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Night Vision Goggles vs Pirates
Cormorant writes "It was reported in The Guardian that Warner Brothers has sent night vision goggles to cinemas across Britain for ushers to don and scan for camcorder pirates during the entire length of the movie [the new Harry Potter], along with watermarks and codes displayed on screen during the film. Mr Graham said "Video piracy is rife everywhere, and with the UK screening the film four days before the rest of the world, Warner was concerned the movie would end up on the internet. Warner sees the investment as negligible compared with the threat to the whole industry."
Returning as Sam Fisher, you infiltrate the theaters of the UK...
Theater pirates may get lots of press, but most of the stolen copies freely available are taken right from the studios themselves.
Have you Meta Moderated t
...if cam captures were the main source of piracy, but from what I've read, it's a lot more common for the leaks to come from "insider" sources. Either from post-production workers, or theatre employees in the projection booth.
... going to spout off about how they have no right to be observing us? I mean, what gives them the right to spy on us during a movie that we paid good money to see?
That seems like a waste of time.
All a pirate has to do is pay the kid making minimum wage running the projector a couple hundred pounds to let the pirate sit in the booth and record from there!
Now when the projector gets screwed up or there's no sound, there will be theater personnel on hand to notice!
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
We had a set sent to our theater, and have had a bit of fun playing with them. We were amazed to find how many people actually use their cell phones during a movie. Just goofing off I've seen cell phones, laptops, and a gameboy! But no camcorders, yet.
Seriously, how could bootleg piracy videos really hurt their industry?
Harry Potter's target audience isn't the people who scour the net for zero-day pirate releases, and anyone who doesn't go see the movie because they saw already saw it in a grainy fuzzy download, probably wasn't really that interested in the movie anyway.
First, the guys working in the theatres who make minimum wage are not going to report anyone for pirating a movie. They aren't paid enough to care
Second, all the good pirated coppies come out before the movies hit the theatres and are from the studio themselves.
Sounds like the guys trying to thwart the pirating aren't very knowlegeable themselves about what/how it happens.
Evolution or ID?
Pirates will begin modifying their video equipment to look like these devices, thus foiling the ability of pirate scouts to spot actual pirates.
Then, one day, a movie theatre employee will kick out a blind man, suspecting him of pirating the movie.
All matter of hell and lawsuits will spew forth and in the end, only the blind people will suffer.
So, ban movie theatre pirate scouts before it's too late!
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Whoops.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
First the Web, then groups, then images, then froogle, then Gmail, and now.... NIGHT VISION!! ON 100,000 Linux boxes!!! NOW I CAN SEARCH THE WEB IN THE DARK!!! ...oh... goggles.
ZERO
Say you took a reasonably high powered IR LED, and fitted it to a 9v battery, would its output be enough to blind the night vision?
I've got no interest in seeing OR ripping off Harry Potter, but I don't take kindly to being spied upon in a movie theatre.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
Of course, there are still pirates on the seas today, and maybe people do use night vision technology to spot them, although radar's good, too.
Mod parent up!
How I understand it, watermarks create slight variations in the encoding of the movie (color, in this case) that are invisible to the eye, but detectable by computers. I wonder, though, whether these watermarks actually make it through to a camcorder rip of a movie, seeing as the quality is so degraded, and the color is so washed out.
Maybe it would make more sense, i think, to flash the serial number of the film print for a frame or two at random points in the film. At 24 fps, the human eye would not notice, especially if the number is simply super-imposed on the video, possibly in a section of the current frame that attracts the least attention of the viewer's eyes. I went to a research talk once of an algorithm to automatically detect the point of high interest in every frame of video, so this could be done automatically.
If I had any intention of going to the Harry Potter movie, I would go. Regardless of whether there's a ripped copy available online. People don't go to movie theatres because it's their only way to see a flick - they go for the theatre experience: big screen, big sound, greasy food.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
I think this is the first time I heard of studios providing NVG to prevent piracy in theaters.
However, I also think this is doomed to fail.The quality of some cam recording lets me think that some pirates may be friends with a projectionnist, thus giving them access to "private" screening with no audience except a camera.
And what of the ushers themselves. Surely quite a number are in facts students with part-time jobs. The same students that download films on p2p. what's to prevent _them_ from camcording the film ?
The only real defense against this would be releasing the film the same day everywhere
"Hey, where are you going with the goggles, man?"
...
...
"Boss told me to check for videocams in the theatre."
"Dude - fair warning, Paul Reuben is in there. I wouldn't go if I were you."
"Who? Look, I just do what the boss says. See ya in a few."
"!"
"You got a fork suitable for removing eyes around here?"
Hope WB is able to handle the 'problems' of this technology.
-Adam
To correct you, screeners ARE copies made from VHS or DVD, sent to movie reviewers and members of the Academy (and others too). Screeners is the best quality you can get.
FOr your enlightment:
What's CAM, Workprint, Telesync, Telecine, Screener,DVDRip, Subbed?
CAM - This type of VCD was recorded by someone in a cinema with a camcorder and the audience can be heard! The picture quality is usually OK but the sound is mostly very bad and hard to make out speech.
