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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
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.
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.
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.
I started at that for a full twenty seconds thinking, "What the hell kind of crypto is involved with cascading stylesheets?"
--- Ban humanity.
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.
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.
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...
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.