to watch once or twice and then throw away. I would probably watch a lot of movies that I might otherwise pass up if I had to return them.
Ummm.. that's why I rent. It's $3 (for 5 days)[1], and if I return it the next day, I get a $1 off coupon... not to mention that, but you can usually find some promotion - I had a pack of 10 $.99 rental coupons. At least when you rent them, you have the full five days, without worry, and you don't have the enviornmental implications of all that plastic getting thrown away...
[1] - I've never seen these kind of prices at BuckBu$ter, but my local Hollwod Video is a little bit more friendly (and I don't think the local BB has DVD rentals yet... what good is large corporate muscle if you don't use it (for me) 8^) )
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
If I pay for something and feel that I own it, I expect it not to just go off and die on me. I do not beliece that these should be consumables, like milk or bread... If I buy a bunch of plastic with a movie on it today, I don't want to end up with a useless coaster tomorrow...
;-) )
Try netflix if you are lazy - just drop it back in your mailbox when you are done... and they send it to you, so you can never leave the comfort of your pajamas and still get your DVDs (assuming of course, that you can telecommute, and not have to leave the house anyway
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>Well,Well, that's fantastic. I'm glad we know what you want. But, why should we care? that's fantastic. I'm glad we know what you want. But, why should we care?
OTOH - why should we care what you wan, either...
>How is droping this disc in the trash any diffrent from droping a netflix in the mail?
No garbage, for one thing... product gets reused. The concept of this for everyday consumer use just doesn't make sense... the only way it even seems acceptable is because of our society, which seems to think that everything from paper cups to people are disposable... so why not DVDs, too. I'm not telling you to go hug a tree, but just think of the things you throw away each day. If you even consider pitching stuff like this (or if you even *own* a DVD player), you are doing better than most, and should make an effort to improve yourself and your community. You don't have to donate money, you don't have to spend hours down at a shelter. Just help in whatever way you can. Wasting time and $$ on DVDegradables certainly doesn't help this, and your attitude isn't helping anyone [/flame]
Just my $.05
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
...are doomed to repeat it.
/before/ DIVX.
People want to collect movies. They don't want disposable disks that self destruct. They don't want to have to keep paying for movies after they've paid for them once. This is why so many people have large collections of VHS tapes.
This might have worked a year ago,
In the end, I have just one question: Why go through all of this for something so thoroughly trivial? Video stores work. Blockbuster is a perfectly valid rental revenue channel for DVDs. Even if you add the convenience of throwaway DVDs, its just not worth the added costs.
404 Error:
Blah Blah, more of the same gas vs. everything else argument that never includes things like people doing more than one chore at a time and at one point in their driving day will be next to a videostore. Regardless of how you rationalize it, throwaways are usually bad for the environment.
Who's writing this stuff that shut in who will only order stuff from the net? I'm half expecting, "Its bad for your engine to stop it and start it one extra time at a videostore, might as well throw them disks away."
Hey now! I was just using Microsoft because I was reinstalling NT 4.0 due to a thrashed boot sector/unrecoverable registry whilst posting! It was a 'use what you got' thing, not a 'M$ is 3>17' rant. If it had appeared an hour earlier, I would have used IBM, as I was unsucessfully beating on a box that magically decided to forget it had a VM. Now that I think about it, IBM would have been a better choice, since they made extensive software provision so that you couldn't reinstall from the distributed media on some of their older minis. Stuff like wiping a bit of the LIC, rewriting a checksum so it wouldn't install, etc. They're already in the business of creativly destroying the install media.
Do me a fav.. Next time you see an obvoius, unfounded MS bash, please flame on! You are right in noticing there is too much of it going around.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Wow. who sold you that one?
Yes, once it is created, Styrofoam is inert and does little damage in and of itself. However, the process to create the styrofoam, including the oil drilling and refineries have plenty of well documented negative environmental impact on people and animals.
