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New IBM Linux Notebook Includes DVD Player
An anonymous reader noted that there's a story on Newsforge about IBM's new ThinkPad. This story says it's the "first commercially available Linux computer with the ability to play back DVDs." The 900MHz Linux T22 will come with a commercial Linux DVD player. Meanwhile Xine, Xmovie, and OMS race to be the first one to support all the features (I need subtitles for anime darnit!) in an open source project, but since CSS plugins float around the net for each of them, actually playing DVDs is something they can do pretty well depending on your hardware. Most interesting about this LinDVD included with the ThinkPad is the implementation of one feature no user needs: Macrovision... done as a kernel module? Hrm.
If you can buy an off the shelf Linux DVD player, does this remove the justification for DecSS?
Well, DXR-2 card is great.. if you watch you DVD in a seperate TV or and old monitor (like those who were used with Atari ST or Amiga)
But it sucks in quality when you watch your DVD in your monitor.
Hetz (Heunique)
And it's slow - compared to Xine. I have tested it on 6 machines with various graphics card - starting from top line GeForce-3, Matrox G400, TNT2, all the way down to Trident.
Xine beats the crap out of VideoLAN in terms of picture smoothness, and the need for SDL (Xine doesn't need SDL)
Hetz (Heunique)
All work is now done on the production site.
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Xine lets you display overlays (subtitles) but it doesn't do a very good job of it yet. Unfortunatly most Anime houses use the overlay feature in ways it was never ment to be used in valient efforts to get a third color on the screen, which confuses the heck out of many software DVD players.
.ifo support to work correctly, so on some DVDs you'll only get 1/2 or less of the subtitles.
Also, I've never been able to get xines
Still, the feature is there, and possibly even useful in some circumstances.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Out of purely academic interest, how much care has been taken to ensure the integrity of the Macrovision module? Anyone know whether it is possible to recompile the kernel in question and get the binary driver to work with it, optionally hacking the driver? Does the Macrovision module have any sort of cryptographic integrity checking mechanism? How hard would it be for a rogue user to (a) replace it with a dummy module, or (b) interpose a "man in the middle" module which loads it and tricks it into disabling Macrovision?
The intersection between "trusted client" security (as demanded by the MPAA/RIAA) and open source OSes should be interesting to watch.
I think it sends a special kind of signal hidden in the overscan area which then activates a special Macrovision chip in your VCR. These chips are a requirement so every VCR has one. There are electronic workarounds (example) however. Of course you can do like me and get a cheap DXR3 / H+ decoder card and installed the hacked Linux drivers which have Macrovision disabled (*).
-adnans
(*) Disclaimer: This is in no way an endorsement for DVD piracy. I use the DXR3/ H+ without Macrovision for archival purposes only.... >:-)
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
The idea is that they would sell more hardware if anybody in the world could write a driver. And people would still pay money for your closed-source driver if it provides added functionality that they cannot figure out for themselves.
In fact, Yggdrassil (yes, they are still around, but they don't make a distribution of Linux any more) and SuSE make DVD-ROMs targeted for Linux users.
-Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I know what you mean about the 15" screen. I got a Hollywood Plus card and a DVD drive, but I was still watching on an old 15" monitor that wouldn't die. As soon as we got DVD in the living room, I stopped using the drive on my PC upstairs. Then I bought a nice 19" monitor (Stealth Black IBM G96, Trinitron tube: buy one). DVD on the computer got a LOT better, to the point where it's my favorite way to watch a movie when I'm by myself. It's basically an HDTV picture, and if you're sitting in front of it it's plenty big.
I'm split on DVD on the laptop: it's nice, but it's too expensive, and the machines I want (older, cheap laptops) don't have it.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Macrovision doesn't mess with timing at all. It puts a spike signal into the vertical retrace. This messes with signal levels in such a way that the cheap AGC (automatic gain control) circuits in most VHS video recorders freak out and mess with the brightness of the picture.
Stupid question time - does this mean that a pair of back-to-back $0.05 zener diodes would remove Macrovision?
If I were selling laptops to businesses I'd recommend windoze, too.
Why? MS Office. It's the only thing out there that can reliably read MS Office files,
and chances are, business customers are already using it on Win or Mac.
Linux just doesn't have the app support to make it viable on many corporate networks.
Sure, StarOffice and friends are nice programs, and have most of the capability of Office,
but until they can flawlessly exchange files from MS Office, they won't be able to compete.
