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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."
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
A guy using a camcorder while watching his TV
Someone plugging in the composite video to a capture card
Brute Force Attack
To stop me from buying your DVDs
Alginate the Movie Industry
It seemed like blu-ray was doing so well, and that maybe the winner would be clear cut and consumers wouldnt have to put up with this 2-format crap. Damn you competition, damn you!
That instead of competition leading to advancements and improvements for the consumer, it's more often competition AGAINST fair USE for the consumer.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Seriously. HDTV is on its way to taking over whether the market likes it or not; I can live with it, I acknowledge its advantages, I just wish that capitalism had been allowed to govern its adoption instead of Congress.
At least the need for a HD-DVD format is consumer-driven. I forget whether this particular format is compatible with existing DVD players or not, though.
But what's next? Is there even industry talk about a post-HDTV video format? 3D video, maybe? Lossless video compression? What will the industry R&D teams do once they've got HD-DVD out the door and China's manufacturing players for US$30 again?
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.
The evil mind is capable of almost anything.
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. Current DVDs use MPEG2 and the there doesn't seem to be much of a problem with non-profit use of it. I don't know that Microsoft is going to be so benevolent. Have they made any statements about open-source usage? They do seem to be a bit down on that lately.
Also, anyone know how the decision is made to encode a DVD using MPEG2, MPEG4 or WM9?
The mandate makes absolutely no requirement that broadcasts be HD (High Def) - only that they stop using analog transmission and go to digital. The FCC's motiviation is to get a lot of spectum back, and MPAA/broadcasters motiviation is they get the 'do not copy' concept.
While I wouldnt mind if the spectrum was freed so that there could be some unlicensed bands to enable 802.11 style equipment for consumer use, I'm sure licenses for the newly freed TV bands will be auctioned off to megacorps instead. I'm just hoping that they dont just sit on them to prevent competition for high speed services.
Why do so many people confuse High Def and Digital - they are *NOT* the same thing, nor do they always go hand in hand.
You *CAN* broadcast HighDef in analog, and you *CAN* broadcast digital, and still be using standard definition (and if stations are forced go digital, it isnt all that likely that they will switch to HighDef)
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From TFA:
Revocation can help contain some attacks by preventing future titles from playing on a pre-chosen set of players. For example, if studios learn that pirates have hacked a player with a specific serial number, revocation makes it possible to author future titles so they will never play on that player.
So just because you own a DVD player that was hacked, you won't be able to play future DVDs? That's a load of crap.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I rarely take the time to criticize a Slashdot editor, but this posting is terribly confusing.
Which is it?
Is the format using "CSS with stronger encryption" in other words...once some company makes a mistake and puts the key in the clear (like Xing did with the original CSS key) then it's game over, have a field day with HD content...
Or is it some kind of improved system that uses any of the principles in the cryptography.com article? The stuff in that article would scare the pants off anyone who believes in fair use rights and using any tactics necessary to secure them. Thankfully, it sounds like this articles is merely pointing out the dream and there doesn't exist such a magic bullet.
But judging by the replies to this articles, it already looks like people are bemoaning and wailing the lost of fair use rights thanks to this unbelievably draconiam new system.
My reading leads me to believe that we should all be very very quiet, wait for HD to reach a nice sizeable market penetration, then wait for the key to appear and bring about DeCSS round II.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I'll buy these only after DE-AACS
(I don't have a non-computer DVD player).
By deciding to split the market asunder, the companies that cannot agree on one standard are instead creating a huge group of people that will just say "screw it", not buy either player, and download rips of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray DVD's that they can play on a computer hooked to the TV (becoming more common and certainly more comon in a year or two).