TS (Telesync) - These are also recorded in a cinema but usually on an expensive camera and they should have a seperate audio source (so the audience cannot be heard), these are generally very good quality and highly watchable.
TC (Telecine) - Done a number of ways, all from taking directly from the reel. Ripped in either widescreen (letterbox) or in full-screen (pan and scan) with excellent audio and video.
Screener - A Screener is usually recorded form a promotional video tape or DVD which is sent to censors and film critics etc.. The quality is usually as good as a commercial VCD, some times a copyright message appears on the screen.
Work-Print - Each frame of the film is copied from celluloid (or another source). The sound is usually perfect and the visual quality can vary. These are sometimes incomplete movies.
LD/DVDRip - Are ripped from DVD or Laserdisc versions of the film and the quality is as good as genuine.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
In NYC, it's almost double that.
In fact, the awards screener DVDs are only one source. (A "screener" is a promotional preview videocassette/DVD of a film provided by a film company, or its distributor, to video store owners or movie award voters prior to its general release date. Selling, trading or distributing these "screeners" is frowned upon by the MPAA)
Every point in the production cycle where the movie transitions from print to electronic version is a possible leak.
Screener traces are already in place. And there was a notable incident this year where an Acadamy of Motion Pictures member was caught bootlegging his screeners by the trace technology.
Have you Meta Moderated t
You're right, it's an urban legend:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/stealth.asp
"A friend of my father's was a cop in Nevada, and he was assigned the graveyard shift, posted outside of town on a little used section of road, given a radar gun and ordered to stay put and to pull motorists over for speeding. One night, while the officer waits by the side of the road, the radar gun starts screaming for no apparent reason at all, registering about 140. The officer, who was sleepy anyway, attributes this to a faulty gun, and ignores the incident.
A week later the same thing happens again, on the same stretch of road, at about the same time at night. This time, however, the gun registers 145, and the officer pays more attention. Later, after his shift is over, he has the gun checked out for problems, and is told it is operating perfectly. A week later, same road, same time, the gun goes off. By now the police officer is confused, and angry.
The next week he has men stationed at a road block a few miles down from the spot where he has been positioned. Like clockwork, the radar gun goes off, and he alerts his friends to get ready for whatever is racing down the highway.
At the road block is stopped a black Lamborghini, with an engine iced and baffled for silent running. The driver is a drug mule, hauling a load and staying on the backroads, and less frequently monitored highways. The car itself is running without headlights, while the driver wears night vision goggles.
Status: False"
I'm willing to bet it will actually increase piracy by killing off a major source of bad quality product.
It's almost as if they want to make the problem worse.
Personally if I were the MPAA I would let these morons record all so they can flood the market with bad quality DVDs and making it such a bad case of hit or miss that the only way you can be sure of getting a good copy is to buy one.
A smarter move would be to finish hunting down the people in their own industry who are leaking production quality material before the movie even makes it to the theaters.
You could buy a couple hundred IR LEDs off of eBay cheap and use them to spell out the message "Your sister is going down on me right now!" on the front of a jacket. At the very least, the NVG goons should get a good chuckle out of it - right before they stomp you into the ground with their jackboots.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
A new paperback costs $6-$7. A used one can often be had for $1-$2.
Who moderates this sort of obvious nonsense as "Insightful"??
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I used to project films for a local cinama (here in the UK) from the age of 15. Films I wasn't even legally entitled to watch.
Large multiplex cinemas may have well-paid, adult projectionists with night-vision monocles and decent security - but there are thousands of smaller single-screen cinemas where any old kid (like me) runs the projector for pocket money. All it takes is for one of them to bring in a camcorder.
Although this cloak and dagger stuff is interesting and will be reported widely, the real problem still remains. People are going to pirate movies. No matter what technologies are used to avoid this, people are going to come up with new ways of defeating it.
The reason people pirate movies is probably similar to the reason people pirate compact disks. They want the product in a more convient format, or they want the product at a lower price.
Long term, here are some suggestions to movie studios to avoid piracy. Most of these require the studios to look past the short term bottom line, and try to serve their customers.
1. Release the movie simultaniously world wide. By releasing movies on different days in different parts of the world, movie studios create demand for piracy. It is understandable that a languague translation might take extra time, but there should be no other delays in movie releases.
2. Get rid of region coded DVD's. These are simply pissing off legitimate users of your product. If you want to reduce piracy, make your product available as conviently as posslble.
3. Release the DVD the day the movie is released in the theater. Doesn't have to have all the special features. That way people who can't get to the theater get the product they want.
4. Stream movies over the internet. If the consumer wants to watch movies on the internet, give them a way of doing it legally.
5. Lower prices for movies. If studios want to capture the low end of the market, they need to lower movie prices. Video games can have play times of upwards of 120 hours, yet cost $40. If an average video game lasts only 60 hours, that is still only 66 cents per hour of entertainment. Movies last two hours, yet cost $8. That is four dollars per hour of entertainment. They can make up any lost revenue through merchandising, product placement, enhanced DVD's, etc.
The big problem with almost all of these suggestions is that the cut into revenue sources, such as pay-per-view, TV premieres, etc.
In the long run, customers will demand more convience, just as they are doing with recorded music. The studios will have no choice.