C-X C-S
Actually, there is a way to get around the whole mess: don't license CSS. The main reason to license CSS is that it used to be a secret, so licensing was the only way to get it. But it's not a secret anymore.
MPAA wouldn't be able intimidate them. It's not like IBM can't afford lawyers. Just showing that you are financially able to fight, is 90% of the battle. IBM probably wouldn't even need to spend any money.
And DVD CCA has already shown itself impotent in the California case. The whole "trade secret" argument fizzled.
IBM could get away with it.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Macrovision works by messing with the time base on the outputted video signal. Normal NTSC video consists of 60 fields/second (well, 59.xxxxx) regularly spaced through that interval. Macrovision increases the timing between the fields slightly. This doesn't affect viewing, but when you record, the tightly-synced 60 fields are go in and out of phase (anyone remember "beats" from your high school physics class on sound waves?).
To overcome macrovision "protection," you need some form of a time base corrector. Most TBCs sell for a couple grand -- they're used by video editors for making sure the source and record decks are synced perfectly. Some consumer VCRs, however, do time base correcting internally (I have a Sharp VCR that I use between my DVD player (with composite out) and my TV (with coax in)). It overcomes macrovision, and could probably be used to tape macrovision-enabled video sources, but I haven't tried.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Most hardware with Macrovision support defaults to it being switched off. That way it has to be deliberately switched on in software, proving that you're using it and letting Macrovision claim their license fee. Oddly enough, most Linux drivers don't bother poking the register that enables Macrovision. The Linux drivers for em8300 based cards (Hollywood Plus, Creative dxr3, a few others) certainly don't enable Macrovision.
That message usually means you have a `reviewer' copy of the tape or dvd. The studios send out dumptruck loads of tapes to newpapers, tv news shows, and basically any creature that might generate some press for them. In order to keep these from dilluting sales they mark them.
I'm happy to see that IBM is putting so much effort into it, but damn, that binary only kernel version dependent crap has got to stop...
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
If you're interested, the Thinkpad in question is available here.
--sugarman--
This is not the case. VCRs do not have a Macrovision chip. This is a quick explanation, and might have an error or two:
The Macrovision signal is primarily a set of flashing white squares in the "vertical blanking interval" (VBI), the area just above and just below, the rest of the picture. A television tube's Automatic Gain Control (AGC) circuit ignores these flashing squares as they don't appear on the screen. But most VCR's AGC looks at the entire picture. The VBI should be black, or have some information like Teletext or close caption data...but NOT flashing squares. So the AGC, trying to control the gain of the signal being recorded to the tape, raises and lowers the gain as the squares flash from white to black. So your dubbed program flashes.
Macrovision removers replace the flashing squares with the black that should be there in the first place. Some of us with projection TVs have to use Macrovision removers in order to simply watch our legally purchased VHS tapes, as the Macrovision signal screws up our picture. Macrovision reps are scumbags and lie like dogs even when confronted with evidence.
Anyway, there is no chip. VCRs vary in their sensitivity to the Macrovision crap.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
They forgot to mention another linux dvd program
called VideoLAN (http://www.videolan.org)
works on my system, does css (i think),
and has subtitles. get a pretty decent framerate too.
I saw it annouced over on freshmeat,
but never see anything mentioned about it.
just though I'd post a link.
-Slackergod
We've run into this problem where I work. Our hardware uses an ASIC produced by someone else. We
developed our software with information on the ASIC that we received under NDA, so we can't make the entire driver open source. Not to mention that other companies could just slap the ASIC on a card, use the software we developed, and undercut our price, since they'd save 90% of the development costs.
The ASIC maker would sell more hardware if there was an open source version of the driver and people didn't have to pay your 90% markup.
IP laws and trade secrets have their own inefficiencies. Isn't it ironic that capitalists strive to avoid competition as much as possible?
Since macrovision is only to prevent dubbing of the video output, I assume that this kernel module will be responsible for feeding the DVD video stream to the S-video output...
Unloading the kernel module would probably just disable the S-video output or something like that.
So, who the heck is this aimed at? I am not aware of many people who use linux and want to be dependent upon the hardware vendor to supply kernels and binary-only kernel modules...
Another thing I would be interested in is if the DVD player sovtware or the hardware will regionalize. I think that the player is REQUIRED to regionalize if it is a 3rd generation player or later...
+++ ATH0 +++
Is this why the DVD divx rip I watched the other night had "if you bought or rented this movie please call 1-888-NO-COPIES" or whatever on the bottom of it? I tell ya, if it was there the whole time you wouldn't care, but it's because they do a smooth fade in of it that it's really distracting (like win2000 popup menus, *shudder*) after about the 15th time I was ready to call the number and tell them to piss off.
