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MPAA Ruins Own Films As Anti-Piracy Measure
WCityMike writes "Steve Kraus, a Chicago film projectionist, noted in this week's Movie Answer Man column that movie studios are quite purposefully putting 'large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area' in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films. Among recent films that feature these spots are 'Ali,' 'Behind Enemy Lines,' '28 Days Later,' 'Freddy vs. Jason' and 'Underworld.' (I guess they had to destroy the movies in order to save them ... )"
They've been doing this for years. It's a simple plan: make movies so bad no one will want to copy them.
lysergically yours
Well, tell that to my DivX copies of The Itallian Job, Freddy vs Jason, and 28 Days Later :)
Finally found a good topic to work on for my Master's thesis in Digital Signal Processing.
Judging from the few movies I've seen this year, I'd say the directors had already ruined them. The brown spot is unnecessary.
I just watched 28 days later the other night (loved it). I didn't even notice that the film was ruined. Just to be sure though, I should probably download a copy and see how much better it could have been w/o the spots?
i don't understand why they don't flash something more useful - like a serial number - so that they can identify where and when the illegal copy was made.
--Slashdot readers delight in generalizing the behavior of other Slashdot readers.
Gimme a flipping break. You don't even see the dots. Also, they aren't visible for the entire film, just a few frames. So bite me.
So we have the cigarette burn marks...what's next?
:)
Pictures of a big, fat, cock spliced into family films?
no comment
The red dots were the best part of some of those movies.
How lucky for them that all compression formats are fixed in stone and can never be changed.
Also that the pirating industry doesn't have any resources it could dedicate to changing said file formats.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I mean, how exactly does one RUIN Freddy v Jason? Isn't that kind of like trying to invent whiffle lace?
You are not the customer.
they should blast the audience with emp energy. take out cell phones and cameras alike. no cameras = no piracy. maybe they can even make one for loud annoying kids.
"Let's see how we can piss off and ailienate our customers some more. Oh I know, let's give them even less of a reason to buy, view or care about movies. That'll teach em."
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I mean if they keep adding stuff like this, people will start to notice, and not buy moives at all. Which I think is where like 50% of there profit comes from. Sorry guys but I have tons of simpsons episodes on my hardrive, but I still buy the DVD because it looks nicer. Don't mess with the format.
Rants done the right way www.koudijscanada.com
I'm sure it couldn't be that hard to edit the "ruined" frames, no? Final Cut Pro anyone?
The anime series Neo Ranga was converted from a low quality analog format to make the DVDs, and they have so many artifacts that when encoded in DivX, DivX ;), 3ivX or XviD, many large brown spots arise which completely ruin the rips. Better copy-protection than anything I've ever seen...
#define DRM chmod 000
didnt they do this to music too?- by adding jitters and damage to the tracks that were to subtle to be heard but very picked up by sensitive burning software. This may only affect those pirates that copy movies right of the screens but not the pirated screeners and leaked movies that come out of the studio...
_+_+__+_+_+_+_+_+_+++
when i moo u moo - just like that
I've been saying for years that the big studios are just flinging shit onto film. Now we have more direct evidence :)
I've seen a couple of these films, and I did not see this. I'm wondering if it's just a single frame (BTW that makes it illegal in the US) or if it's only in certain theaters....
are they also inserting some frames from other movies along with these 'cigarette spots'
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
It's actually based on a simply principle that people expect to see typical amounts of red, green and blue in the world. Over time, if the balance in a certain area is offset, the subconcious realises and looks for a pattern in the ionformation.
The Kodak system simply spreads a subliminal message across the length of the film, to convince you that you have enjoyed it. Simple psychology.
Unless these spots are particularly difficult to identify, someone need only write a filter to detect them and fill in the offending space, possibly with the average of the previous and next frame.
Did not notice anything wrong with it at all. My guess is that the compression actully filtered the spot rather than enhanced it.
It's just Tyler Durden messing around again. Look closely and you'll find it's a penis.
The movie company then downloads the film, see's the spots and tracks it to my theater. Now what? Are they going to shake down the theater owners, untill they install security and metal detectors?
How does this really prevent anything, aside from viewers like me having just ANOTHER excuse to wait until the DVD comes ou and rent that, rather then deal with tampered film (among the other lame problems of theater viewing, like ticket prices, travel, lines, food, seating, etc)?
how exactly does this ruin a compressed version? messing up the difference values? wouldnt it just wash on the next frame?
and then, isnt this noticeable to people who are watching the DVD anyway?
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
I saw the dots on Underworld--don't judge me by my taste in movies, please! I thought the dots might be some form of coded serial number to track the relationship between theaters and films. If someone were stupid enough to send out the film over the Internet with the dots on it, the MPAA movie police might have a better chance to catch the person-- especially if the film gets out before any embargo dates.
Quick, patent this!
[Error 407: No signature found]
28 Days Later has been available on Region 2 DVD since 19 May, so it's a waste of time 'protecting' it, now that DVD ripping is so easy.
And in other news the MPAA will require people to duct tape their eyelids closed before entering the cinema. A MPAA spokesperson was quoted saying:
- "In order to produce decent movies we have to make sure noone sees them".
that movie studios are quite purposefully putting 'large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area' in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films
....
Next step: replace the 'large reddish brown spots' with large reddish brown ads for Coca-Cola
-kgj
The MPAA has also elected (I think) to stop sending out dvd screeners to academy members - giving smaller films less of a chance at an oscar - just to prevent piracy.
Bet the MPAA comes back in a week singing another tune:
Those stupid dots ruined Gigli!
...skid marks. Plain and simple.
Um ... so I think I'm missing somthing. Whats stopping someone from using a diagnostic tool (since DivX is multipass now) from finding points where the compression goes to crap and just cutting out the bad frame? Yeah it's a LITTLE more work but as most compressing jobs take on the order of several hours I don't see why the pirating groups wouldn't do it to save the output quality.
this is the right tactic, but bad execution. I think that tagging every movie so that it's unique is one of the better ways to combat piracy. Certainly better than not send out any screeners at all and much much better than suing everyone in sight.
But, there are so many other ways they can do this without ruining film quality. How many scenes are there where you fade to black, or the camera lingers around somewhere before changing scenes. On one movie, make that fade to black last half a second longer but cut down the place where that camera lingers for a little.
I imagine there are probably hundreds of such spots in the movie where you could extend or cut short the shot by half a second or a full second. So, just come up with unique combinations of those and you've got a unique id.
Any problems with this? Seems a lot less intrusive than a big red dot and a lot more stealthy too. People might not have even noticed this happening.
in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films
WTF? These supersized cap codes have nothing to do with *ruining* copies of the film. Rather they are used to *identify* the person responsible for leaking the film. These films go to the projection houses long before their release dates and are often seen on the internet often before opening day. So obviously some houses have evil employees capturing the movie into computer video formats and leaking them via P2P networks. All the MPAA has to do is download and look at a pirated movie and look for the cap codes and bam, they have ID'ed the projection house responsible for leaking the film. These cap codes have been in film forever - but only recently have they been enlarged enough so that they show up in low resolution computer encoded video.
How hard would it be to have software process the film, look for large swaths of colours approximately matching the splotches, and remove them? Seems almost trivial image processing to me, although there is a lot of data to crank through.
My rights don't need management.
Why don't we try to live without Hollywood films? After all, there wouldn't be no need to copy those films any more (Yes, this is a provocation).
And: do they plan to do this only for movies which they have to sell (because they were so bad in the theaters) or with every single movie?
