Posted by
emmett
on from the i-got-yer-serial-digital-interface-right-here-pal dept.
pgrote writes "The New Scientist is reporting about a pretty cool device you can add to your DVD for digital output to a Serial Digital Interface. As someone who didn't know the ins and outs of DVD signals and how restricted they were, this article opened my eyes."
Re: HDTV, "Widescreen", and FireWire...
by
Pope
·
· Score: 3
I have a regular ol' 25" TV, and I try to buy ONLY letterboxed movies (VHS or Laserdisc) because otherwise the nice framing that most directors use is LOST. Even Star Wars and other 2.35 movies are better than on pan&scan, cuz otherwise you miss most of the damn picture!
DVD sales aren't slow! It's the fastest-ever rollout of any new consumer medium ever! CD's took forever to gain this kind of momentum, and the big shift there didn't start until LPs were discontinued by the big labels.
Incidentally, the big push for "Widescreen" format comes from people like me, who'd much rather watch it. Did you actually LOOK at the packaging to see whether both Pan&Scan and Letterbox ratios were available?
P&S sucks, period, IMO.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
-- It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Re: HDTV, "Widescreen", and FireWire...
by
SuperKendall
·
· Score: 3
Do you own a DVD player? I don't mean that as a flame, but I have found in every case that when I show people who say they hate letterbox movies a movie on DVD in letterbox (even the non anamorphic DVD's) that they end up loving watching the movie in that format and do not complain after that!
I think that partly it is because of the increased resolution over VHS (I have to say that the letterbox VHS tapes of Star Wars seem to loose a lot of detail and looks kind of fuzzy) as well as simply having a large enough TV (I only have a 27" but find it sufficient).
I really think it is BECAUSE of the widescreen format that DVD's have become so popular - it is now in vogue to like Widescreen which I think also helps convert a lot of people over.
-- "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Re: HDTV, "Widescreen", and FireWire...
by
ostiguy
·
· Score: 3
If it isn't letterboxed, you lose 43% of the picture when films are panned and scanned.
Properly made DVD's (anamorphic letterboxed) are future proofed for HDTV, which *will* become ubiquitous (thank you FCC). Most movies are shot at 1.85, so they will look just nifty at 1.78 (16/9, current tvs are 4/3 (1.33).
Even with HDTV, some classics like Chinatown (2.35) and Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia ( both 2.66 or so) will still be letterboxed because they were shot for the 70mm and other wider ratio formats.
If you want to see the whole picture, you need leterboxing. Or, accept 43% less film, and watch cable.
This device, as far as I can see from the New Scientist article, outputs _uncompressed_ digital data. That's fine if it's going straight to a screen, but would chew up enormous amounts of space to record.
If you wanted to record from a DVD or from an MPEG-2 based digital TV transmission, you'd probably also use MPEG-2 or some other lossy compression to save on space. Certainly this is what the new digital VCRs (using a hard disk) do. And if you wanted to make a bootleg copy of a DVD, again you'd need to MPEG-2 compress the signal.
But decompressing the disc's contents (even to a digital signal) and then recompressing them using a lossy algorithm will mean that the copy has reduced quality. So this is not a way to make perfect copies of DVDs, which supposedly is what the movie industry is scared of.
It's also a rather inelegant solution to get MPEG-2 data from a disc, TV aerial or satellite dish, decompress it with a set-top-box, output it as an uncompressed video signal, and then recompress it again. Life will be much simpler once you can directly access the original MPEG-2 data. With DVDs this is via DeCSS (I think), and with digital television you would need the receiver part of an STB, without the part that turns the MPEG-2 into a video signal.
Then you will be able to record directly from DVDs or TV transmissions onto your PC's hard disk, or onto a digital VCR. And you will then be able to make perfect copies (which you can do already with DVDs just by copying the disc, DeCSS and SDI outputs are red herrings for large-scale piracy). But you can't make perfect copies using this device, just pretty good copies.
If you have a normal DVD player, go out and rent the movie "The Sixth Sense". Slap it in the player. Watch as previews for other movies come up on the screen. Reach for your remote and push the "DVD Menu" button. Watch as your DVD player says "no".
That's what the MPAA wants the DVDCCA to protect: the "right" for them to control how you use the intellectual property they've sold you; or, as they'd have it, the intellectual property that they've given you precisely constrained access to. That's why DVD player manufacturers have to sign away their souls, and that's the real threat of DeCSS: if it's an open-source project, then somebody will port it to a mainstream platform like Windows, and then Mom and Dad can play DVD's without any manufacturer controls.
