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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."
Let's turn this technology around for our use in civil liberties; thus, making the product a threat. I would like to have this in a backpack. Imagine if it could detect a camera from several hundred yards and direct a laser (preferably mounted on a shark) to that camera thwarting intrusive surveillance. Yeah lets see how long until the Men in Black would allow this.
But really, the issue at hand is cameras in theaters. Is the bootleg market that big? I have seen some movies that were recorded with a camcorder and they were funnier to watch the action of recording than the movie. The market has to adjust to the viewing habits; it appears people may want to watch new movies using alternative methods (aka internet). Don't most movies nowadays make more money from DVD sales then the actual movie? I wonder if the movies were released simultaneously to theaters, DVD, video on demand, video of Internet, etc if this would be an issue?
Now lets bring the two views together from paragraph 1 and 2. Just as the public sector adapt to use changing technology, the movie industry needs to adapt to the situation.
Looks like it's also being promoted as a tool to prevent employees from doing the pirating themselves: the "PirateEye" camcorder detector and the "TrakStar TVS" audio watermarking system, ostensibly installed by theater management, are apparently connected, and if one is disconnected from the other, loses power, or is otherwise tampered with, TrakStar's call center (a paid service, I'm sure) is notified, which can then make an independent decision to call security: Is the movie supposed to be exhibited now? Is the anti-piracy equipment still intact and functioning? This is in addition to the tracking information that audio watermarking can provide (i.e., to certain theaters and certain times, narrowly identifying "offenders").
You can bet a company like this is angling to position itself to be EVERYWHERE, much like Macrovision - and then, one wonders if "offending" theaters will be punished by, say, having new releases withheld?
http://trakstar.net/solutions.htm
Once the DVD's hit the shelves in any country, the stuff will be on the net anyway.
Sharing it could become easier and safer also: I2P --- an anonymous onion-routing network --- now has a functional BitTorrent client that functions completely within I2P (tracker, peer-to-peer traffic, everything).
For those on I2P, get it here: http://duck.i2p/i2p-bt/files/i2p-bt-0.1.0.tgz (this URL only works when you're running I2P).
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That's exactly what I was going to say. It's not much different from recording a song off the radio onto your cassette tape. I've actually downloaded music that was obviously recorded in this way. It's simply terrible.
They have done a lot of work to prevent abuse by screeners. As for movie theatre employees, there are a lot of the same issue with quality.
Sounds like someone solving a non-problem, as usual.
The supposed problem is the supposed cash loss due to piracy, so naturally Hollywood will want theaters to pay for these devides (despite the fact that they could simply be turned off via a small bribe to the theater operator for a particular showing). And with the increased cost will come increased ticket prices. I wonder if movie execs do studies on just how much a movie go'er will pay for a movie. I haven't been in a theater in a few years, so I don't even know how much tickets are these days. Not to mention the price of a simple beverage...
I am just counting down to the point when someone releases a filter to block all light on this wavelength. You might even be able to make one with stuff you can currently buy at the DIY shop. This would not effect the filming because the light it would filter is not visible. To this 'detector' the camera's lens with the filter would show as a black blob (non-detectable).
This technology will be really easy to block.
Seems to me that the solution is to take a bunch of these bad camcorder recordings and merge them. You should easily be able to compensate for the skew from different seating locations and jitter by comparing 3 or more recordings and establishing a sense of where the screen is in each and what how the screens map to each other.
That blurs the watermarking, can allow you to improve the image quality, remove problems like people standing up and getting in the way, etc.
Audio watermarking is also defeatable. Someone slide an engineer at this company a few k for the specs and you can just use Felton's approach.
This post is not meant to encourage anyone, I'm just trying to point out to the industry (in case they're listening) that an arms race is not a particularly wise course of action. To quote The Hunt For Red October, "this will get out of control."
Why don't the theater owners strategically place high output infrared (LEDs) light sources behind the screens. Since most of the screens are full of holes, it should allow enough infrared light through to severly mess up the image recorded by the camcorders.
For those that don't understand, CCD cameras are highly sensitive to infrared light and will produce a white hotspot. Try it some time with your camcorder.. press a button on a remote while holding it infront of the camera and watch the results in the viewfinder. The higher output the IR, the bigger and more pronounced the hotspot would be.