I'm surprised the RIAA didn't think of this earlier. An effective anti pirating technique, rather than pay 10s of millions to lawyers... Develop a "background inaudible noise" algorithm on CDs/wavs that would throw off mp3 compression making music file trading just too bandwidth costly. Kind of like a watermark, but far more annoying.
I remember seeing the dots in Underworld, but didn't know what they were for until now.
They were noticable because they were out of place and seems to serve no purpose... but they didn't detract from movie at all because it was so horrible.
I SAW the dots in Underworld. They drove me NUTS. I thought it was some kind of problem with the film copy or... I dunno what.
I did not see this on 28 Days Later. Maybe I just missed it, or maybe it was only in the re-release with the new ending.
They are doing this on PURPOSE? Madness. Will these be on DVDs too?
As far as I know these "brown spots" appear on all films that are produced on multiple reels, its the visual cue for the projectionist to switch reels and can be found on pretty much every film shown at non-digital cinemas (i.e. the vast majority).
conspiracy theories, gotta luv 'em!
GIGLI was the beta version...
how long until
What the movie industry SHOULD be doing, instead of pissing in the wind, is add value to the movie experience. I personally don't go see a movie in the theatre unless it is a 'Spectacular' movie. One where the experience of seeing it on a Big screen cannot be duplicated by any other means and actually plays and integral part of the film.
They should invest, partner, encourage more theatres like the IMAX franchise. As I understand the Matrix has done very well in those venues and cannot be duplicated in any other environment.
Give the movie goer a REASON to see the movie in a theatre, make us CHOOSE the theatre instead of our living room/computer monitor/etc.
There will always be individuals who would not pay to see a particular movie in a theatre, this is something that cannot be changed (and should not show up on any studio's bottom line). These are the same people who would rather pirate them to just be up on the popular culture of the day.
Make Better Movies, make us WANT to go to the theatre, make us excited enough to go, otherwise they will destroy themselves fighting a trend that will never cease to move forward.
--
If they were handling these reels appropriately, according to their cinematic quality, then they would be wadded up and covered in brown streaks.
I can see the fnords!
I always see the ostrich milling about the set in the Wizard of Oz and there is some story about a dwarf who hung his self...
Is this what you mean?
The blobs are actually a unique per "print" (i.e. physical copy at 1 theater) serial number. If someone takes a camcorder copy and makes DVD's of it - then the serial number will be embossed on the video on the DVD's so the movie company can then say -
"This DVD was made from print #1323 - that means this copy must have come from the Downtown cineplex screen #2 in Washington"
The serial number is probably well encoded enough to survive the frames being removed (i.e. the missing frame numbers also encode the print number) - so unless you go through and photoshop each frame, it's going to be obvious where the copy came from.
But of course, you could always write a www.virtualdub.org filter to automatically remove it......
megapixie
VHS macrovision is popular precisely because it's undetectable in how it alters visual quality. You'll hear lots of complaints by people who are unable to copy videos correctly, but you'll never hear a complaint by anyone about how macrovision has degraded their signal -- it hasn't.
We're almost at the stage where digital watermarks are completely seamless. Ten years ago, inititives like this would've been scoffed at. Now, they're becoming reality.
BOO! TERRO
Let's see if I can be the first to point out that they aren't trying to foil compression, but to identify a certain print should it be leaked. Only one print will have red blotch at 0:32:11 and two white dots at 1:03:05. Slightly distracting for viewers, but uniquely identifying.
If I ever download a movie, it's so I can watch some of it and decide if it's worth shelling out the $30 to go see. It's about $30 because:$9 for me, $9 for my g/f, and the rest for popcorn/etc.
Can't bring in outside food or drink anymore. Can't even bring in a backpack, either - post 9/11 fears and "anti-piracy measures" gone too far.
I don't care if the movie looks like crap on my computer. I'm not interested in keeping most movies anyway. If I like it, I'll go see it in the theatre or wait for the DVD.
This really isn't a bad thing. Heck, since the MPAA is purposely altering movies, maybe they should go ahead and let us download stuff and leave p2p alone. If the stuff on p2p is of such low-quality, what is the big problem?
Oh, the problem is that we'll watch it and realize that the movie sucks and we won't shell out $$ to go see it.
I wish I could have my money back from John Carpenter's "Vampires" - aside from 1 hot nude chick, that movie was a total waste of time and money.
I mean *a friend* of mine watched a couple of these movies DL'ed from the web, and I uh... *he* didn't see any artifacts at all. My guess is that they were either edited out by the ripper, or that the compression did not enhance them the way that the studios might have hoped.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
I, for one, welcome our new Red-Dot overlords!
Goodness, just stop putting with with the bad plots, where the story is second to the selection of actors. Stop putting up with canned endings, and weak story lines, where you know the entire plot by watching a 30 second ad.
Go to something like the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse or the Acadia Cinema Cooperative, or one of the many in London.
You like Linux or *BSD, because the other OSes aren't good enough for you, why not demand high quality cinema?
The article does not say the blotches are used to screw up compression to ruin the film for pirates, as the slashdot summary suggests. Rather, it is just 20-year old "cap code" technology enlarged to be more easily visible in high-compressed pirated copies.
Cap code was "designed to uniquely mark film prints so that pirated copies could be traced to the source." Originially the dots were small enough that compression obscured them out of usability.
I've seen some pirated movies, and in my opinion, a few splotches on a few frames isn't going to screw them up a whole lot. They already tend to look and sound bad.
Interesting, so they are so desparate to do things against piracy that they are willing to lower the quality of their films, not to stop it, mind you, but just to make an act of piracy to some measure less attractive?
This amazes me considering that DVD movie technology, and by extension, digital movie files, naturally involve a measureable loss of detail and quality over, say, watching it in a theater.
It almost sounds like a desparate measure; as if someone out there threw the idea out without taking into consideration how little quality matters when it comes to satisfying the average DVD consumer.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
People are always saying that, as long as you can listen to and watch a film you can copy it. I guess the MPAA really does understand what "plugging the analog" hole entails.
This is not the first time something like this has been done. ITC was quite purposefully putting large white spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in an area around the perimeter of the island, ruining any chance of No. 6 escaping.
Oh you mean this guy?
We enjoyed the film. Robin (girlfriend) thought it was really funny. Robin's sister went with us, and she also liked it.
Yes, it's a dirty trick if it's really intentional, but that little ugly spot lasting only a fraction of a second is hardly what I'd call "destroy the movies in order to save them".
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
So THAT was the problem with Gigli! And here I thought it might be J. Lo.
But you can't stop piracy. You can only make it pointless, by making movies that are so good that people will want to see them on the big screen even if they've seen it already, or by making the moviegoing experience something that you can't get at home.
When I have a choice between watching a movie in my living room or in a theater with a screen much smaller than the ones I remember from 10 or so years ago, with whole families talking about their day 2 rows back, and cellphone-answerers 2 rows in front, guess what I choose?
I watched 28 Days Later on DVD-quality SVCD before it was out in the theaters, so obviously this latest measure is not making pirated movies unwatchable.
Lately, every single movie I go watch plays an anti-piracy ad. Average Joe says something very close to: "I don't think it hurts the director -- well, it does, but it's miniscule compared to what me, the set contruction guy, the sound guy, the camera guy -- we're not million dollar employees."
Does anyone else find that insulting?! I go watch many movies at the cinema, very rarely outside of opening week, and often during opening weekend, and I find that insulting.
Well now, they'll have an excuse for suppressing the word-of-mouth spread of bad reviews!
"If you hated the movie, you MUST have watched a fucked-up bootleg copy! Pirate!"
Somewhere just beyond the asteroid belt, Jupiter is on the phone to its lawyer...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If you do notice these spots, demand your money back from the theater; you have the right if the movie you paid for is "defective."