Who is going to buy either kind of player when there's such an open question as to which will succeed?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
The AACS Licensing Authority has proposed the use of subset-difference trees with AES encryption,
That sounds nice because AES is strong by most standards (there is a theoretical attack that is faster than brute force, but only very marginally better - in reality it is jst as impractical). The catch is that you still have to decrypt the content at the client end for viewing. Unless you include unique serial numbers in the packaging that the user has to input each time (yeah right), or require the DVD player to be internet connected and download keys, the key has to be on the DVD. From there it's just a matter (okay, not simple, but still) of reverse engineering the unlocking procedure to find where/how it gets/decrypts the necessary key, and we're back where we started.
Personally I loathe DVD encryption just for the region encoding alone. I used to travel a lot (and may well do a lot more travelling in future), so my DVD collection is a hopeless mess of different regions. Worse, when living in the Asia-Pacific region there were any number of interesting DVDs that simply weren't released there (usually more obscure art-house films). The only solution was to order them from overseas...
region encoding is silly. It's supposed to protect film distributors who distribute their films at ifferent times to different markets - but with the ever growing popularity of simultaneous worldwide releases (or releases separated by weeks at most) that isn't a very relevant argument. Instead it is being used to provide regional DVD distributors with a monopoly so they can price gouge.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
That article from cryptography.com, should it's seggestions come to pass, would prevent me from making copies of my discs so that my 2 year old wouldn't trash the originals. It would even prevent me from ripping all discs to a server, and making a special remote interface for her.
;-) (On a side note, I was impressed/suprised to find out that it will function just fine with two discs in the player at once.)
What's most interesting is that "real" pirates (pressing discs for mass distribution) would likely be able to circumvent all these measures with a bit-accurate re-press. *shrug* At least we know who the industry is really worried about when they talk about pirates...you and me.
BTW, yes, my 2 year old knows how to load a DVD player, and I print the discs so she knows which is which. I reauthor them so that the movie starts immediately without user interaction. I haven't figured out how to make her understand that the top-loading CD player in her room won't play three discs stacked like records, though.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My favorite quote from the last link in the summary (on format security) would have to be the following:
"In the U.S., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorized circumvention. Outside the U.S., however, many jurisdictions only have conventional copyright laws that only protect creative works. Normal decryption keys do not include any obvious creative element."
Now, jumping to the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries") it is not clear that copyright must *only* be granted to works with "obvious creative element." But I liked the fact that the above comment on future security requirements acknowledged what seems to be much of Slashdot (and the tech community's) beef with copyrighting algorithms and computer software, but from the assumption that it's a GOOD thing, rather than a BAD thing.
Just an example of how you can agree on the issue while still having mutually exclusive views on the sollution.
-Trillian
o/~ Join us now and share the software
There was a big leap between VHS and DVD that really added to the migration and the adoption of DVD by the consumer.
My guess is that HD-DVD and Blu-ray will go the way of Minidisc. They don't add anything remotely interresting for the average consumer. The average consumer is still buying Full-Screen edition of the movies. They won't put any money on those new formats any time soon.
Unless they pull the plug on the DVD format. Which won't happen anytime soon.
By the time this format is the standard, your kid will be, like, twelve or something. :)
--- Ban humanity.
HD DVD has no significant features that are of value to me. Instead of focusing on new technologies, perhaps you should divert your precious R&D resources to providing better content.
With love,
The Consumer
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I started at that for a full twenty seconds thinking, "What the hell kind of crypto is involved with cascading stylesheets?"
--- Ban humanity.
In 10 years, you'll either be able to d/l it through the either, or make a "crippled" DVD that only works on PCs that can verify your subscription as you watch it.
Alternatively, you'll be able to burn a time-bombed or player-specific version, one that will work FOR 2 DAYS ONLY or one that will work ON YOUR LAPTOP ONLY.
Of course, someday, they'll just beam it straight into your head complete with commercials, a la Futurama.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
SPDC and Format Security
Formats with Self-Protecting Digital Content(TM) solve this problem by enabling discs to carry their own security software that runs in a tiny security interpreter (VM) in each player. This software can identify and correct security problems in the player, re-establishing secure playback without revoking legitimate users' players. This capability is called system renewability or true renewability.
