HD-DVD Wins Support of 4 Studios

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like HD-DVD has won the latest round in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format war. Toshiba announced today that 4 major studios (Warner,Paramount,Universal, and New Line) have endorsed the HD-DVD format. Toshiba also said it will use AACS for content protection, which is basically just CSS with better crypto & no ability to recover from security failures."

Comments

Plus Minus

[fembots]

Since both HD-DVD and blu-ray are using the same blue lasers, will this 'war' eventually turn out to be HD/BR-DVD similar to the DVD+/-R standards.

More and more we see

[slycer9]

That instead of competition leading to advancements and improvements for the consumer, it's more often competition AGAINST fair USE for the consumer.

HD and BR both have entertainment value

[Fr05t]

or at least the monkey poo fight we will see in the next few years. Anyone know which one the porn industry is backing? I'll put my money on that format.

Screen-Scraping to the next level

[davidwr]

I predict in 10 years you'll see 3rd-world pirates using fully-digital screen-scrapers to bypass otherwise-unbreakable encryption.

Scrape. Store. Burn. Sell on the street corners.

The studios will never "win," they'll only be able to manage their losses.

In the USA, it will be less of a problem as most middle-class people move to a subscription model, where they can watch what they want when they want to for a fixed monthly fee. This will take away most people's economic incentive to buy bootleg copies.

Sure, you'll still have some domestic piracy, but if the studios price things correctly, it will be drawfed by legitimate users.

Pirates or users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, pirates will attack high-definition disc formats.

It should be noted that the DVD content scrambling system failed not under the attack of pirates but due to legal owners of encrypted media striving to play them on an open source operating system. I think there's a lesson to be learned from that.

Proprietary codecs in a standard are nothing new.

[Hobart]

Just a reminder: Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray now require the implementation of Windows Media 9 (now VC-9, or VC-1 depending on who you ask). This means that anyone using a computer to play DVDs may be subject to Microsoft licensing restrictions.

Just a reminder: DVD and ATSC (American digital television spec, mandated by law) require the implementation of Dolby Labs AC3. This means anyone using a computer to play DVDs, or using a computer to watch broadcast television may be subject to Dolby licensing restrictions.

Just a reminder: VideoCD (MPEG-1) requires the implementation of The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Layer 3 algorithm. This means anyone using a computer to play Video CDs or listen to .MP3 music files may be subject to Fraunhofer licensing restrictions.

At the moment, Fraunhofer, for example, realize the futility of prosecuting implementations of software-only MP3 decoders. This does not mean they do not have the right to file lawsuits against the users and producers of such, even, should they so desire, to the point of requiring per-use license payments.

The ogg / vorbis / theora solutions that the industry is paying no attention to are the only specs that are free of this insanity. But don't get all worked up just because Microsoft was the company whose codec was chosen instead of one of the other evil companies in mpegla.com's portfolio, unless you want to be thought of as this guy.