Enough people demand their money back, they'll stop.
Nice sample of the dots here.
A nice little 'advisory' was issued by the InR group, followed by a huge discussion on it.
I remember an art teacher explaining to us way back in the day what these brown spots were for.
Apparently, they're signals to the projectionist that it's time to change the reel soon. They're definitely are in old movies (especially in long old movies).
Sometimes you see VHS's with the spots still in them. I must admit I haven't RTFA but I do believe there's a good chance someone's just over reacting.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
If it had been a movie I actually *liked* I would be doubly irritated. I'll have to tell my friends who've spotted them, and griped about them as well.
I also wonder, why can't they do something with the cigarette burn? It's up on the corner, it's not remotely as distracting, and most people don't pay attention to it.
All I can say, though, is that this goes beyond sad. I find it simply stunning that they actually believe that this is a good idea. I mean, what next, the RIAA embedding random chunks of static on CDs? At the rate they're going, they're gonna cripple their products to the point that no one wants to buy them anyway... (Which would then also be blamed on piracy... (Sigh))
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I have a Divx rip of the "28 Days Later" DVD. Watched it multiple times, no spots to be seen...
"WHAT are these random brown spots doing all over this otherwise PERFECTLY GOOD roll of edited film?!?"
"Well, boss, those are coffee...*cough* I mean copy protection. Yeah, I specifically designed them to interfere with digital compression!"
"Good man! Guess who's getting a bonus this Christmas!"
...
Q. Have you been seeing spots when you go to the movies? It may not be your eyes! More than 20 years ago Kodak devised a system called "Cap Code" designed to uniquely mark film prints so that pirated copies could be traced to the source. Cap Code uses very tiny dots that flash occasionally but are so small that the average viewer almost never notices them.
Well, something new and horrible has been introduced on some studios' prints. Sort of a giant picture-marring version of Cap Code dots: Very large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area. They flash in various patterns throughout a given reel while other reels of the same film may have none at all.
A Kodak spokesman who helped devise the original Cap Code says this is not the work of his company but theorizes that it may be intended to be more visible on the murky compressed copies that get posted to the Internet where the original, very subtle Cap Code may be difficult to discern.
On one movie technical forum they are referring to this new system as "Crap Code" or "Cap Code on Steroids." There are reports coming in of viewers complaining of the spots on the pictures. While theaters strive to keep prints free of dirt and scratches, Hollywood starts sending out prints with built-in marring. Among the films known to be afflicted are "Ali," "Behind Enemy Lines," "28 Days Later" "Freddy vs. Jason" and "Underworld," probably many others as well.
Steve Kraus, Chicago
A. You're the expert projectionist at our Chicago critics' screening room, with a fierce love of high-quality film, so I can imagine how upset you are. What's amusing about Crap Code and the other efforts to catch pirates is that most of the thieves are apparently industry insiders. A recent news story says studios may even be discouraged from distributing advance DVDs of their Oscar contenders to academy members, because some of these movies quickly find their way to the Web.
"Submitted for Your Consideration",
flashed across the screen constantly didn't deter piracy, I don't see how a few colored blobs are going to have any effect.
Why not "personalize" each DVD that is sent out to Acadamy Members?
"Submitted for Your Consideration (insert Acadamy Member Name here)"
The Studios already spend gobs of money on advertising to try to get their pictures nominated for Acadamy Awards, how much more can it cost to personalize a few hundred DVDs?
Note to Jack Valenti: If you use this idea, you can send me personalized copies of all the films too, thank you.
I like microcars
Let's face it, to attack media piracy you have to attack their current methods.... So, attack the majority of codecs that rely on the fact that motion picture images tend to change little from frame to frame over the course of a movie. If Hollywood made the jump to record every single movie in STEREOGRAPHIC 3D, could it be possible for moviegoers to gain a potentially more immersive viewing experience, while stomping out some of this digital piracy? I'm no expert on the matter, but I figure it is much easier to film and create than it is to take that product and convert it into data that could be reasonably compressed by modern codecs, seeing that every other frame is going to be significantly different than the last. I'm pretty sure an analog capture and compression would still be easy enough, but that's not what the MPAA is going after, as witnessed by the topic of this post.
And you thought that being colorblind didn't have any advantages.
IIRC, seven orange dots like this:
***
***
*
But I may be forgetting how they were aranged (saw Underworld opening weekend).
I was ranting to my friend not long in. Maybe I will take to just screaming "Fuck the dots" next time... or much smarter, just demand my money back.
This might be wildly off topic, but what happens when you can record and replay your own experiences? I'm talking at the biological level. Would movie studios make their content 100% incoherent?
http://www.vcdquality.com/image.php?id=18919
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Why can't they just put big infrared projectors behind the screen? Wouldn't that knock out 99% of the CCD camcorders?
Instead of pirating it, you could have gone to www.amazon.co.uk and ordered it. It was out in England on DVD before it hit theatres here...that's why you were watching a "DVD-quality SVCD".
Instead of finding a way to stop pirates (which you won't do), find a way to catch them. Quit throwing bad films and good money down the drain by giving pirates another hurdle to jump. I'd rather see these people caught. Stop ruining my music and films because you don't want them pirated. If someone keeps robbing your house, do you just keep adding new alarm systems time and time again, or do you try to catch the bastard? It's just stupid, IMO.
Has no one ever worked at a movie theater? The reddish brown spots are assembly registrations. The films come in to the theater in canisters on several reels and the film is assembled. At every splice there is a film artifact showing where the splice is. It comes in really handy when they disassemble the film. You have to know where to cut the film. There should be at least three or four of these throughout the film . . . as well as between every trailer, and commercial.
Get a life folks. Not everyone is a victim of the RIAA and MPAA . . . some of them are customers.
For how many frames do these dotted scenes appear? I assume it's a rather short measure, in hopes that most audiences will overlook or not even see them. Wouldn't it be simple to add logic to most ripping/encoding apps that scenes that are suddenly blank with a few red spots, lasting for 1 second are simply ignored or cut off.
It's ironic that instead of identifying the guy who made the film available for mass-download (ala Kazaa), they're identifying the screener who loaned it to his friend.
The screeners know better than to send copies to half a million people. I'm willing to bet they only let close, trusted friends borrow the video. Yet the movies are still leaked.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
When you go see a movie with these watermarks, such as underworld, when the movie finishes go to the theater manager and demand your money back. Tell him there were marks and dots on the film that distracted you and shows their lack of quality control. Tell them you refuse to pay for a movie with marks and problems on it. When the theaters are paying out enough refunds, you'll see how fast the MPAA drops it when Loews, Sony, UA etc. demand it.
I never Noticed on 28 days later. Hmm...Strange
If the screeners were distributed as low-quality MPEGs, then the pirate-distributors would be happy, because they don`t care about quality, the pirates would be happy, because they don`t care about quality anyway, so it wouldn't deter either groups.
The group that buys DVDs would still buy DVDs and the group that don't still wouldn't.
In other words, this won't change anything.
What WOULD change things is if the RIAA discovered a way of preventing DeCSS but still retaining the ability to play the DVD on your standard DVD player.
Sales of DVDs would plummet.
I don't care about the RIAA fighting pirates, but they better not get between me an my RIGHT to backup the data I bought legally from them.
Don't let the wording fool you;
When you buy a DVD, you are buying the DATA that makes up the DVD.
The storage media is irrelevant.
I now OWN the ones & zeros encoded on the disk, so it is MY data and I have a RIGHT to back it up.
Period.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Just like all "anti-piracy" measures in music, movies, and software it will NOT affect the real pirates in any way.
Just load up the video into your favorite editor, snip snip, and the offending frames are gone!