Who thought this up? Emulation of a player's security VM in software would eliminate the renewability of the security anyway, just as a comprimised key would. You'd have to resort to revoking the ability of a certain hacked or emulated VM to decrypt the content anyway.
This whole thing is asinine. With the right equipment you can make bit-for-bit copies of CSS-protected DVD's, thus "pirating" them withouth having to break any security whatsoever. It would be reasonable to assume this may be possible with any HD disc format as well. With any HD player, unless you integrate the codec processor into the security processor, you can probably build some hardware to get at the decrypted datastream too (169time.com does this type of hack).
DirecTV and digital cable and all that use this same model, only this replaces the smartcard with essentially a more limited type of smartcard on each disc. The model works with directv because to hack it you must be able to decrypt the live stream for immediate viewing. With a DVD this is not the case - you only need to be able to decrypt it once then distribute the decrypted copy. Only one person need have a hacked piece of hardware to accomplish this. This is where the true "priacy" is taking place anyawy. All this new junk does is just make players more expensive and discs harder to watch.
it does not matter. the past few days here in the USA DVD player sales were through the roof.
those people are not going to simply cast aside their players and huge DVD collections for the new shiny thing that will force them to buy all their movies yet again.
Unless they wait 5 years so that the consumer doesn't get all pissy when they spend $129.95 on their 7th linited hyper digitally remastered editions of the star wars hexilogy with yoda bouncing first and then have to re-buy it again for the new format.
I do not see any HD DVD content catching on very fast. DVD-audio and sony's offering of higher def audio formats are failing horribly to attract buyers, and with most homes not even considering buying HD televisions soon It looks pretty dismal.
Yes, I own a HD tv, and if they demoed the cable TV signals and off the air signals to me instead of their perfect 1080i DVHS example material I would not have been suckered into it.
I'm just glad I only spent $5500.00 on mine, I'm betting the guy that spent $13K+ on his HD plasma is insanely pissed at the quality of programming available in the real world right now.
the cable company compresses the hell out of the signal to the point that everything looks wierd with the background almost completely still most of the time and artifacts around the actors.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How many times are we going to be forced to buy Star Wars? Laser Disk, VHS twice (original and updated versions), DVD, and sometime in the future HD DVD. And by that time it will be a 6 movie set. Lucas sure does dig deep in the pockets.
As to AC3, can't you just pipe the raw stream out a digital port from your computer to your sound system? If you have a surround sound system, they've already paid for a patent license to decode the AC3, so your computer can let it do the work and avoid the patent issue.
I just love how they talk about encryption, and how they are going to prevent pirates, blah blah blah.
When are people going to realize that in things like this, encryption/obfuscation/etc... will only keep honest people honest. The pirates and people who have extra time will break ANYTHING they can put on a disc.
Why is this?
The answer is so simple, which is why it flabbergasts me that people put so much time and effort into copy protection.
The decrypted content is IN THE HANDS OF THE END USER. Right there, that simple fact is why every possible method of copy protection will fail. If the end user has the decrypted content, it is possible to (obviously) retrieve that content by the end user (I know that's circular). Because of this, you can NOT protect a DVD or whatever from being copied, no matter what.
It's appalling the kind of money and time that goes into trying to keep content from the user, when in the end, it's doomed to fail and it's obvious to anyone with half a brain.
I chose not to buy a DVD burner until +/- burners became widely available. I passed up the fire sales on +only or -only drives, it just wasn't worth the risk.
Why? I didn't want to be caught with a losing proposition.
I'll buy a high-capacity DVD player only if it can play all common formats.
Message to the Media Moguls who probably aren't listening:
Either agree on a common format or make darn sure you sell affordable multi-format drives. Otherwise you aren't going to get my money. Remember, once I buy the hardware, I'll keep coming back for software. Until then, you won't see it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If the studios are for it then that means it's Doubleplus good for us. Right?
You can be sure that this will be a user-hostile situation. M.I. type discs, "Mr. Phelps, this disc will self destruct in 5 seconds." after watching something.