Imagine a world where Lawn Boy figured out a way to control a lawnmower engine so that it'd only mow a particular type of grass. Got St. Augustine in the front yard and Bermuda out back? Fine, just buy the St. Augustine lawnmower for the front yard and the Bermuda mower for the back. Lawn Boy would of course license the technology to every other lawn mower manufacturer, all of whom would be ecstatic to have such a sales-boosting technology at their disposal. Then, of course, they'd all get together and tell the government that people who tinker with their lawnmowers to disable the "Grass Security System" are just doing it because they want to kidnap children and use the modified mowers for terrorist acts and drug-related murders. As a society, we must stand up to the criminal element and outlaw illegal mower mutilation.
Nobody would willingly put up with a world like that except the people who'd stand to reap windfall profits. But that's really exactly what the MPAA wants.
Problem With Digital Interface
by
LaNMaN2000
·
· Score: 5
The problem with the digital interface that they are using is that it is only found on *very* high-end home theater equiptment. Most HDTVs (even high end ones) use the standard Firewire input to receive data from an external decoder or other digital video source. As a result, the DVD players that will ultimately come with this output will be priced to compete only in the high-end market (for the near future).
In addition, most people do not even have HDTVs yet. As a result, their TVs cannot receive a digital input. Even if standard TV manufacturers built D/A converters into their sets, the signal wouuld have to undergo the same D/A conversion that currently takes place within the player, anyway.
Since their is nothing preventing somebody from developing a device that will let this digital output connect to a firewire device, that should be the next product offering. As a result, people could ultimately get the firewire outputs, which the MPAA tried to eliminate, on their DVD players despite the manufacturers contractual agreement!
Garrett admits that his technology has been made possible by loopholes in Hollywood's contracts with DVD makers. "All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI," he says. Firewire feeds high-quality video into computers.
I can't believe that they had to sign a contract agreeing not to make a FIREWARE DVD player! Apple should sue the hell out of them.
*Sigh* It's just sad to see how corporations today cripple technological advancement just for the sake of their bottom-lines...
But Hollywood studio bosses are worried. They see the new system as a pirate's charter, and have been fighting to keep the pristine digital signal out of consumers' hands for fear that people will make broadcast-quality copies.
The technology is already there (ie. the high quality data). But they have to cripple the output in the name of "avoiding piracy"??? What kind of greedy, profit-hogging attitude is this? I am disgusted. If you don't want your consumers to get at the "pristine digital signal" then why put it there in the first place??? Perhaps Hollywood should go back to using VHS for movies. If they want the technology, what's the point of deliberately crippling it? It's like buying a Formula 10 car with all the engine power in there, but with an additional device that restricts the horsepower that can be output, in the name of "driving safety". I mean, why do you sell an engine with that much horsepower if it's never intended to be used anyway?!
This whole thing just stinks of greed and power lust (in terms of controlling what your consumers can do). What use is advanced technology if nobody can use it? (OTOH, of course, they are just asking for trouble by doing this. Surely they'd have learned by now that deliberately crippling something that's already there is a sure incentive for pirates and crackers.)
---
--
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Re:Who does the MPAA represent?
by
Mark+Gordon
·
· Score: 4
Remember: Jack Valenti tried his hardest to kill home video, which now represents a very large revenue stream for the film industry. He hasn't really learned from that mistake, either. The problem is that the MPAA sees its goals as "minimizing unauthorized copying", whereas the studios have a goal of "maximizing profits". Where the two collide, the MPAA fails to represent the film industry. In practice, the best way to minimize unauthorized copying is never to produce anything, but that doesn't generate any profit.
Part of the problem is that Valenti is hostile to any new technology, and his knee-jerk reaction is to try his best to stifle it. For the MPAA to serve the film industry better, the film industry needs to get rid of Valenti and replace him with someone a bit more forward-thinking.
Uh, hello people... wake up...
by
pkj
·
· Score: 3
There is absolutely nothing different between the output of this system and what you get from using DeCSS or even just watching a DVD movie on your monitor
In fact, one of the DVD FAQs describes very clearly how to build a very high end home theater system using a PC with line doubling and anamorphic decoding to drive a high quality 1600x1024, 90 or 120 hz refresh, signal through a high end projector or large format plasma/CRT.
The real issue is the one the got mentioned only in passing in the article, and that is the fact that it is trivial (and cheap) to build a small-scale pay-per-view delivery system for an environment such as a hotel... or perhaps something just a bit larger like your local broadband cable modem net.
-p.