You could even get a little more clever and just fill over the spots with pixels to make them impossible to read.
And if you want to be supremely clever, you just let the computer average over the frames to erase it away, and/or use the clone and heal brushes in photoshop to make it as if the spots had never existed.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Any real image processing person can write a filter to take this stuff out of just about anything. If it doesn't substantially obscure the interesting parts of the frame (e.g. they put it on a single color surface) then you could use just about any stupid methododology to repair it. 2D median filter in that area, for example... This method isn't viable because making it hard to remove also involves obscuring/significantly degrading what's going on in the picture. I don't see anyone doing this to any real extent - few would stand for it. A much more interesting method is that being developed by a company called Cinea....
What about DVD Region restrictions though?
Thank you. Drive through. (:wq)
So the solution is not to perform a multipass scan to work around the dots, but to remove the dota altogether.
If you read down past the red dot question on the suntimes movie answer man.
You will see a story about a movie taht was ruined by the MPAA.
Here is the question and answer:
Q. I have heard that Fox Searchlight will release Berto-lucci's "The Dreamers" as an R-rated film, instead of unrated or NC-17. If Fox knows that the audience for the film will be adults, and that educated adults will not want to see a compromised version of a movie by a great director, then why are they releasing it as an R? Why not have it be like "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and release it as unrated?
Gary Rancier, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A. The NC-17 rating is unworkable, thanks to Blockbuster, which refuses to stock such films, and the MPAA, which refuses to create an A (for "adult") category that would stand between the R rating and actual pornography. The movie could and should go out unrated.
If Fox Searchlight does not want audiences to see the movie that Bertolucci made, then they should do the decent thing and give up distribution rights to a company prepared to stand behind its films. To buy a film and then cut it because of the MPAA rating amounts to vandalism.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
Given the fact that most of the pirated copies of movies are ripped from DVD's sent to screeners and reviewers, why would they need to include this on the printed versions sent to theaters? Why not just add a frame or two to the DVD versions?
Considering that the movies you mentioned are already fucked up, who the heck cares about brown spot. Replace the entire movie with a large brown spot and I swear people will still go to the movie theater if you run a badass advertising campaign.
I was thinking the film guys up in the booth just started to smoke a little more then normal.
As pointed out beautifully in the article you should have read. Now ask yourself - why would they NEED to enlarge them, if not to screw with compression, in the same way the RIAA has done with sound recordings? RIAA put spikes in that don't play badly, but that really screw with attempts to rip to mp3, resulting in pops and cracks. The MPAA is just combining two technologies here.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The movies content may have sucked, I wouldn't know I didn't see it.
But anything that produces the following ROI was obviously good for somebody.
Hell they made $11M profit in the opening weekend.
Budget: $25M
Gross: $81.6M (as of September 28, 2003)
Numbers from IMDb
Disclaimer: These are only the US numbers, I'm too lazy to look up the conversion.
...by putting Kevin Costner in 'em! =)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
They're not talking about "Cigarette Burns" before reel changes, but unique marking codes indended to allow one to deduce which theatre allowed a given MPEG or DIVX to be made.
Finally a new challenge to develop a better codec to specifically countermeasure this new technique to stop the free sharing of movies!
;)
Gotta go to work on it, cya
"Repeat after me. In the longterm, secure client-side encryption [security]* is impossible."
That's why people say that when Linux becomes more popular, it will be a bigger target. And by your admition the hacker will win.
Remember your argument works on things you like (Linux), just as well as it works on things you don't like (RIAA, MPAA). Just ask the OpenSSH/SSL people.
*point added by me.
"Pedal you hamsters, PEDAL!!!"
Does everything include nothing?
Was watching a show on tv last night and they announced that Jack Valenti of MPAA has decided that they will no longer send out screener tapes to members of the Academy for awards selection. Apparently alot of academy members copied the tapes and they ended up in the hands of family members, friends, etc. This was also done to deter the piracy of those high quality screeners.
Members of the Academy must now actually pay to see every movie in a theatre in order to consider it for an award.
In other news, the RIAA is replacing all their songs with white noise.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I didn't notice them in Underworld, but then again, I didn't notice any light spots in which to place the dots either. The whole movie takes place at night.
... usually 5 seconds after the mark the scene will totally change (dark <-> light) and the sound will, too.
But I'll look for the dots in the next movie I see. It's kindof like the "end-of-reel" mark that they put in the upper right hand corner... I never noticed it until knew about them, and then I always saw them. It's a mark to tell the projectionist to queue up the next reel
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
(...)movie studios are quite purposefully putting 'large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area' in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films.
They should take the Tyler Durden approach and insert frames with pictures of penises instead. It's way more effective in ruining movies.
"I'll wait until it's out on cable."
"I'll wait until it's out on DVD."
The only reason people still go to the movies is because they can't get an experience like it at home. Advances in home theater tech -- HDTV, Dolby 6.1 -- and disruptions in the theaters -- babies crying, thrown popcorn -- are making the movie theater less popular. They're being amazingly stupid by adding even more annoyances.
Jimbo: So you see kids, we have to kill these animals, or else they'll die!
(Ned takes a flamethrower to about 30 deer)
Jimbo: Good job Ned! Way to thin out their numbers!
I guess such a program would be illegal under the DMCA, which means only the pirated copies would be free of them. So might we end up with a situation where the pirated copies of a film are of better quality than the orignial?
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
It degrades the movie-going experience, nobody wants that.
It is so obvious the pirates could edit it out.
Simple techniques to watermark films would be to add a tiny amount of flicker to the whole frame for a sequence, or to use techniques similar to the (failed) SMDI system to watermark the audio. I really expected more sophistication from the studios than big brown dots. At least at this point, the sophistication of the pirates is not great -- and identifying them through subtle, persistent watermarks could make a difference.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Ok there's not much usefull info in this thread so I'll try to add some :)
Exhibit A: screenshot with dots ...ok that's my only exhibit. Enjoy!
You can see the big T shape in the upper middle part of the image.
Exhibit B:
Funny, I don't recall seeing any language on the ticket stub indicating I'd be subjected to anti-piracy measures that might distract from the presentation itself. And I do remember seeing those weird red dots during "Underworld." What next? Are we going to see an equivalent to a *broadcast flag* at the bottom of the films next?
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I have watched '28 Days Later,' 'Freddy vs. Jason' and 'Underworld.' on my pc, a various levels of compression, and various codec.. not once have I (or my friends) noticed any "' large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture,"
has anyone actually noticed this supposed phenomenon?
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
I've seen some of these movies and never noticed the dots. On the other hand, I have been drinking more 7up. Coincidence?
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I researched this a year ago when working out a fake number to use in a book, and finally have the opportunity to share this worthless information...
I can't imagine the red splotches could be any worse than the occasional bad CAM version of some 0-day films available on the 'net. When will the industry learn that I'm not going to pay to see this crap. Never. I would rather watch a crappy CAM with people coughing and standing up and a lousy audio feed than shell out $12 before I know the movie is worth it. All the industry is doing is screwing the people who shelled out the cash to watch their "blockbusters" and eat over-priced popcorn.
Regardless, the DVD will be error-free, which means the worst-case scenario is that I have to wait 5 months before getting a crispy XVID DVD rip. Ooh, that's tough love.
Oh, and Mr. MPAA Man, we geeks have this wonderful little open-source program called VirtualDub that makes removing bad frames from videos dead-easy. Just so you know.
They want you to spend your 7$ to see the movie so even if it's crap, they still get to add that 7$ to the gross. Wasn't there a deal where the Tomb Raider sequel guys were blaming the demise of the movie on people's cell phones? People txt messaging each other saying the movie sucked will loose you some of those one time ticket charges.