How we know is more important than what we know.
For those looking for notebooks, check out the Thinkpads. Yes, they usually cost a little more than others but I think they are worth it. They are very solid and work very well now that they got rid of the mwave chips.
I just bought an IBM X20 and run Debian and Windows 2000 on it. The only piece that Linux has a problem with is the modem. If you order it without the NIC it comes with a Lucent modem that is supported, but if you get the built-in NIC it has a 3COM mini-PCI NIC and modem, and the modem is a non-supported software modem. I put a Lucent 802.11 card in it and now have a great 3.5lb wireless Linux box.
The article claims that IBM obviously couldn't use the current open source projects to produce their own DVD player, but my question is why not. Sure, they'd probably have to licence the DVD spec from the DVD-CCA, for the sake of looking legitimate, but once they've done that they'll basically want to be producing the functionality of DeCSS - after all, all that program is for is decoding DVDs, just like any DVD player has to, which is what IBM have to do if they want to produce their own solution.
If they're worried that IBM couldn't open source their own work, sure they could. Nobody in their right mind would use IBM's alterations, but they could certainly publish the changes (presuably without altering the main part, and thus without having to republish that).
That must be some laptop! At $3500, I guess they have a few nickles in the budget to pay off the MPAA. Maybe they figure that anyone spending that much on a laptop probably doesn't have the time to pirate a $20 movie :-)
It's interesting that this apparently has S-video output. Aside from big screen TV Quake sessions, this might be just the thing for business presentations.
It's nice that IBM seems to see the light in regards to DVD capability on Linux, but at this price, I don't think this is the one "for the rest of us"...
A dingo ate my sig...
It's not like there's a good way around making it kernel dependent. They can't release the source to the CSS code, and I'm sure the their licensing agreement for CSS requires copy protection such as Macrovision. Therefore it has to be a closed source binary. The problem is that Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. You have to include a bunch of kernel headers, which change from one kernel to another. They also often change when someone applies a kernel patch, so you either have to have some kind of open sourse interface layer for your driver that can be recompiled, or if someone patches their kernel you driver doesn't work anymore.
We've run into this problem where I work. Our hardware uses an ASIC produced by someone else. We developed our software with information on the ASIC that we received under NDA, so we can't make the entire driver open source. Not to mention that other companies could just slap the ASIC on a card, use the software we developed, and undercut our price, since they'd save 90% of the development costs.
The code for the binary driver can't call kernel functions directly. It goes through a layer which is open source and contains the kernel headers. That layer needs to be recompiled every time the kernel is recompiled to ensure the driver works with the new kernel. It's a pain for our customers, and it makes Linux the most difficult (and therefore the most expensive) OS for us to support. Fortunately, we have enough customers using Linux to still justify supporting it, but tech support really dreads getting calls on our Linux products.
As for InterVideo's particular choice of going with a binary only approach, they really don't have a choice. The MPAA dictates the rules of the licensing agreement, there choices are a closed source LinDVD or no LinDVD.
First off, I think you're talking about the driver for NVidia's family of GPUs ...
We're not in the graphics market, but the issues may be similar.
So why don't they, and why don't you publish that which you can publish and ship only the NDA'd stuff binary? (which would also aid the reengineering effort because then there's a lot less to work on).
I really don't know why the ASIC vendor doesn't publish their spec. The firmware specification which tells us how to interface with their ASIC is under NDA, but a lot of that information can be determined from the GPLed Linux driver, but definately only a subset of the functionality that we use. Since the material under NDA is at the core of the driver, it wouldn't do users much good if we released the source to the rest of it. It would however help our competitors which have access to the NDA information.
By releasing the source, we risk having the software we developed stolen and used by our competitors, but what do we gain. In our particular market the hardware our board interfaces with is very expensive. The average open source developer doesn't have $100,000 worth of equipment sitting around. Because of this our market just doesn't lend itself well to open source development. We do have certain partners who do have access to the source. We had to execute a 3 way NDA with the ASIC vendor to give them access, but it is possible.
You of all people should know that a chip isn't done when the VHDL is done. Even if people get it to work on a FPGA (and they're sometimes more expensive than purchasing the device!) all they l get is an underpowered version of the real thing.