Interesting hack - where is that MPEG2 stream?
by
tjwhaynes
·
· Score: 4
This gadget is claimed to take an MPEG2 stream and convert it to a digital stream for a SDI port.
Okay - that's a fairly nice conversion chip, but there really interesting question is where in the DVD player is it getting that MPEG2 stream? As has so often been pointed out here on/., any encrypted stream has to be decoded at some point - even the 'secure' digital video displays must decode the stream just before putting the images up. So, this gadget must sit right after the DSS decoding and pick it's data up from there. But if it is that simple to pick up the data stream, would a simple hardware hack allow you to pick this data up and feed it into the computer? No DeCSS needed anymore - we'd just need to fly a cable around inside our PC's off the DVD ROM to, say, a high speed serial or ethernet port and slurp away.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
-- Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't
necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Re:Interesting hack - where is that MPEG2 stream?
by
mistered
·
· Score: 4
Have a look at my other comment. It's not very hard to pick off the compressed MPEG2 stream, or the uncompressed digital video. The reason it's not more common is that building a converter to go from a byte-wide MPEG2 stream to anything your PC will like (say, 100M Ethernet, SCSI etc.) is non-trivial and out of the reach of the average person who wants to get the data from their DVD.
-- Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law.
Choose any two.
when is someone finally going to stand up?
by
matticus
·
· Score: 3
we need someone with some power to stand up against the DVD "elite" (more likely, seeing the DeCSS code, the DVD l33t). After i read this article and the essays on OpenDVD.org i got sick to my stomach. We think Microsoft is screwing consumers (because they are), but look ot the MPAA and the DVD Consortium. they are terrible. the region code idea is monopolistic, the second-rate scrambling system sucks (but we're not allowed to do anything about it), and now we find out that the video signal is messed up in some way "to prevent copying," making the picture quality way less than what it should be. they are allowed to continue this reign of terror under the guise of *copyright*. give me a break. i've stuck with my trusty VCR for 10 years now, and it looks like i will not touch DVD unless one lands on my lap. thank God for LiViD. otherwise i would hate it even more than i do. this is a key example of a technology that could have revolutionized at least something, but instead being held back to its toddler years by greedy corporate-types. blah.
The more there are these uses for getting the raw DVD data, the harder it's going to be for the MPAA to get roadblacks enacted. This isn't a toy for a bunch of hackers (as important as you and I may see that to be), it's businesses with sound (and more understandable to the common man) justifications for bypassing anti-copying provisions. Hopefully its existence will even help the DeCSS case.
-- Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Why don't we use the ITU-R-601 digital video format for everything? It is an uncompressed, digital form of PAL and NTSC. The data rate is 270 Mb/sec, which shouldn't be a problem over the short distances used for equipment interconnects. It would avoid the expense and artifacts introduced by multiple compression/decompression operations in the video path.
-- Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I don't think the contracts mention "FireWire(TM)"
by
yerricde
·
· Score: 4
FireWire(TM) is Apple's brand of IEEE 1394 high-speed serial connection. Contracts that I've read (IANAL, but I do read everything I sign, including EULAs) tend not to name a lot of brand names; if they do, they also have heavy generic equivalent language to keep exactly this from happening.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a regular ol' 25" TV, and I try to buy ONLY letterboxed movies (VHS or Laserdisc) because otherwise the nice framing that most directors use is LOST. Even Star Wars and other 2.35 movies are better than on pan&scan, cuz otherwise you miss most of the damn picture!
DVD sales aren't slow! It's the fastest-ever rollout of any new consumer medium ever! CD's took forever to gain this kind of momentum, and the big shift there didn't start until LPs were discontinued by the big labels.
Incidentally, the big push for "Widescreen" format comes from people like me, who'd much rather watch it. Did you actually LOOK at the packaging to see whether both Pan&Scan and Letterbox ratios were available?
P&S sucks, period, IMO.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Do you own a DVD player? I don't mean that as a flame, but I have found in every case that when I show people who say they hate letterbox movies a movie on DVD in letterbox (even the non anamorphic DVD's) that they end up loving watching the movie in that format and do not complain after that!
I think that partly it is because of the increased resolution over VHS (I have to say that the letterbox VHS tapes of Star Wars seem to loose a lot of detail and looks kind of fuzzy) as well as simply having a large enough TV (I only have a 27" but find it sufficient).
I really think it is BECAUSE of the widescreen format that DVD's have become so popular - it is now in vogue to like Widescreen which I think also helps convert a lot of people over.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it isn't letterboxed, you lose 43% of the picture when films are panned and scanned.