I normally dig the stories on Slashdot's front page, but jesus ("you said it man, nobody fucks with the Jesus"), there's about a paragraph of crap written about how they put a larger spot on a couple film frames. I could understand if there were some technical background on the spotting. But, alas, NOooooo, the second link is a straight dope message board that seems to have nothing to do with movies. Only some metaphorical reference as destroying your own product in order to save it.
/. going down the tubes.
There's a lot more news for nerds out there. Even stuff that matters, not this pseudo journalistic fluff.
I know I read slashdot at my own risk and "If I don't like it, I don't have to read it." It's still a bummer to watch the quality of
Come on Editors, drink some coffee...or maybe I've had too much.
The article doesn't say anything about the red dots being used to mess with encryption schemes. It is a method being used to track pirated rips back to individual leaked screeners. From what I know of video compression, taking a screener which has this "CapCode" on it would tend to make the spots more noticeable, however it is my opinion that this is more of a side effect than the main purpose in putting these in.
DVDs that you buy in the stores are pressed (instead of burned), so by definition they all end up having the same image.
It's possible for stamped DVDs to include up to 188 bytes of individual data in the Burst Cutting Area. To get an idea of what BCA markings look like, turn over a GameCube disc and look for a fine 1.2mm wide "barcode" that overlaps the inner edge of the data area. Though DVD Video does not use the BCA, the forthcoming DVD HD Video specification may require decoders to read decryption key and serial number information from the BCA and add watermarks to the decoded picture.
Will I retire or break 10K?
----
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
When I was in Singapore, I found that the theaters were blocking cellphones... and if that's government oppression, then BRING ON THE OPPRESSION, it beats the hell out of listening to the dipshit behind me make crack deals throughout the whole film.
How's this for blocking cameras: random flashes of infrared, low enough power to keep everyone's retinas safe, but high enough to screw with the CCDs in the cameras?
They want us to watch these films.
They want us to hear the music.
But at the same time these entities want your money many times over and in as many ways as possible that they'll take such irrational actions such as suing the very people who are buying their products or changing formats the physical formats of the products every decade or so just to "keep up with technology".
At least they can pick out the downloaders of the pirate films, just follow the trail of epileptic fits of people staring at flashing dots.
--Mods giveth, Mods taketh away--
Sounds exactly like the way the movies (successfully) responded to the advent of TV. All those Cinemascope huge screens, all the sprawling epics like The Robe and so on, were basically made because TV couldn't compete with a huge screen. TV really changed the movies that got made, in a big way: suddenly Westerns and Biblical epics, huge movies, were the rule.
I don't think bigger (and louder) is going to be better this time, though. The studios are trying to outcompete home theaters now by moving everything up that extra notch -- just blasting the sound, and making the picture explode with every frame. Those kinds of movies are exactly what turn me off. Hey, my brother's home theater can rattle the walls too, and the screen's pretty big. Movies like The Big Country look pretty watchable on my 32" set at home now, even.
They need something more than an overwhelming sensory assault on the audience, we can have that any day of the week at home. Right now there are plenty of video games more visually interesting than Star Wars Episode II. And those are interactive.
If it was me I'd try to do something to play up the social side of it. People go to movies on dates, they go with their kids on Saturdays, it's a social thing. Instead of playing to that, they're blaming us for it -- we share files with each other, how awful. Seems like a misjudgment.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I, for one, am appalled by this overly aggressive product placement by 7UP.
Not 7 UP but Kotex.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seems to me the pirates, especially now that they're aware of it, will just carefully edit out those sections, or fiddle with the original video to reduce them so they dissapear in the encodings. All they're going to do is further annoy their legit customers, and lead them down the ol' piracy trail. After all, if you pay good money (and mortgage the house) to go to the theater to see a film and it's ruined on purpose, then who wouldn't come home and download an edited pirated copy without the added crap so they could watch what they paid for in the first place?
...but I just thought it was the Reddi Whip gas I had snuck into the film to make up for lack of entertainment...
If the lamphouse is running too hot (say someone changed the bulb and forgot to drop the output of the rectifier), then the print will get a nice "blob" in the middle. It's actually more noticeable in dark areas, but this still sounds like it.
Given that distribution houses routinely mix and match film reels in order to get a shippable unit together, I can see where it would be easy to get one bad real out of 5.
-David
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I thought those spots were timing indicators telling the projectionist when to switch to the next reel, the first flash being a warning and the second flash being the time to switch over.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Remember DIVX? It was the same idea.
Sorry, I will not buy into a format that requires that some central service authorize my media before I can watch the movie. That central service may go down (again, like DIVX) or suddenly decide.. "Hmm, we're going to re-release _The Lion King_. Let'd disable everyone's copies so they're forced to see it in the theater!"
No thanks. Once I buy media, I want to be able to watch it whenever I want. I urge everyone to avoid formats that require any sort of "authorization" for this reason. If no one buys it, it will fail.
Seriously. Takes a bit longer to d/l and also need a DVD burner but they last longer, look better. And it also feels more like stealing!
So you get a few red dots! So!! How many guys do you know who regularly watch the scrambled porn channel?
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
Honestly, I feel some movies are SOOOO bad as to have STOLEN my time. Too bad we can't go after the movie studios for false advertising. I guess if you compress all the good parts of a movie into a 3min "preview", then even the shittiest of movies can look like Oscar nominees.
I defy ANYONE to take "Lawnmower man 2" and find 3 decent minutes in the whole film. :-) Even the best pop-vid remix would still make most people lose conciousness from chronic brain death in seconds...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I feel much better now that I know I'm not crazy. I totally saw this in Underworld every time a large portion of the screen featured a solid light color, even though my wife insisted I was hallucinating. It looked like a pattern of six dots, two rows of three dots, flashing on the screen. Drove me up the frickin wall.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Trust me, you're not losing anything.
...codecs take this into consideration when they do the first-run analysis of the video stream?
;-)
You'd think Microsoft was sitting on the MPAA Anti-piracy Board -- movie activation anyone?
CLIENT SIDE.
Stare at the words for a few minutes, if they still aren't sinking in then try beating your head against a wall.
Emp is for n00bs.
;-)
Quack, quack.
If that was their goal, they'd need to make them persist for more frames, moreso than size. The problem is that the spike is one with regard to signal vs time. The derivative d(signal)/dt is too sharp, and screws up the compression algorithms. If it successfully does that, then the info is NOT successfully being preserved - I believe the two concepts are mutually exclusive. So either the things are being used for something other than the caps now (ie, compression screwing), or else the phenomenon described, messing up the compression, isn't actually occurring.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
That is, splicing single frames of pornography into Disney films.
Who needs single frames? Many films distributed by The Walt Disney Company are rated R by the MPAA's ratings board because they contain whole scenes of nudity. Disney's Mumford and Disney's Full Frontal are far from being the only examples.
But I'm still not buying Mr. Eisner's crap, porn or no porn.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by the "big spot" people are talking about on the movies has been around for years. It shows up periodically (in the upper right hand corner) to tell the projectionist when to move the movie to the next reel.
Now, where have I heard something like this before. Aye! Now me recollect. They seems to have stole a page from tha pirates 'emselves.
They already tend to look and sound bad.
I don't know where you are getting/watching your pirated copies but I have seen some INCREDIBLE copies of movies (Matrix2 and T3 are the most recent).
For FREE instead of $20 (which is what it costs for two people to goto the movies these days) I can deal w/any deviation from the "excellent" quality that is shown in the theatres.
Stop downloading TMD releases from Kazaa/IRC and get some BT downloads going from better sources.