That depends a lot on the product. When you aren't talking about huge volumes, then FPGAs are a reasonable and even cost effective solution. Rolling an ASIC is very expensive, and mistakes mean rolling it again. With a FPGA you can change how the hardware works across the PCI bus, while the board is in the system. We have two products which perform significantly different tasks, on which the only differences are the parts externel to the FPGA and the VHDL. You can actually populate the board with parts for both functions and change what it does while it's in the system.
As for a FPGA being an underpowered solution, this is completely untrue. There is no reason that a FPGA solution is inherrantly less powerful than an ASIC solution.
Your comments on FPGAs being expensive it very true, especially at higher densities. However, you can save money if you can split the design into a couple less dense chips.
One more thing, I'm also aware that making the device available with only proprietary closed software to use it with also has the advantage of controlling what functionality/features of the device are available to the end-user. That way, you can keep people from exploiting the hardware of the device to the point that it prolongs the product's lifecycle and thus possible impedes sales of a successor device.
We are a small company that's trying to put our the best product we can with the most features we can in the shortest time we can. We aren't holding back features for the sake of our next generation products. This may be true of other companies, but I can say that it's not true of ours.
I can't tell you why they have a NDA on their firmware spec, but they aren't alone. I know of no vendors in their market that don't. It may be that they are trying to hide some of their IP from their competitors. Most likely they are trying to hide the limitations of their products from their competitors, so their competitors can't exploit them or market their products at those weaknesses. You can say that they shouldn't design products with weaknesses, but everyone has to make design decisions, and no product is perfect. A large percentage of the time spent on driver development is working around limitations or flaws in hardware. It's amazing what you can fix in software, and with the speed of today's processors, a few extra clock cycles doesn't effect performance. If you use dma and write your software well, you can keep the cpu load low, and still saturate the PCI bus with data.
I think that the Macrovision is only inserted into the NTSC/PAL video output -- it inserts spurious signals in the blanking interval to mess up the gain control on VCRs, right? So wouldn't it be impossible to embed the signal into a VGA RGB signal?
<P>
If that is the case, then all you need to do is get a scan converter to convert VGA -> NTSC, and skip the Macrovision entirely.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
If that is the case, then all you need to do is get a scan converter to convert VGA -> NTSC, and skip the Macrovision entirely.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Macrovision
(thing) byZorin
Sat Nov 13 1999 at 14:28 utc
An extremely annoying copy protection used on commercial VHS videos and the output of DVD players. Although it is easily worked around with a Macrovision Buster, it's a necessary evil that content producers need to use to protect their assets.
(thing) bygetzburg
Sun Apr 2 2000 at 00:54 utc
I lack technical details on this one, but basically what it does is mess with the gain control on whatever device you attach it to, particularly VCRs, so that the picture keeps alternating between light and dark. Tremendously annoying.
(No, I wasn't going to merge all the node linkage! Some people [] too much! Perhaps Slashdot needs some E2 intergration... that would rock...)
Anyway, hope this helps!
IIRC WinDVD is only $30, so LinDVD should be similar in price. I was unaware that the product had even gone gold... perhaps I should pick up a copy for my Debian laptop.
--
--
I like to watch.
Dunno about Ygg's specific products, but DVD-ROMs can be made using the ISO-9660 file system (with or without Rock Ridge, Joliet, etc.).
DVD-ROM does not imply UDF.
Show me a laptop that plays vinyl LPs, THEN I'll be impressed.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
Now I can play DVD's on a notebook. Wait, I've been able to do that on my Windows 2000 notebook for a year now...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
They're also painting SF sidewalks with "Peace, Love, Linux" stencil graffiti. Weird. I wonder if they will get hit with a fine for that one...
sulli
RTFJ.
On the other hand, if it's just a LKM, then it's in a nice self-contained file where it's easier to disassemble and patch, or even replace with code that does nothing.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Betamax video recorders were not vulnerable to this signal and would supposedly copy it perfectly. Ditto for Go Video VHS recorders, although I think they were eventually forced to put the crappy AGC circuit into their stuff a couple of years back.
Time Base Correctors fix the problem because the nasty signals are in the sync areas of the screen, which they throw out and replace with clean signals. But a true TBC (which makes sure that entire scanlines come through with the right timing, something that videotape is not accurate at) is overkill for Macrovision.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Now here's where you can get a firmware upgrade that'll make your T22's drive region-free. Nice to have Linux users in on this now.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
I don't know if it's "the best one" or not, but it's the only one I managed to compile AND make work, so I thought I'd mention it.
More info on their web site.
--
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
Dang, that crap sucks. If anyone figures out how to disable it in ANY player, esp. a Linux player, post below, eh?