They do NOT want to allow us to keep anything.
They want recordings to operate like PPV, pay each time you watch it, even if you've recorded or BOUGHT it.
No matter how loud people bitch and squeal, they'll force this on people, one way or another.
I've got a number of old TV's. Several of them are in great condition, nothing wrong with them at all, but they won't receive HD programming. So if I want HD programming (which I don't) I would have to either buy all new TV's or some sort of set-top tuners. But, no worries, they'll make me do it anyway, I've got one more year of use out of my old legacy TV's and rabbit ears.
All the local stations have begun dual-casting in HD and analog and are hawking the new technology in PSA's, urging everyone to hurry and buy a new TV set before they turn off the old.
I like the analog way. When there is a signal problem with digital, the picture breaks up and almost completely fails and the sound is either mangled beyond understanding or is muted completely. In the old analog world (that I still live in) the signal can be weak but the picture and sound is still viewable and understandable. I can turn my old TV on, turn the rabbit ears around and get the local news. It looks like crap but it's more than good enough to get the weather report. If it were digital and the signal was that bad it would have already muted the sound and put up a message on the screen "Please stand by, acquiring signal"..
So, just like they are forcing digital TV upon us, they will force whatever media type gives THEM the upper hand, the most control. They will NEVER gives us any technology that gives US the upper hand..
Even with all the encryption in the world, some part of the signal chain has to be decrypted right? they can't eradicate piracy when all a pirate needs is an EE degree and a soldering iron...
You are stupid, but we will show you the light. We don't expect Joe Shmuck to buy HDTV sets and HD-DVD players right away. We see the prices for the sets falling. A year or two after we release HD players, those prices will also come down. By that time there should be some stunning content available. Early adopters will show this off to their friends, who will get their own sets and players. We don't expect you to buy another copy of American Pie, which will work just fine on the new players. We do however, hope you purchase the HD-DVD version of Star Wars Episode III or the next James Bond.
With love,
Hollywood
All they care about is that StupidPeople and StuplePeopid won't copy all kinds of movies, music, pictures, software, and other media. That's all they care about. Bunch of greedy scumbags. You wait and see. The free software movement is changing software. More and more governments, corporations, businesses, and individuals are switching every day. Right now, this software is catching up to commercial software in many areas. It has already exceeded it in others. In the next few years, it will exceed commercial software in many areas. The desktop will switch to free software. This same movement, I believe, will eventually take control of the music, movies, and other media industries. This movement will continue to grow, until the messiah shows up and everything is free in the world, and all work will be done by robots, and all we'll do is hang out at the beach and have a good time. That'll be cool.
As per subject, What's wrong with DVD-Audio encryption? It works just fine, it's already there and nobody has broken it yet.
Whether to put up with these security provisions or not. Witness the (original) DIVX players.
Here's a relevant story. When DVDs first came out, I was an early adopter, and bought a player in the first year or so. I figured the format was going to take off, and I was tired of the kids video tapes wearing out from repeated play.
The first thing I did was bring the DVD player home, and pipe it through my VCR, which had multiple inputs I could switch between using the remote, rather than with a mechanical switch. Convenient. Finally, buying a higher-end VCR was going to pay off. This was all in the days before multiple video inputs were common on some types of stereo receivers, so this may seem trivial today.
The hardware was all set up, and I put in "The Wizard of Oz" (one of the initial crop of discs I bought, this one at the request of the spouse). WTF? Fading to black and back, messed-up sound, etc. This is not what the DVD is supposed to look like! Was it broken out of the box?
No. It was at that point I learned the joys of MacroVision video copy protection. Now I know that it is not technically difficult to circumvent, but it was damned annoying. I was not trying, and had no interest, in video taping from the DVD. I was just piping through the VCR as a source switch. Thanks to this nonsense, I had to re-do the wiring and buy a stupid and awkward mechanical switch for the TV input.