And have you seen their ridiculous TV commercials? Trying to personalize piracy. Showing the 'guy-next-door' Key Grip or lighting guy - "Actors aren't the only ones affected by piracy." i.e. they want you kill the 'the actors already rich anyway' attitude because it supposedly affects the little people involved in movie production as well. Yet they have no guilt paying Ben Afshit and Gaylo $40 billion a movie while paying the 'little people' with peanuts. I'm supposed to feel bad? How about a little more even compensation, then maybe they'll have a point.
If you got a crappy experience out of the film because it was intentionally ruined, you have a right to a refund.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I thought the hair and the unique dirty pattern that is shown on the screen through most of the movie theatre experience. Heck it is even coded to each individual movie screen.
The Hair waves and the dirt pattern is the different for each movie theatre and screen. Nice protection if you ask me. I dont want to see it in many screens with a High pattern protection scheme. Sad thing is, only newer theatres seem to have better pick of the protection algorithms.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Prior Screenshot with dots
As for them ruining the movie, I guess you could say they do that in a way. When I saw the dots, I started thinking about them and it took my mind off the movie.
The setting is that some evidently wealthy and sophisticated elderly couple is relaxing in their den expecting a delightful evening listening to some piece of classical music. The caption said something to the effeect 'In order to prevent copying of tonight's broadcast of [some classical work], brief intermissions of barking seals will be interjected randomly throughout the program.'
Trying to see if this cartoon might have made it's way onto the Internet, this slashdot discussion came up: Interesting Way To Protest Napster (guy inserting animal sounds in shared songs).
I would rephrase that as a "no real loss" compression method.
Yes, I bought their album. I am a long time Metallica fan (since the beginning), and the only reason I bought it was because my wife had several gift certificates for Borders, and she wanted to use them up. I have listened to that album twice, and I could barely get through it both times. What a stinker. It also came with a DVD, which I haven't watched, and some special code to get free music over the net (which I haven't used). Why would I want crappy, free music? I paid good money for my crappy music, thank you very much.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Because the screen is big, sound system is better than anything I can get at home...at least the theater I go to.
Also, it has my undivided attention. I become totally engrossed into the movie. The screen commands your entire view. You're not distracted by pausing it, your kid walking in and asking you for his favorite cookie, you can't pause it to get up, you have to watch it from start to finish...the way it was intended to do.
I get no one talking to the movie. I go by myself or with just my wife. I go to the first show because it's cheaper and less people and with people that want to see the movie. I've yet to have anyone get up and start talking during those times.
That's why I go to a theater.
Your milage my very.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
So how exactly does one phone a black hole?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Maybe it says something about the movie, if i was paying that much attention to a random flaw on the screen...
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
And here I thought they were just trying to bring back the old feel of the old reel-to-reel films decaying over time, just like we saw at the theatres some 20 years ago... *grin*
Those fuckers!
*ducks*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm no video buff, but I've got an idea to get around this sort of protection. The first one is called contrast. It's still in the experimental stages, but a small "knob" would allow a person to control the difference between the darkest and lighest elements in a frame. The other one is called brightness. It also comes in "knob" form, but it lets someone control the over all brightenns of a picture.
You have just provided a tool: (text instructions).
This tool can be used to circumvent an access control system.
This access control system is designed to restrict the availability of copyrighted material.
Please remain where you are. The police are on their way.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
No normal capture device captures natively in DivX. So you apply filter to the original stream (whatever that is) as you save the stream in DivX. (original -> filter -> divx encoder) No extra intermediate step is needed. All you need is a smart enough filter, but it shouldn't be that hard to identify automatically (would be a variation of motion detection identifying "flashing" dots.)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So, how long (or has it already happened?) until we've got DVD compression software that automatically edits this crap out?
Well, I don't want to help MPAA, but I believe in the open exchange of information, so here is an idea.
It might cost a bit more than placing big blobs of shit-coloured paint on the film, but it would look much better. It will be especially useful when digital distribution becomes reality. Simply change the text on certain objects in the movie, such as house numbers, street names, license plates, etc., when it's not essential to the plot. You can make every print uniquely identifiable, while still making the movie watching experience as pleasant as possible.
This can be countered, of course, by simply acquiring two copies from different sources and comparing them (binary subtraction and then brightness x20). Everything that would survive compression should become visible.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I just downloaded all those movies and they play and work fine for me...
WOOPS! I mean uh... my "friend" dowloaded them... uh...
Ave Molech Setting
The thing is that the movie pirates know that they put these things in there, so they edit the identifying marks out to protect their source.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I'd like to see those things come back, or at least see someone try.
Motion would be the most interesting. Since "car chase" is a genre unto itself for movies and a significant component to many action films, why not build theaters everywhere with motion-capable seating that could be incorporated into the movie (and impossible to duplicate in HT)? Its not like its going to go away as a genre.
When at Disney's California Adventure, they had a ride ("Soarin' Over California"), which, while kind of lame from a content perspective coupled a movie with some pretty basic movement to provide a really compelling flying sensation -- much better than IMAX.
There's no reason that this kind of technology couldn't be incorporated into a theater to provide a movie+ride experience, and it'd be a sensation applicable to many, many films.
Add in a restaurant, and you win back the social aspect of it -- food and a whole evening built around an attraction you can't get on a 70" Sony.
What is the colour of a movie sucking?
Instead of doing something as obvious as big dots, they could be smart and digitally put different details in the background of certain scenes - a bookcase with a code corresponding to different colored books, say.
The technology already exists to do this in real time for TV - it's used to do virtual advertising (replacing billboards in stadiums, so the ads seen by the home viewer are different from the ones in the park). When films are distributed digitally, it should be possible to invisibly watermark each copy - you wouldn't see the difference unless you went to two different theaters.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I have Season One on DVD-R, burned from mpegs from Usenet (oh god what a pain, is there any simple way w/OS X to demux an mpeg and then resync the audio WITHOUT doing it by hand in iMovie? YES i do have legal mpgs that need to be put on DVD), and it most certainly looks immeasurably shittier than the real DVD, which I'm caving on and buying tonight.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
For those of you who actually know more about the topic, I apologize. For those of you who only read the poorly written /. summary of an article, you should do your homework before posting comments.
The MPAA has been putting dots in films (reels) for years now. They serialize where the film came from if it ever shows up somewhere it shouldn't (eg. auction house, different theater, or yes, your home living room).
Disney was one of the initial big backers of this technology. They are particularly careful about who gets their reels of film once the movie runs. The usual answer: "No one."
Production/Distrobution companies own the reels and movie houses (AMC, Cinemarc, etc) only get the rights to show the reels. Typically they don't own them outright and at the end of their lifespan they have to be sent back to be vaulted up or destroyed.
Anyway, these codes are a newer technology based off of 'cap codes.' The dots are usually put in one or two frames near the middle of the print in a 3x3 grid with only some of the dots showing. (Eg. five dots in a 'T' formation).
The move was because with most current compression technologies will make the whole screen get brighter unless those frames are removed before encoding.
The better pirating groups will usually seem them edit them out by either just dumping the frames and copying the ones before it and after it. (at 28/32 FPS, you won't see the effects) or they take a morph of the two and make an 'averaged' frame.
These are much more obtrusive than the original 'cap codes' but they hardly ruin a movie any more than the 'cigarette burns' that show up which are just as noticable.
Newer technologies which have not been implemented involve a form of visual stegonography where they can slightly alter the frame in certain places to do the same thing without the large brown dots. Infact they can do it throughout the entire film which would make it hard to just toss a few frames.
-- dK
I'd rather watch _Freddy vs. Jason_ again, than see that mess again...