When styrofoam is incinerated, a practice that is becoming more prevalent as landfills fill up (with styrofoam) and close, it is also plenty toxic. I'd love to see you melt that styrofoam into a liquid and drink it instead. Or burn a few hundred pounds of it in a closed, unventilated room. Then I'll be convinced.
Then there's the aformentioned landfills. How many habitats do we need to destroy to have giant holes in the ground full of inert petroleum products?
You imply that the "green spin doctors" will have trouble with dumping trash in the ocean and have no trouble with radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain. You should actually talk to one of those "green spin doctors" once in a while. You'll find none of them advocating burying U238 in that mountain.
The microwave is your friend. Here's what I do to avoid wasting old CDs (AOL demos, promo stuff I dont want, etc):
put it in the microwave at high power for 3-5 seconds. you get to watch a wonderful little lightning show. (don't leave it in there longer than that or you'll break the magnetron.)
then take it out (caution: contents may be hot) and enjoy your new coaster. you can easily distinguish it from good discs by the fact that the metal layer is all cracked and shattered-looking.
Plastic is, environmentally speaking, one of the most harmful substances we have ever created.
One example of the impact of plastic manufacturing is this: chemicals used in the production of plastics emulate sex hormones and cause infertility and birth defects in amphibians. This is one of the reasons that amphibians are disappearing around the globe.
I wouldn't like to see this idea go mainstream... we throw out too much stuff already. Now they want to manufacture DVDs that are specifically designed to be thrown away? Definitely not cool.
"On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten."
I think the rental stores will push back the hardest on this. They *want* to collect late fees, and if you have to go back to the store to return the movie, you are much more likely to rent another one. This is a stupid idea, pure and simple.
Of course, I just use kozmo.com to deliver movies to my door and pick them up when I'm done. I don't have to go anywhere!
-Jeff
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I thought the article was saying that the LASER LIGHT caused the degradation.
With a self destructing disk, it would force me to create a good copy of it. Sounds like they're just pushing the idea of piracy to many people who might not normally do something like that.
Hmm. Methinks the greed has blinded them.
I think a lot of people are going to have a knee-jerk reaction that they don't like it simply because of the reference to DIVX. However, I think this is a great idea.
If I could get a disk for $2.50 (or the average rental price), and not have to return it, this is a big win. I hate returning video tapes.
Note that this is not meant to be a replacement for the ability to buy permanent DVDs, which was the big problem with DIVX.
---
All the major CD-R manufacturers claim expected CD-R lives of at least 50 years, although (being manufacturers standing to profit from longevity) their results may be dubious.
The Special Interest Group for CD Applications and Technology has performed a study; after artificial aging, 3 (TDK, Avery-labeled TDK, and Taiyo Yuden) out of 8 CD-R manufacturers' discs could not be read. There are some limitations to this study, though. There were not enough discs to subject them to the full "Life Expectancy of Compact Discs (CD-ROM) -- Method for Estimating, Based on Effects of Temperature and Relative Humidity" (ANSI/NAPM IT9.21-1996), so there is not estimate of how long these discs are expected to last (which almost makes the aging section of the study useless). The aging conditions were 80C, 85% relative humidity, 750 hour period, ramping rate of half that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations, and equilibration time of twice that of ANSI IT9.21 recommendations. There are some other links at http://www.cd-info .com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/Media/Longevity.html that you may want to take a look at.
In my own personal experience, though, I have made about 40 (TDK) CD-Rs that receive heavy use that are about a year old, with no reported problems. Taking life expectancy to mean the average life span of a CD-R...