Properly made DVD's (anamorphic letterboxed) are future proofed for HDTV, which *will* become ubiquitous (thank you FCC). Most movies are shot at 1.85, so they will look just nifty at 1.78 (16/9, current tvs are 4/3 (1.33).
Even with HDTV, some classics like Chinatown (2.35) and Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia ( both 2.66 or so) will still be letterboxed because they were shot for the 70mm and other wider ratio formats.
If you want to see the whole picture, you need leterboxing. Or, accept 43% less film, and watch cable.
Matt
This device, as far as I can see from the New Scientist article, outputs _uncompressed_ digital data. That's fine if it's going straight to a screen, but would chew up enormous amounts of space to record.
If you wanted to record from a DVD or from an MPEG-2 based digital TV transmission, you'd probably also use MPEG-2 or some other lossy compression to save on space. Certainly this is what the new digital VCRs (using a hard disk) do. And if you wanted to make a bootleg copy of a DVD, again you'd need to MPEG-2 compress the signal.
But decompressing the disc's contents (even to a digital signal) and then recompressing them using a lossy algorithm will mean that the copy has reduced quality. So this is not a way to make perfect copies of DVDs, which supposedly is what the movie industry is scared of.
It's also a rather inelegant solution to get MPEG-2 data from a disc, TV aerial or satellite dish, decompress it with a set-top-box, output it as an uncompressed video signal, and then recompress it again. Life will be much simpler once you can directly access the original MPEG-2 data. With DVDs this is via DeCSS (I think), and with digital television you would need the receiver part of an STB, without the part that turns the MPEG-2 into a video signal.
Then you will be able to record directly from DVDs or TV transmissions onto your PC's hard disk, or onto a digital VCR. And you will then be able to make perfect copies (which you can do already with DVDs just by copying the disc, DeCSS and SDI outputs are red herrings for large-scale piracy). But you can't make perfect copies using this device, just pretty good copies.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If you have a normal DVD player, go out and rent the movie "The Sixth Sense". Slap it in the player. Watch as previews for other movies come up on the screen. Reach for your remote and push the "DVD Menu" button. Watch as your DVD player says "no".
That's what the MPAA wants the DVDCCA to protect: the "right" for them to control how you use the intellectual property they've sold you; or, as they'd have it, the intellectual property that they've given you precisely constrained access to. That's why DVD player manufacturers have to sign away their souls, and that's the real threat of DeCSS: if it's an open-source project, then somebody will port it to a mainstream platform like Windows, and then Mom and Dad can play DVD's without any manufacturer controls.
Imagine a world where Lawn Boy figured out a way to control a lawnmower engine so that it'd only mow a particular type of grass. Got St. Augustine in the front yard and Bermuda out back? Fine, just buy the St. Augustine lawnmower for the front yard and the Bermuda mower for the back. Lawn Boy would of course license the technology to every other lawn mower manufacturer, all of whom would be ecstatic to have such a sales-boosting technology at their disposal. Then, of course, they'd all get together and tell the government that people who tinker with their lawnmowers to disable the "Grass Security System" are just doing it because they want to kidnap children and use the modified mowers for terrorist acts and drug-related murders. As a society, we must stand up to the criminal element and outlaw illegal mower mutilation.
Nobody would willingly put up with a world like that except the people who'd stand to reap windfall profits. But that's really exactly what the MPAA wants.
The problem with the digital interface that they are using is that it is only found on *very* high-end home theater equiptment. Most HDTVs (even high end ones) use the standard Firewire input to receive data from an external decoder or other digital video source. As a result, the DVD players that will ultimately come with this output will be priced to compete only in the high-end market (for the near future).
In addition, most people do not even have HDTVs yet. As a result, their TVs cannot receive a digital input. Even if standard TV manufacturers built D/A converters into their sets, the signal wouuld have to undergo the same D/A conversion that currently takes place within the player, anyway.
Since their is nothing preventing somebody from developing a device that will let this digital output connect to a firewire device, that should be the next product offering. As a result, people could ultimately get the firewire outputs, which the MPAA tried to eliminate, on their DVD players despite the manufacturers contractual agreement!
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Garrett admits that his technology has been made possible by loopholes in Hollywood's contracts with DVD makers. "All the manufacturers of DVD players have signed an agreement not to provide a Firewire digital output. But there is no mention of SDI," he says. Firewire feeds high-quality video into computers.
I can't believe that they had to sign a contract agreeing not to make a FIREWARE DVD player! Apple should sue the hell out of them.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
*Sigh* It's just sad to see how corporations today cripple technological advancement just for the sake of their bottom-lines...