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
A recent news story says studios may even be discouraged from distributing advance DVDs of their Oscar contenders to academy members, because some of these movies quickly find their way to the Web.
So guess what, it's not us consumers (the ones who are paying the theater ticket prices and rental fees) who are doing the pirating. It's their own people.
Maybe the studios should police their own people rather than give us even poorer quality films and blame us for having to do it.
For thos who would suggest these are the reel markers or other such nonsense, here are several scans directly from FILM PRINTS of this phenomenon.
h ttp://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141b.jpgp ://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141c.jpg/ www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141d.jpgw .film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141e.jpgi lm-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141f.jpg
http://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141a.jpg
htt
http:/
http://ww
http://www.f
Projectionsit forums have been a buzz about this new version of the Caps Code for months-- and it is recommended if you see these dots, complain to a manager and request that they return the film to their distributor to show that we will not tolerate destruction of the films to prevent piracy.
Demand your money back, or passes- get the theater owners grumbling about this and it will end.
Aside from the obvious moral issues of piracy, which I won't belabor here...
The pirated copy of Matrix2 that I saw was on DVD. It was watchable, but obviously over-compressed. Action scenes especially suffered. Then there was some problem with the aspect ratio, if I remember right. And the sound was pretty bad; near the end it completely cut out.
I didn't make a copy for myself. Since it was not yet released on DVD, and I had already been to the theater twice, I didn't feel too bad about watching it. But I was not about to settle for that poor quality when I could buy the DVD version within several months.
Yeah, I could tell by the trailers that Underworld was going to suck. Here's an amusing tidbit, though:
My next door neighbour pre-ordered it from Amazon before it hit theaters. He's already paid them $30 for the DVD. Isn't that hilarious?
Of course, I saw Tuck Everlasting and Master of Disguise, so I guess I have to laugh at myself, too.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
People do the craziest things.
A few years ago I knew a guy who aquired home camera vids shot in movie theatres of just released movies. He made a dozen copies of each and sold them at a profit in downtown Newark NJ.
The crazy thing is they were UNWATCHABLE (to me). The lack of quality, the noise of the audience, the movement of the home camera all just ruined the movie watching experience for me to the point that even tho he let me watch them for free, I chose not to waste my time.
He always had plenty of repeat customers. I wouldn't have believed you could make money selling so crappy a ripoff.
You can't make a priori guesses about how people will act. "What if" ("Let's pretend") mind experiments make sense in physics not in human behavior.
Actual human behavior will suprize you every time.
Mostly a vertical pattern of three dots in the middle right side of the screen.
They drove me fucking nuts, because I thought they were part of some Tyler Durden-esque message. Fucknazis.
Piggybacking on this first post since there's already 500 comments.
Behind Enemy Lines was an inconsistent piece of crap.
1) The way the missile tracked the plane, and the plane did all sorts of loops was pure fiction.
2) After ejecting, the first thing you do after landing is hide your parachute, and if it was a 2 seater, you wouldn't leave your buddy standing in a clearing if you had just been right there, broken ankle or not.
3) The huey's being used in the rescue mission variously had 1 and 2 engines---1 over land, and 2 over water--look at the turbine exhausts.
4) When the french commandos were coming in for a rescue mission, they would not have aborted because of some idiot reporter making up a story.
5) The pilot fixed his radio by reversing the battery. Wtf was it not in right in the first place. Doesn't anyone check these things before taking off?
6) You can't run through claymore mine trip wires like the pilot guy did, and survive...
...all that will do, having nicely informed everyone about this, is make the quality telecine groups use MORE THAN TWO sets of reels in their mastering; even better as this will eliminate both individual identifying marks like these crap dots, and eliminate film grain (thus improving compressability).
You speak also of Photoshopping every frame as if it were a bad thing, but you forget that in fact very high-end tools such as CinePaint exist (and, indeed exist on Linux, chiefly because Linux = cheaper cluster) for doing, well, pretty much exactly that.
If this means the release groups have to increase the quality of their releases, that's a very good thing as far as the pirates are concerned...
It's a secret Visitor communication. Those dots look very like the alien language in "V", if you're quick enough to notice.
Which leads me to believe that they're not just a random blotch. Rather, I suppose it's easy enough to encode some sort of lot or batch number in those dots, to trace what version/release/theater is being leaked.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
It's interesting you mention the disjointed nature of the songs. Bob Rock was going around mentioning how they recorded the songs and then went and twisted all the bits and pieces around in Pro Tools. He was trying to say it was some sort of art movement.
All it really means is that Metallica have gotten even lazier in the studio and can't even play their own parts good enough for an album. So it's now some "garage art" movement.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Unlike Macrovision which causes the brightness to fluctuate, Goatsevision, when recorded via an unauthorized method will randomly show the Goatse man in a variety of poses. Optionally for childrens films, we can embed a variety of celebrities that children find frightening, including Paul Rubens, Michael Jackson, Andy Dick, or even Al Sharpton.
With that list of films,
A large black area covering the whole screen would be the best way to save them!
Actually, the free online music is a bunch of live recordings from various concerts (three in number, they are supposed to add more soon), all from shows before St. Anger. In fact, the online music is the only good thing about that cd.
If that's the case, then the article's wrong. If the code comes through unscathed and viewable, then the compression wasn't effectively messed with - the original will be just as messed up as the compressed version. I'd like to see an example of compressed/uncompressed images to compare.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I've seen these "little splotches"... I figured it was a way of tracking which region/theater the movie was recorded from when they find it in the wild.
And I've seen this in every movie I've seen lately... They look like a pattern of dots.... only up there for a frame... maybe two... usually red but in the "School of Rock" that I saw yesterday, the used black dots on a white background. A technique that would force a CODEC to show it.
-=Kraulin
I'm not really familiar with history, but didn't the Greek use one of the most powerful anti-piracy systems ever? Instead of capturing you're story on some medium (almost any medium can be copied), just hire some actors, make them play your story. It's fun for the actors and for the audience. Ok, you do miss some special effects, although, if you've got great sound and light technicians, everything is possible. In a play the actors can react to the public, they can wait until the audience stopped laughing. In a play you can use the language of the local people, you can make people from the audience play "guest roles". A play is always unpredictable, even the actors can't tell when somebody is going say the wrong line, when an actor will lose his wig, break a part of the background, ...
Why would we still watch movies, where everything was planned, all bloopers were removed, with actors that live many thousands kilometers away from us, if the real live experience is so much better?
and i hope they were able to make some changes before the final release.
did it still have that "gobble gobble" line in it?
The addition of a few extra I-Frames around the dots is seriously not going to double the size of the encode! You do realize that encoders automatically insert I-Frames at most things that have a sudden transition. That means any scene that cuts directly without a fade (pretty much every cut in the typical movie) has an I-Frame injected. In addition to that, depending on the IPB pattern and GOP size used, there are I-Frames anywhere from every three to fifteen frames. That is roughly 10 to 2 times per second at NTSC output rates. The addition of three I-Frames in a row is so pitifully small it would be lost below the standard deviation frequency.
Secondly, I would question whether or not the encoder would even merit these small dots worthy an I-Frame! They would be about 2 to 3 pixels in size, based on what I saw flicker by in the theatre. That's the size of dust. You have that much random gunk all over the reel, yet you don't see encode filesizes exploding through the roof from a dusty take!
V
My officemate thinks as I do that it could drastically reduce a large portion of these problems, but that it would never fly because of (legitimate) privacy concerns and the difficulty of repudiation.
In some part, I agree with my officemate, but think that the cost of implementing such a system will, given present abuse trends, start to become appealing enough to become viable. How much crack am I smoking?
sloth jr
The Paul Reubens incident was just a misunderstanding. He was an MPAA agent that hadn't been assigned a partner yet.