"Proof" by reduction to an absurdity that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
If the life expectancy of a CD-R were less than 10 years, then (As x goes from 0 to (infinity), Integral(2^(-x/h))dx = 10, so h/ln(2) = 10) the half-life of a CD-R would be less than 10 * ln(2), or 6.9 years. Then, the probability of decay after t years would be less than than 2^(-t/6.9). So, the probability of a CD-R surviving one year is less than 2^(-1/6.9), or 0.90. Hence, the probability of 40 CD-Rs all surviving a full year is less than 0.90^40, or 0.018. This is approximately (within 1.1%) the probability of drawing the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards with jokers: possible, but unlikely. Since all 40 CD-Rs did survive a full year, it is much more probable that the original assumption was false (or my math is wrong :-); i.e., it is much more probable that the life expectancy of a TDK CD-R is greater than 10 years.
Now back to studying for my English midterm... :-)
Daniel J. Peng
Daniel J. Peng
Or you can just rent a DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever. This changes nothing.
This will encourage piracy....Think about it. Buy a cheap self-destructing DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever.
Right, except that it isn't piracy. Since you bought the DVD, barring a signed agreement to the contrary, you have a fair use right to "make a backup copy, solely for archival purposes in the event of the loss or destruction of the original."
I can see a couple reasons rental stores won't like this...
Taken together, these would seem to undermine the typical rental store's way of doing business. Your favorite rental store will no longer be a repository of movies that can be shared and enjoyed for years to come, but a clearing house for disposable wastes of time. Oi.
Only through hard work and perseverence can one truly suffer.
When you don't need the key anymore, place the DVDs onto a hard surface and use 1 hammer to mix. Cook in a 1000 watt microwave for one minute. (1:30 for low wattage ovens)
This will stop most spooks. Now, the NSA might have uncooking technology, but of course they're on our side.
The only cool part about it is that it makes the disk change colors. I wonder if they could make a coating that would change, but leave the disk usable, kind of like a freshness seal.
"We think it gets around what killed Divx," said Nabil Lawandy, Specra Science's CEO. "There's no phone line, no credit card transaction, no special player needed, and no Big Brother element to it."
The idea of a DVD that will degrade to an unplayable state does look stupid, but the thing that killed DIVX was the implied erosion of privacy. At least these guys pay very strong attention to bolstering the DVD rental industry while explicitly respecting people's privacy. You have to give 'em a little slack on that count.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
A DVD costs around $1 to manufacture in large runs. Add to this the price of packaging, destructive coating and distribution. Substract this to $3 (or even $2.50). What you have left is the total (and paltry) profit. The initial price of a DIVX was $4.49 and according to the DIVX business model they actually lost money if the buyer didn't use the disc again after the 48 hours window had finished. Besides, there are still severe undercapacity problems with DVDs; they can't just produce as many discs as they want and as a result, there are currently many delays with new releases and reprints. And some clever guys are speaking about destroying them? Bollocks.
As soon as I read this, my stomach turned.
:)
It used to be that you returned a rented video so that it would be there for the next person to rent, now it seems you return them because you're not licensed to view them for any longer then the rental period.
On top of this, imagine how much more trash you would have generated had you thrown out any rented media as soon as you were done with it.
What's next, libraries that only let you take out photocopies made with disappearing toner?
I just hope that the cost of new media for each rental will keep the technology too expensive (read more expensive than the current system) to ever get used.
P.S. First post (at least when I started writing
I believe he was talking about the ocean subductive zone... that's totally different then the ocean. The ocean subductive zone is where the Earth's crust re-enters the mantle. There would be NO negative consequences for dumping stuff there, in fact, it would be as close as we could come to putting it back in it's original place. It would be kind of like throwing it into a volcano, except that it would go back into the crust instead of being spit back out at us. The problem with dumping stuff with it is two-fold, and PR has nothing to do with it. 1. It's very deep in the ocean and increadibly hard to get at. In fact, it would probably be easier to shoot it into the sun. 2. We might need the stuff someday. I could have sworn I read an article on a expirimental nuclear power plant that used waste from the normal ones.
I used to work for a publisher of reference material on CD-ROM, who sent customers an update of their CD every month. According to the software license, customers were supposed to mail their previous month's CD back to the company when they received the new one. Instead, some customers would sell their old CDs to colleagues.