The technology is already there (ie. the high quality data). But they have to cripple the output in the name of "avoiding piracy"??? What kind of greedy, profit-hogging attitude is this? I am disgusted. If you don't want your consumers to get at the "pristine digital signal" then why put it there in the first place??? Perhaps Hollywood should go back to using VHS for movies. If they want the technology, what's the point of deliberately crippling it? It's like buying a Formula 10 car with all the engine power in there, but with an additional device that restricts the horsepower that can be output, in the name of "driving safety". I mean, why do you sell an engine with that much horsepower if it's never intended to be used anyway?!
This whole thing just stinks of greed and power lust (in terms of controlling what your consumers can do). What use is advanced technology if nobody can use it? (OTOH, of course, they are just asking for trouble by doing this. Surely they'd have learned by now that deliberately crippling something that's already there is a sure incentive for pirates and crackers.)
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Remember: Jack Valenti tried his hardest to kill home video, which now represents a very large revenue stream for the film industry. He hasn't really learned from that mistake, either. The problem is that the MPAA sees its goals as "minimizing unauthorized copying", whereas the studios have a goal of "maximizing profits". Where the two collide, the MPAA fails to represent the film industry. In practice, the best way to minimize unauthorized copying is never to produce anything, but that doesn't generate any profit.
Part of the problem is that Valenti is hostile to any new technology, and his knee-jerk reaction is to try his best to stifle it. For the MPAA to serve the film industry better, the film industry needs to get rid of Valenti and replace him with someone a bit more forward-thinking.
There is absolutely nothing different between the output of this system and what you get from using DeCSS or even just watching a DVD movie on your monitor
In fact, one of the DVD FAQs describes very clearly how to build a very high end home theater system using a PC with line doubling and anamorphic decoding to drive a high quality 1600x1024, 90 or 120 hz refresh, signal through a high end projector or large format plasma/CRT.
The real issue is the one the got mentioned only in passing in the article, and that is the fact that it is trivial (and cheap) to build a small-scale pay-per-view delivery system for an environment such as a hotel... or perhaps something just a bit larger like your local broadband cable modem net.
-p.
Okay - that's a fairly nice conversion chip, but there really interesting question is where in the DVD player is it getting that MPEG2 stream? As has so often been pointed out here on /., any encrypted stream has to be decoded at some point - even the 'secure' digital video displays must decode the stream just before putting the images up. So, this gadget must sit right after the DSS decoding and pick it's data up from there. But if it is that simple to pick up the data stream, would a simple hardware hack allow you to pick this data up and feed it into the computer? No DeCSS needed anymore - we'd just need to fly a cable around inside our PC's off the DVD ROM to, say, a high speed serial or ethernet port and slurp away.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
we need someone with some power to stand up against the DVD "elite" (more likely, seeing the DeCSS code, the DVD l33t). After i read this article and the essays on OpenDVD.org i got sick to my stomach. We think Microsoft is screwing consumers (because they are), but look ot the MPAA and the DVD Consortium. they are terrible. the region code idea is monopolistic, the second-rate scrambling system sucks (but we're not allowed to do anything about it), and now we find out that the video signal is messed up in some way "to prevent copying," making the picture quality way less than what it should be. they are allowed to continue this reign of terror under the guise of *copyright*. give me a break. i've stuck with my trusty VCR for 10 years now, and it looks like i will not touch DVD unless one lands on my lap. thank God for LiViD. otherwise i would hate it even more than i do. this is a key example of a technology that could have revolutionized at least something, but instead being held back to its toddler years by greedy corporate-types. blah.
The more there are these uses for getting the raw DVD data, the harder it's going to be for the MPAA to get roadblacks enacted. This isn't a toy for a bunch of hackers (as important as you and I may see that to be), it's businesses with sound (and more understandable to the common man) justifications for bypassing anti-copying provisions. Hopefully its existence will even help the DeCSS case.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Why don't we use the ITU-R-601 digital video format for everything? It is an uncompressed, digital form of PAL and NTSC. The data rate is 270 Mb/sec, which shouldn't be a problem over the short distances used for equipment interconnects. It would avoid the expense and artifacts introduced by multiple compression/decompression operations in the video path.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
FireWire(TM) is Apple's brand of IEEE 1394 high-speed serial connection. Contracts that I've read (IANAL, but I do read everything I sign, including EULAs) tend not to name a lot of brand names; if they do, they also have heavy generic equivalent language to keep exactly this from happening.
Will I retire or break 10K?