How long will people put up with crap like this?
Until after LOTR:ROTK is out, right?
You've missed the point, which is what it does to the picture quality for the paying customers.
I just bought a DVD that came with the full 1940s cinema-going treatment (or a sample of it): newsreel, comedy short, Looney Tunes cartoon (which would probably have been a NEW cartoon back then). Compare that to what you get for $9 or $10 today -- endless slideshow ads, TV-style ads, poor-quality 'plots' and 'acting', and now splotches??????
Hey, if you want all the customers to stop buying the product, it would be easier to just say so!
someone should yank this entire topic, noted as "submission was a hoax, and no one caught it in time." Still, it's entertaining to see some people make conjectures about the recoverability of a compression algorithm in certain scenarios.
(The GOP sequence is fixed for MPEG-1/2 (IBBPBBPBBPBBPBBPBB) except crappy encoders like mencoder only use I and P frames, and MPEG-4 (DivX in particular) only started supporting B frames a while ago. Anyway..)
often have trouble with Macrovision. They do have AGC and early color correction circutry that can be affected by Macrovision.
Should one be watching DVD on older sets? Another topic...
Blogging because I can...
I'd verify this, but then I'd have to watch Underworld again.
This
These brown dots are not cue dots.
cigarette burns. you know about them. all about them. you've burned many gentile and jew babies, innocent as they are, you burn them. you are the fucking terrorist who walks around baby wards and burns them cigarettes. when we catch you, you will be burned 3 times for every baby burn you gave out. that should leave you looking like a sasage you fucking terrorist keilbasa.
I am just finishing watching Baraka which I just bought. This film was done in 70mm and I owned the VHS so decided to get the DVD. While watching it I saw a redish dot appear in the right hand corner. I moaned that the film had deteriorated so quickly before it could be archived. And it appeared again later in the film but in the same place. I thought odd that their was a flaw in the same area of the film but so far apart that it could not be a film blemish across layered frames. I decided to read /. on a whim and see this. I should return it. This film is masterpieced of visual presentation and it does interfere with the film. I am wondering if the badly compressed audio which causes low bass notes that are droned to form beats and the skipping at the halfway point are on purpose also.
So my thoughts of this being a bad job done to a great film is probably just an example of bad policy applied to a great film.
This is depressing.
Really depressing is anything safe or pure, or even meant to be enjoyed by the consumer or is the act of consumation the only thing that matters anymore.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
kind sir, your trolling abilities are needed here
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Why bother further ruining the film? The movie's quality is so bad that it's an anti-piracy measure already. Why do they over-kill the issue like this when they have already achieved their goal?
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
I, for one, welcome our new Red Spot overlords
I went as saw 28 days later on the weekend and I did notice some of these spots, they were up in the top right corner near where the projectionist marks are (damn you Fight Club for teaching me about that and now sub-conciously watching that spot!)
:P
I not sure that 28 days later really needs the protection - the camera being unsteady for most of the film should be enough to render compression useless
Just in time it sounds like :)
yaams
Films that do employ this, I won't be -paying- to see.
Suck on that.
All you have to do is sort your search descendingly according to the number of sources; the more sources a movie or whatever has, the more likely it is to be good quality 'cos most people only keep good copies and delete corrupted ones.
If when tasting it you are inspired to compare it to a mixture of dog shit, underarm perspiration, and athelete's foot fungus (even though you've never tasted those)
You have led such a sheltered life...
You can't take the sky from me...
The dots are not to ruin compression, they are a pattern of dots about every 100 frames that given enough frames you can actually identify a certain print so that you know what theater allowed a pirate to copy the movie.
This info came from a Kodak rep on the Film Tech website about a year ago.
If you get 2 copies with different brown spots, run some code to identify the spotted frames, and then get the frame from the other copy... that'd ruin this "identification" scheme, wouldn't it???
Sounds... braindead simple.
Look, maybe this is just a personal bias, but I tend to like cheerful movies. They don't need to be brainless or anything, but I like to see films that I enjoy, that entertain me. I'm not sure I've ever run across a happy independent film. The closest I've been able to get is "bittersweet," which isn't even remotely the same thing.
:)
I welcome suggestions, of course, if anyone knows of happy, enjoyable independent film-viewing.
~ Leilah
Regardless of whether or not this is a visible artefact in movies, it boils down to the same story that we've seen a thousand times:
1) People will see movies if they're well marketed.
2) People will _pay_ to see movies if (a) they have no choice, or (b) the movies are worthwhile.
Trying to use technology to force people to pay for movies after the cat is out of the bag is pointless. People know that movies can be ripped, screeners can be made, etc. Unless a movie is truly worthy of dropping $25/person (parking, food, tickets), people will download it regularly.
The movie industry, and the recording industry for that matter, have to realise that they no longer hold a monopoly, and that the alternative has every advantage except legality and moral high-ground. (things which never sell too well.) If they make products that are WORTH supporting, then (and only then) will people support them.
As an aside, we had a film festival here last week. My wife and I paid $9 per ticket to see five movies. Add popcorn, drinks, and gas, and you've got a fairly hefty bill--all for movies I'd pay to see again. (especially The Barbarian Invasion. Whew!)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
(No I don't work for RT.)
anyone got a sample pic of it? awww...screw it...I'll just bT it....off to suprnova I go.
What the HELL that pattern of dots in Underworld was all about...
You should have just gone with 'm-w'.
Those brown spots are actually subliminal messages to go and try some of the fresh fried poo served up in the lobby. "Let's go out to the lobby, let's go out to the lobby, let's go out to the lobby and get ourselves some poo!"
Reminds me of watching Scary Movie 2. I hadn't seen the first one, had only caught the commercials for it. We went with another couple, got there early to watch the trailers. So the next 'trailer' comes on and starts with that scene in the beginning, where the excorsist girl pees on the floor. I whispered to my husband, 'man, that movie is going to suck. I wonder what kind of fool will be stuck with that?' If it wasn't so dark, I'm sure the look on my face was classic as it finally dawned on me that we were the fools about to trudge through such trash. All agreed that it was the worst movie we had ever seen.
I attended KILL BILL press screening today and most certainly, the reddish dot patterns were there! They seemed to be present only in one reel of the movie (the bloody scene with dozens of Lucy Liu's henchmen at the end) and they were not very subliminal - I looked at the guy sitting next to me when I first noticed them and he's seen them too. They appeared at least half a dozen times, even in the scenes which were shot in black & white (so the red dots were very visible). They seemed to have a precise pattern suggesting that this is some sort of (binary?) encoding of the print number. click here to see how it looked. (Note that this is not screengrab from the movie itself, it's just me putting some dots on the movie photo so that you can see how it looks like and you can spot it in the theatre easier.)
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
The dots in question are NOT changeover cues. Changeover cues are found at the end of each reel in the upper right corner, first the motor cue, then about 7 seconds later the change cue which comes about a second before the actual reel end. Each cue is on 4 successive frames which means they are on screen for a slightly long period of time.
d e.jpg
The dots in question are designed to uniquely code the prints. Which is fine and dandy but not when they are obtrusive and annoying.
Lookee here:
http://www.angelfire.com/creep/dots/crapco
If they're visibly obvious, any decent graphics app can be used to zap them out, and several people here have pointed out automated methods to get rid of them. If they actually want to catch pirates, lots of ways to digitally watermark an image.
Or just stego the name/address of the intended recipient into the digital track.
If during a court hearing, the stego decrypt app is run, having a nice image with the name and address of the person being tried show up in what all parties agree is the content whose misuse is the subject of the dispute will be. . . very convincing.
Tech Public Policy stuff