At that time, there was some talk of physically self-destructing CDs, which would eliminate that particular problem. The same principle applies here. I'll bet publishers of subscription-based library updates will jump at this technology.
I wish these companies would wake up and smell the land fill. When I worked for that same company, I saw rooms (!) full of throw-away CDs. As far as I know, there was never any effort to recycle them. There is no excuse for that kind of waste.
I started out with laser disc, and a manufacturing flaw in those discs would cause them to degrade over time (months to years). The manufacturers would replace the discs if this happened, as it was a flaw. It's called laser rot, and comes from an oxidation of the relfective layer.
Now some group tries to implement the concept as a feature. DVD uses a different plastic than laser disc, so classic laser rot can not happen to them, but it's the same basic idea.
Remember that DIVIX comes from a group of copyright laywers. It was funded largley by Circuit City. It failed because they tried to build a product the public didn't request. DIVIX got some content providers on board, and had to pay them advance royalties to do it.
Oh, well, let's hope this dies too.
Do you think BlockBuster will want to lose the money they make from late fees? I think not.
That is why this will fail.
BlockBuster was used as an example, this could apply to any rental place. Please don't sue me. If you do sue me, you could get 10s of dollars.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What a great idea, more disposable junk. I hope they come packaged in styrofoam. (sarcasm off)
It's like the *best* place to dump toxic and radioactive waste being in an oceanic subduction zone. It's the best answer but will never happen for publicity reasons. "You want to pollute the oceans!" The green spin doctors will have a field day with this. while burying U238 at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, where it can eventually get into the water suply.
There's a certain almost poetic beauty to the way this idea juxtaposes with the "archival backup" provision of "fair use", isn't there? When I rent an ordinary disk, I clearly don't own it -- I just have possession of it for the period of the rental and I'm entitled to view it, but that's all. However, if I buy a self-destructing disk, then I do own the physical medium. They may be willing to sell it to me for a rental price on the theory that it will self-destruct, but barring some really fancy legal footwork on their part, I don't see how they could justify denying that I am entitled to use it according to "fair use", including the right to "make a backup copy, solely for archival purposes in the event of [must...keep...straight...face] the loss or destruction of the original".
I think you're getting a bit carried away. There is no way that the courts would consider making a copy of one of these things "fair use". The very idea is ludicrous. Why on earth would you need an archive or backup copy when you're only licensed to view it for one day anyway?
Oh, BTW, Moore's Law was only formulated for integrated semiconductor devices, not magnetic media. Though I take your point about the similar price/performance evolution curve.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I have no personal experience with the DivX/DVD fiasco, but it seems to me that one of the major drawbacks to the DivX is that, after the 48 hour window was up, you either had to pay more money to get a key to unlock the disc, or you were stuck with a glorified coaster (the other problem being incompatibility with some DVD players, IIRC).
How is this new technology going to be different? Oh, that's right, you *can't* pay for extra time, the disc itself degrades under laser exposure. All the drawbacks of DivX with less long-term potential for the customer. In the end, you're still stuck with a coaster (or microwave experiment... kids, don't try this at home!).
Am I way off the mark here? Which was the bigger drawback of DivX? Heaps of coasters or lack of universal compatability? If it was the heaps of coasters, this technology will fail the same as DivX.
On the other hand, this technique could surely be useful elsewhere... I'm just not immediately sure where.
Eric
I'm sure an agency that REALLY wanted the one-time pad would be able to remove the coating w/o damaging the data on the disc.
You need something like an acid which REALLY melts down the data-storage layer of the disk...