The impression I got was that it sends a pulse of light into the theatre, somehow picking up on the lense of the camera. I'm sure I'm missing something though, because under this model my glasses would set it off probably. Not enough information, but if they published the specs it'd most likely be easy to find holes in their system.
stuff
You must be from Oklahoma City or something. While I was stationed there, their main theater in town had the center channel cut out the first time I went there, the AC went out the second time, and the fire alarm went off the third time, cutting out a good four minutes of the movie.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
First, I find it humerous that a number of the first people to post comments all mentioned that they had watched pirated movies.
/.'s readership is known for, I find that interesting.
Second, I have not seen a single post that adequately states how this technology really works. Given the level of technical ability
My guess? CCD cameras almost always use an infrared filter. They have to or the color gets screwed up. This technology bathes the theater in infrared light and the camera simply picks up the reflection off of the filter. Take off the filter and you mess up the image. Keep it on, and your camera glows.
Here's a simple, possibly flawed idea. Install some high powered IR emitters around the screen. Most CCD cameras I've played with picked up invisible to the naked eye IR (like from a TV remote) as very bright white light. A halo of IR emitters, (possibly strobes?) shouldn't be noticeable by you and me sitting in the theater, but for an unfiltered camera would really wreck any quality of picture possible.
Seriously, they would never recoup costs of $thousands for every screen in the world. Not unless they believe their own inflated damage estimates (I predict they don't). And it's an incredibly risky investment. I give it 2 weeks before somebody figures out you can defeat it by covering the camcorder's infrared autofocus light with a piece of masking tape, or installing a lens hood, or before they simply have to trash the whole system because it triggers the emergency response system every time somebody wearing coke-bottle glasses walks in.
Not that I care, I've never even seen a "screener."
Since the system appears to detect only a camera lens, and not an active recording, why not attach a few lenses to your jacket (k001 l334 badgez, right), etc. After the "human verification" agent checks out a few hundred false alarms, the system fails.
ALso, I hope they aren't trying to trademark all the quoted phrases on ther web page.....
Watermarking is promising, but only if you can pull it off 100%. That is you need to develop watermarking technology that can be added to thousands of prints made, that is difficult to detect and remove, which does not negatively affect image quality, which will survive a poor quality cam recording and MPG/AVI encoding, to force all your distributors worldwide to implement camera tracking systems (and if you can't persuade the distributors in Egypt to do it, you either end up with Egiptian video + USA audio versions, or lose the money because you can't release films in this countries), all with the questionable goal of getting 50$ (two tickets + popcorn and stuff) from people, who care about your movie so little that they are content with a crap recording. Not to mention the risk that it won't work because of some ingenious trick like pressing Shift. :)
:)
This is totally retarded and the only problem is waste of money. The legitimate moviegoers will indirectly pay for this shit. Really stupid.
Personally I don't usually care about cam versions, but telesyncs (done with a tripod in an empty theatre) are good enough for films I don't particularly care about. A screener is ok for the rest, and if there is no screener, I can wait a few months for the retail DVD-rip. Of course, if the movie is good, I can just go to the theatre to see it.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
And it helps a lot that any camera lens they're worried about is always going to be pointed directly at the screen. That constrains the geometry and makes it simple to locate the source of the reflection.
I don't believe, not for a moment, that one can detect a pin-hole camera like this.
Agreed... But who has a pinhole video camera?
If I find out a movie theatre I'm patronizing uses this Pirate Eye technology, I'll take a few snaps with my camera phone in every movie I attend, just to keep those call center people on their toes.
You can buy a handheld SpyFinder. Here's a customer review with a discussion of how it works. It uses two lasers, one on the optical axis and one slightly off it, run alternately at a few Hz. Things that have focusing optics followed by a flat reflective surface (which includes most cameras) will blink. Ordinary shiny things will not.
Around the same time that a movie hits the theaters, a good # of internal use only DVD's are often manufactured. Some are used for review copies, other are used for connected employees.
The family of a friend of mine has a few good connections within the Hollywood industry and has access to DVD's of feature films with relative ease. Sadly, my friend has never permitted me to borrow one of these discs.
Sadly, it does make sense though. Why charge an employee of X to buy/see/etc one of X's products? It would be a nightmare to have the local theaters permit some in for free, so a limited distribution of DVD's make more sense.
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