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New DRM Scheme To Make Current DVD Players Obsolete
Oneflower writes "ExtremeTech reports that a proposed new DRM scheme could make current DVD players obsolete. The scheme, from Hewlett-Packard and Philips, targets DVD+R and DVD+RW and is an attempt to enforce the FCC broadcast flag on DVD recorders."
that my DVD players/writers come obsolete anytime soon. I use them for writing data, not playing/recording movies. Besides, users don't like forced obsolence of hardware anyway.
It's not like I can't just stop watching DVDs.
There's a threshold to just how much crap people will put up with it. Mine and some fellow geeks may have lower thresholds, but eventually the public threshold will be met as well and the companies that keep pulling these silly stunts will get a thrashing in the form of competition that treats customers like customers, not like crooks.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
It can be recorded/copied.
When are they going to learn?
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Why exactly would I buy DVDs that I can't play on my existing DVD player? Oh yeah, in a few years they simply won't make DVDs that do play on my existing player.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
FU CARLY
No kidding...
Wow, thanks HP and Phillips. Really looking out for your customers, aren't you?
Not that I was planning on buying anything DVD related from those two companies in the future, but I will be avoiding them like the plague now. And advising my family and friends to do the same.
...I'll go along with their shiny new DRM standard, if they'll replace my DVD player for free. By which I mean, pick it up from my door, and give me an equivalent player with the DRM, for absolutely no cost to myself.
However, I bought a DVD player, and if it stops playing DVDs for no good reason, I'm not going to be enthusiastic about buying another...
Each time they made money for the sellers of the scheme, but harmed the purchasers. And I don't mean the end-users, I mean the companies that shipped software that depended on unreliable and sometimes deliberately broken hardware.
Customers couldn't use the products, and returned them for a refund. Which made the dealers relctant to stock them, and eventually the products were supplanted by their more functional competitors.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Horseshit.
The media companies are trying to find ways to curtail not just piracy but legitimate fair use. They fought VCR's when they first came out and the movie studios fought television when it first came out.
They are short sighted and almost always fight what ends up making them a lot of money when they lose. The danger is they may not lose this time.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
My Panasonic -R recorder has already refused to record several movies because it detected a copyright flag.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
...you insensitive clod.
I'm still waiting for two features they never brought over from VHS:
1. A format that will ALWAYS fast forward when I hit the fast forward button. (same with rewind)
2. A format that will withstand the destructive force of a toddler. (Though I do applaud the DVD's resistance to heat from a car.)
If this new-fangled DRM standard player would provide me with those things (and have a low cost), I'd look into buying one. I'm not holding my breath.
Which is a rarity in and of itself -- usually companies do not like to discuss the potential of people overcoming their restrictions.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
[0] - a bit of irony on Philips part there I think; I just picked up a Philips DVP642 DVD player which can also play divx and xvid on cdr/dvdr/etc. Surely they know the great bulk of those are downloaded.
I think rather than irony this is a fun example of how geeks can pull one over on increasingly clueless higher ups - to upper management at Phillips Divx is nothing more than another item on a checkbox list of features!! I'll bet some guy got Divx added in just that way. It's what I would do, were I working at Phillps and also perhaps a follower of Bob.
Finally the stupid "feature list" serves a purpose for good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What if consumers do not know?
After all we all now use macrovision and many of us bought new TV's because we could not figure out why we could not watch some certain movies. I know my parents did and it was years later until I found about Macrovision.
This new standard will be standard. It has to be by law. June 2005 is the deadline for the old standard to become obsolute under the DMCA.
Its also a crime punishable to 10 years in prison to copy movies you own or practice fair use.
The US government is always on the side of big business. Get use to it.
http://saveie6.com/
Oh if only that were true.
Music CD-Rs work just fine in regular $20 CD-R drives, and tons of consumers are stupid enough to think you *need* the music ones if you want to burn music.
I'm thinking that if they offered this for cheaper than what we pay now, they would get some sales. For example, I don't like paying around $1 per blank dvd but that's about what I pay. I can get a stack of 50 for $40 and with tax it comes to maybe $.83 or so... but that's three times more than I feel they are worth. I would be quite happy paying $.25 each and would buy a lot more than I do. But even at $.75 I would consider switching and I think a lot of other people would.
But then again, I would buy their new media only after I had a new player that was either able to play anything by default, or had been updated to play anything... but then again, I already have 5 dvd players... would be pretty stupid if the new media couldn't play on the old stuff. If however, the new media simply wouldn't accept data that had the flag, that would be ok because you could just get a program that ignores that for your burning needs.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Have you opened your DVD player up at all? It's nothing more than a PC DVD drive with a hardware decoder. My Phillips DVD-724 kicked the bucket (and it was expensive as far as DVD players go, and wasn't worth a shit), so I pulled the case off to see what I could fix, and there are three main components: A power supply, a DVD-ROM drive from a PC (without the metal case around it, but it's one nonetheless) and 3rd party Mpeg2 decoder/tv-out board with a PCI interface. There's a header for rewriting the firmware, and the whole thing can be replaced with a Via m1000 mobo with very little modification to the wiring harness and backplate. Firmware will be released to upgrade your player, but not from the manufacturer, or someone's going to make a player that pays no heed to their DRM.
DVI will be encrypted, or any other digital means.
But high quality analog is fine with me. I don't see what the problem is with good quality captures off of a component video input.