From that point on, I have been wary of any kind of copy protection or anything else that might interfere with the simple and valid desire to watch the video content I paid for, on the system I have, without stupid encumberances. I will *not* buy any flavour of HD-DVD player until I know that I will not be surprised some day by the thing incorrectly deciding I must be a pirate, and my license to play has been revoked. I've already been fooled once with regular DVD.
Actually, VCD uses only Layer II audio, not MP3. There aren't any controlling patents or licensing fees for MPEG-1.
Your general point is very apt, of course. Except for VCD, virtually all media technologies require various patent licensing, and in practice these haven't resulted in any company gaining undo control over the technology. It just means that makes of encoders, players, and/or content have to pay a fee to make the stuff. But the licensing contracts don't let a company revoke or re-negotiate the license after it has been launched.
My video compression blog
AACS is the Ann Arbor Computer Society
AACS web site
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
all they need to do is release a super-duper special edition hd-dvd 'lord of the rings'. instant market penetration.
Who are we kidding? By the time any copyrights on motion pictures made today are allowed to expire, civilization will have completely collapsed and/or the Sun will have burned out.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Blu-Ray is a better format than HD-DVD. They will both include security measures to prevent copying, but:
:(
- blu ray has a special coating that is meant to eliminate 90+% of handling scratches to the disk.
- blu ray holds more data (changes in materials and tolerances).
They both require the same 3 codec support in the player (MS WM9 (VC-1), MP4 (H.264) and MP2). They both need blue lasers. They both will use next generation Dolby Digital and DTS sound formats for 7.1 (or higher) surround sound. The only reason HD-DVD is even in contention is because the manufacturing methodology is nearly identical to normal DVD. Therefore, the same factories and materials can be used to produce HD-DVD and normal DVD content. With Blu-Ray all new equipment needs to be purchased and the per-disc materials costs is higher. So, the studios are faced with the following choices:
- Use a more consumer-friendly (scratch resistant, more data) format, or
- Use a format that gives us more profit.
Wonder which one will win?
Dan
Not a single question there addresses fair use. Or even the ability to use the HD DVD as i see fit.
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
...that you still have to decrypt the content ...
Actually, the professional pirates would not have to decrypt anything. All they would need is a hacked player/recorder that copies the digital data bits exactly, bit for bit onto another disk. There would be NO way to tell the copy from the original, because a bit is a bit is a bit. If such bitwise players/recorders become commonly available, NO encryption scheme would ever work again. A bit for bit image could be distributed on the Internet and burned onto a disk which the player would decrypt just like an original disk. Making an EXACT copy, encryption and all should not violate the DMCA, since no copy protection is actually circumvented. All that is happening is that a string of ones and zeroes are transmitted from point A to point B. Back in the 80s, there were floppy drives that did bitwise copying, making exact copies, which included the weird formatting and other tricks that the then current copy protection schemes used.
All theory is gray
Plenty of people watch Divx stuff now that is pretty highly compressed, lots of people would be satisfied just to get the extra resolution even with more compression artifacts.
There are already a large number of people downloading copies of HD TV shows, not much shorter than a full movie. You can thank BitTorrent for making that possible - and people seem willing to wait literally days for show to finish transferring.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For one thing, the extra storage space on these new formats makes lots more extras and commentary possible.
On the main point though - I once thought as you do that people would be happy enough with DVD's as there were and wouldn't see a noticable difference between DVD's and HDTV resolution signals. But after comparing HD broadcast movies and normal DVD's, I have to say the difference is not all that hard to see and is pretty impressive. And lots of people are buying TV's now that do offer the extra level of resolution that can take advantage of the extra resolution.
The format will take a while to catch on though if there's really much of a standards war.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The post I was replying to was talking about `professional pirates' --
and assuming that piracy here means copying DVDs and selling them, and not plundering ships at sea (I don't like the definition, but nobody consulted me before first using it), then this copying wouldn't fall under the fair use provisions. Or do you disagree?What I was saying is that you don't have to break encryption to violate the DMCA. There are other ways ...