Automatic Scanning for Cameras in Theaters

An anonymous reader writes "A Florida firm claims to have found a solution for the movie industry to prevent bootlegging in theaters. Tom's Hardware carries a story about Trakstar, which demonstrated its 'PirateEye' technology in a Hollywood movie theater to journalists and movie industry representatives: The technology uses light impulses to detect video recording devices. A second component is an audio watermarking system."

Comments

Actually, this is meant for inside jobs too

[daveschroeder]

The equipment is designed to be installed by theater management, and ALWAYS be running. If it's tampered with, a call center is notified. And if any "detections" are made, the same call center is notified, and then a live person makes the decision to notify the local theater's security and management. If it's not tampered with AND a camera detection isn't made, then the audio portion has a watermark that contains the exact theater and time the recording was made. See my post here.

Re:Bootlegging

[Tethys_was_taken]

There is a very large market for these so called "camera print" movies in Eastern countries like China, Korea and Malaysia. India is just beginning to get onto this. This mostly happens because English movies used to release in these countries a couple of months after the "international" release, and also because the average cost of a VCD/DVD is unbelievably high (singe movie = almost 20% of the average monthly income).

Someone takes a video, uploads it, and soon it's being copied all over the world in tiny shops with 2-3 burners. I suppose this is one of the main problems they are trying to solve.

Re:How the hell would this work.

[ControlFreal]

Somehow the camera is supposed to respond to this. My knee jerk reaction was that all you needed to do was put tape over the remote control sensor and you would be good to go.

Apparently, the system strobes the theater with a low-intensity light (visible wavelength, it says on their page (strange)), and records images of the public in the IR range.

It seems that camera-lenses reflect that light, and that these reflections can be recorded.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that you would still like to record your movie in the cinema, even though getting it through suprnova is much easier. Then the only thing you need to make sure is that your camera doesn't reflect light in the IR spectrum. A good lens-coating (having a broad stopband in IR) could do that. Using a very small lens (pin-hole camera) could do it.

Beware: They list that the system can't be fooled by, say, pin-hole cameras for two reasons: Marketing, and FUD. I don't believe, not for a moment, that one can detect a pin-hole camera like this.