Your Working Boy,
All this talk about the dvd starting to degrade when the laser hits it is erronous. It starts to degrade when the sealed package is opened. Here is a better article on the subject. I found it a few days ago.r eport/pjb/stories/03064261.htm
http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/frame_it.cgi?URL=/
Also, all this talk about pirating by copying it is really annoying. The disks will most likely NOT have all the goodies that are on a full dvd, and will probably be pan and scan only to boot. Who want's a copy of that? Certainly not me. Might as well just wait and get a previously veiwed vhs copy for all that's worth to you. I will pay the $15 - $20 it costs to OWN a dvd I want with all the enhanced features intact. I'm not rich, but I'm sure not that cheap, especially considering the cost of a dvd ram drive + the cost of media.
The one thing they need to iron out is some type of recycling effort once this goes into production, where you take your stack of watched disks back whenever you want, and they give you 10 or 25 cents each and send them in to be recycled into whatever they can to keep them out of landfills.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
With self-destructive media, that second trip to the vidshop is totally unnecessary. Only ninety percent of rented movies are actually watched. About ten to fifteen percent are kept one or more days late because they haven't been watched yet. And less than twenty percent of the time people go to the video store to return a rented movie do they rent something while they're there. Imagine never having to pay a late fee again, or having to return an unwatched movie. Imagine not having to waste twenty minutes and a third of a gallon of gasoline returning what could be thrown away more cheaply and more efficiently. Oh, and if you've got a two-evening rental and couple of five-evening rentals from Blockbuster, you could be saving two trips to the store.
The day will come when you can just download the movie, thereby eliminating the video store and all its related pollution altogether. Doubtless when that happens, illegal-vid sites will exist in the numbers illegal-mp3 sites do today. Until that time, I'll remain fairly happy not to have to fight traffic just so I can give something back.
And here is the absolute, hail-Eris best part: The video store will never, ever be out of what you're going there to rent.
Cheers
--
This is not my sandwich.
Well, the application that immediately popped into my mind is as a storage device for one-time-pad encryption keys. If the DVD degraded after being used to encode some top-secret message, then the key is automatically destroyed. No "bad guy" can get ahold of it, and no stupid encryption clerk can accidentally/purposfully usr the same one-time-pad twice. Not a bad use.
I cant believe that in this day of environmental consciousness that and idea like this would even make it through the concept stage. If this idea would take off it would be an ecological disaster. Everyone claims to be so eco-friendly but doesnt want to put up with 'minor' inconveniences like returning movies. How difficult is it anyway? This is just my 2 cents worth but I think it is a horrible idea...
I've just been hearing from a colleague that CD-Rs have a life expectancy of less than 10 years ... i.e. the data on them degrades due to the physical/chemical nature of the technology. Also heard that CDs sold today are a lot less stable than the earlier ones because the manufacturers are cutting costs.
So what is the half-life of a DVD anyhow? With its higher data density than CD plus the manufacturers corner cutting I wouldn't be surprised if it's only about 5 years at best. Just in time for them to sell you your whole movie collection all over again in whatever the new technology of the moment is.
(The MTBF for the players are only about 2 years anyhow.)
Might be wise to take the Hemos approach and occasionally have your house burn down.
(Anyone got any real figures on DVD life expectancy? Seriously.)
Regards, Ralph.
There's no way DVD-R media's going to come down in price for those reasons.
Put it this way: right now, hard drive space is less that $30/GB. That's based on an 18 GB Ultra-2 Wide SCSI drive I bought a few months ago for about $600. It's probably less now, not to mention how much less it would be for bigger, slower IDE drives. I haven't been paying close attention to such things, but I imagine it might be half of that. Hence, storing a 4 GB DVD movie on my hard drive would cost me about $120 worth of disk space on the U2W, or maybe $60 if I bought a cheap IDE drive. If Moore's Law stays with us for another five years, we'll see a little over three more doublings, bringing that down to $6-12 per movie, which is less than buying the movie normally, even if the disposable disk costs ~$5. So, even if removable media prices fail to keep up, ordinary disk space will become cheap enough to make "backing up" of single-use DVDs practical within five years, which is soon enough to matter. If I understand this right, the idea would be for these to replace rental DVDs, so the price would have to be in the same range (though no doubt they'll try to use this as an excuse to jack up the rental prices by another buck or two "in order to serve you better".)