Do any good HD capture cards have component inputs? I haven't had a chance to play with any of them.
This should be legal, and not "grey area" quasi-legal either. The supreme court said years ago that I can make analog copies for the purpose of timeshifting (broadcast flag or no broadcast flag), did they not?
What TiVo does is legal and I shouldn't have to deal with any kind of crap to extract and burn it to DVD (and TivoToGo is going to be a load of crap). It captures an analog signal. The problem is 1:1 digital copies, right?
Fuck it. Nowadays watching TV requires a lawyer. All this shit will kill the "entertainment" industry as it stands.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
As an aside, "böse" is the german word for "badly".
Do you know who we have to thank for the fact the every DVD player sold in the UK is multi-region?
Tescos, Asda Walmart and Sainsburys.
The supermarkets have reputations to keep. If the average shopper cannot play every disk under the sun then he returns the DVD player with no questions asked. He also grumbles about the supermarket to all his friends in the traditional British way.
Tescos want everyone to be happy with their purchases. They want everyone to be happy with their cheap 30 pound player. Everyone is happy, including me.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
This is one of those myths that has been repeated so often that people believe it. Betamax was at most very slightly ahead of VHS on picture quality, but even that is arguable (though certainly there were brief windows where one or the other would debut a new technology that gave it an edge). See, for instance, http://tafkac.org/products/beta_vs_vhs.html (which has many source references, including independent comparisons published at the time); here's an excerpt:
Technologically, the two formats were each other's equal. True, except for the recording length, Sony pioneered most of the improvements over the years, but the VHS manufacturers caught up to each improvement, usually in less than a year. So, for instance, within a month of Sony's announcement of Beta Hi-Fi, JVC and Panasonsic announced VHS Hi-Fi formats. Interestingly, the two VHS formats were incompatible with each other. [7]
Comparisons between VCRs with similar features showed no significant differences in performance. In fact, most of the differences could only be seen with sensitive instruments, and likely would never show up on most consumer grade television sets. [5] In particular, the qualitative differences between the two formats were less than the differences between any two samples from the same manufacturer.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Frankly, were I a lawyer, as soon as these things started being sold to the channel, I'd try to put together a class-action lawsuit claiming harm to the class of people who previously purchased recording devices that were being legally used that now had to go out and purchase new units.
Also, the fact that these new units would cost more due to the implimentation of this copy-protection scheme creates additional actionable harm.
I would add, for the benefit of karlandtanya that the term fair use also refers to the permission to exhibit or broadcast copyrighted material due to a news event, like the death of a person connected with the material, a photograph of a person and so on. Fair use in the United States exists for a period of 48 hours and then it expires. In that event, one might be able to use one's home-digitized material on a blog as long as the link was removed in 48 hours, though this has certianly not been tested.
What he is referring to is home copying, which is legal as a result of the Sony Betamax Case that specifically allows home recording and copying and storing of material for personal use.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
It sure as hell isn't law here in the UK, and I'm betting our export market in DRM-free DVD players/recorders will get an enormous boost around July 2005 if that's the case where you are.
If such a law actually exists (and I'm not convinced it does), then it would only apply to the US. However, players imported into the US would have to adhere to the US regulations. Namely, if the law says the players must obey a "broadcast" flag, then the players coming in from overseas would have to be modified for sale in the US market. This is not unique - several products are already produced in special runs for certain markets.
And since the US doesn't actually manufacture any DVD players locally, I don't expect any international markets to suddenly find themselves with a gap created by the (non-existent) US manufacturers suddenly only selling crippled DVD players.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Actually, several newer discs I have have disabled fast-forward/seeking on either the main feature or significant extras, as some sort of "artistic intent" mandate from directors/producers. :-(
The TV show DVD *Greg the Bunny* for example has a great, in-depth feature about the genesis of the show as shorts on IFC through its network incarnation, reworking, and demise. No fast-forward, even though you can fast-forward the episodes themselves.
I just got my *Degrassi: The Next Generation* box set and thought I'd briefly skip to the parts that were censored in the U.S. airings before viewing it all--but no, not allowed.
I even bought a *porn DVD* that has this "feature"--a classic 70's adult film featuring the most beautiful gal in porn history, Annette Haven. Imagine my surprise when a notice on the Scene Access menu says, "The producers intend for this classic feature to be viewed in its entirety. However, for those who've already seen the film, a scene index has been provided." You can choose one of five places to skip to, but once there *no fast-forwarding*. Aargh.
Thank god for DVD Decrypter's option to strip PUOPs (Prohibited User OPerations) from IFOs and VOBs...
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
I still haven't bought a dvd recorder because of the standards that are basically a mess and waiting to see if it gets ironed out - but now it looks like it is going to get worse. I only want to put my home movies onto cd - I use the svcd standard - more cds but I don't care I just want the movies to last and be around for a while and share them with friends/family. I just hope the new players will still play this standard still- if not I will be very very pissed off. I don't record any movies or tv shows - heck I don't even watch tv except for sports (use to watch techtv - screensavers but now G4 has just destroyed that station and is nothing but crap now) - the movie/tv networks don't really put anything out these days that is worth pirating in my opinion. why don't they concentrate on that instead of being worried about stealing 24 hours of the day. Also is it me or to be an actor these days you just have to have a voice - nobody does acting anymore because they all make these computer animated movies.