Of course, I love the idea of being able to store my movie collection on a hard drive for the same reason that I like MP3s: not for making bootleg copies (remember, don't call it "piracy"), but for the convenience of having everything in a jukebox-like system, instantly available, without needing to flip disks around, plus track memory, playlist management, etc.
There's a certain almost poetic beauty to the way this idea juxtaposes with the "archival backup" provision of "fair use", isn't there? When I rent an ordinary disk, I clearly don't own it -- I just have possession of it for the period of the rental and I'm entitled to view it, but that's all. However, if I buy a self-destructing disk, then I do own the physical medium. They may be willing to sell it to me for a rental price on the theory that it will self-destruct, but barring some really fancy legal footwork on their part, I don't see how they could justify denying that I am entitled to use it according to "fair use", including the right to "make a backup copy, solely for archival purposes in the event of [must...keep...straight...face] the loss or destruction of the original".
Of course, what they should really do is just grow up and realize that they can't absolutely prevent bootlegging, and that they don't really need to do so, since it won't stop people from buying from them anyway, rather than continue to be such greedy bastards with their increasingly ridiculous attempts to control everything, which only serve to impede other desirable, and perfectly legitimate, uses (see above), but that's been said before.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
"Is it sexual harassment to force a female employee to watch a degrading DVD?"
"The Star Wars movies have been degrading ever since the first ones were released on DVD."
"Rental porn on DVDs pulled from shelves in favor of new, more degrading materials."
This company has successfully corrupted DVDs with one of the biggest gripes that consumers have with VHS tapes: they corrode over time and the image quality is reduced.
It makes you wonder what will happen when DVD writers finally become commonplace: under fair use doctrine, it's ok to duplicate your media to guard against unintended distruction (ie backups). Just copy the self-destructing DVD to a normal DVD disc, and you're all set.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This will encourage piracy....Think about it. Buy a cheap self-destructing DVD, DE-CSS it and its yours forever. These kind of tactics don't generally work and I expect the general public to reject it for every reason including environmental pollution, and health reasons...(noxious gasses emmited by degrading DVDs....)
TDK tests have estimated 70 years for their CD-Rs, Pioneer CD-Rs are rated at 100 years, while this independent site states that life expectancies range from 75 - 200 years based on the color of the disk (green (cyanine) disks last up to 75 years, gold (phthalocyanine) last up to 100 years and platinum last up to 200 years).
On pioneer's site they have DVD-R's for sale and describe them as having 100 year life expectancy.
One problem I see with this is that the coating is just that... a coating. The data is in the middle of the disc, like the jelly in a peanut butter sandwich.
Then someone will come out with a "DVD Cleaning Liquid" which removes the ugly... uh... stain. Yeah, that's it, it's just stained. Yeah, I accidentally poured hot grits on my DVD. That's it, that's the ticket.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that optical discs have been degraded with a coating, just the first time for a "time-delay" coating. The original DiscoVision laserdiscs often used a "scrap" side for any title that used an odd number of sides. (Laserdisc is two layers bonded together, just like DVD.) These extra sides were coated with hairspray-like substance, which can be removed with isopropyl alcohol.
So what happens if the phone rings or you have to take a crap while watching a "this disc will self-destruct in ten minutes" DVD? And what kind of shelf life does the coating have? Will DVDs need a "freshness date" on them?
Besides, do people really want throwaway DVDs? Sure it can be a pain to return rentals, but you eventually have to go back to get more rentals anyhow. One big problem with DIVX was that you had to go all the way to Circus City, of which there might be one or two in any given city, rather than a local video rental place, of which there would likely be one within two miles of where you live.
Go outside and get some fresh air, already! The big room with the blue and/or gray and/or black ceiling won't hurt you.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }