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Blu-Ray To Punish Users for Modifying Hardware
datemenatalie writes "As reported on Engadget, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely. As the article asks, "Are they talking about PVP-OPM techniques and rejected HDMI keys, or something else far more sinister? Because apparently "A hacked player is any player that is doing something it's not supposed to do," which open to a pretty fair amount of interpretation--most of which egregious.""
Umm, you do realise that many Digital TV services and ALL IPTV services do this already, right?
- Paul
where this type of extremely anti-consumer idea was ORigINally HATCHed0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,59298,0
(yes, i know. missing an R)
There's tons of fun and functionality in blizzard's games that don't involve logging onto bnet. I should know, I've played every Blizzard game (except for WoW) here in India and never once logged onto bnet - for the simple reason that the ping times are literally from the other side of the planet. Blizzard's games are excellent and once I could afford them, i started buying them, ridiculously expensive though they are, relative to my (above average) salary for the simple reason that Blizzard makes, IMO, the best computer games.
... stupid.
Forcing me to connect to the 'net to play my Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player is just
I'll never buy a Blu-Ray disc or a Blu-Ray player.
K
Now, what MIGHT happen is that the new players will allow DVDs to run code that checks for modified players and refuse to allow themselves to be played if it finds such a modification. That is more what we need to be concerned about.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Sure. Nielson is tracking Tivo usage http://www.koeppeldirect.com/infomercial-media-res ources-pvr-article.htm
OpenTV, the middleware used by DirecTV has audience measurement code http://www.opentv.com/products/middleware_products .html
For IPTV services, the "tuning" is done at the DSLAM end, not in the consumers home, so if they log it, they have every zap you ever make at any time. The best case is a reference in the ToS where they promise (like Tivo) to only use this information anonymously.
So far, there are no consequenses made public for this, but the technology is in place already for the most part.
- Paul
To buy a house in a neighborhood with a Homeowner's Association, you have to sign a covenant first. The covenant is available before you purchase and you can read it and decide before you buy the property. But in this case, Do they defind hacking? Do you as a consumer have to sign a covenant with the manufacturer?
Okay. A slashdot article on the blu-ray spec posted at least a month ago (2 or three dvd-related threads ago) had a link to the spec, a pdf. A 15 minute skim of the paper scared me and I posted about it, then reiterated it in the last 2 related threads. Does anybody read the technical material? It's like /. is just a bunch of 12-year old wankers who don't even like programming or studying that much.
The encryption system uses a broad tree of keys and subkeys so that the player can disable an entire subset of media by denying decryption functionality for parts of the tree.
The player can be Internet connected but does not have to be. However the spec IIRC does allow executable code or related commands in part of the DVD, which seems to be protected with a different key.
The player is proposed to have a wireless LAN adapter which may be sold separately, presumably this would simultaneously serve media to clients in your home while providing a keyring and monitor to police usage across the LAN.
The spec as proposed appears to guarantee that there will be events from time to time triggered by media or net connection (or even from media or programs on another pc on the LAN) causing portions of the key tree to be disabled, enabled, or updated. The ultimate thermonuclear threat on this platform is to disable the entire tree which may either render the device unusable completely, or may just let you use DVDs that are unprotected (if any exist in that format).
It sounds like each player will have a unique ID as well. While disablings of keys may not discriminate between IDs in the beginning, it is entirely possible that hacking your player could even end up in your being blacklisted in some way, or "infecting" your entire network with commands destroying functionality.
Personally I despise this introduction of military-grade security into my home by big entertainment companies and will boycott and fight against this any way I can. I already do not buy CDs or DVDs outright and do not feel I suffer unduly. This initiative is sure to make your home a battleground for all kinds of cyberwarfare that make you nostalgic in 10 years for the cute and relatively limited and harmless spyware and spam threats of today.
I have a 20" apple cinema (the newer model) that plays xvid quite nicely at 1680X1050 without artifacts (if it's properly encoded). Maybe you're just watching releases from crappy groups.
I'm sorry, it is *impossible* to encode an MPEG4 (using any presently available encoder) with that resolution and fit 120+ minutes of video in 700MB (i.e. ~750kbit/s) without introducing artifacts. Anyone who says otherwise is welcome to prove it by linking to such a video. For purposes of comparison, source material (uncompressed or compressed to a reasonable bitrate, e.g. ~6000kbit/s for that resolution) would be useful. If your source material is lower res, scale down bitrate pro rate: i.e. for 720x576, you'd have to use 176kbit/s; 640x480 (a more standard resolution for the vids I've seen available as bittorrents) 130 kbit/s.
To suggest that it is possible to get artifact free encoding at these rates is ridiculous. I've seen it at ~1000kbit/s for 640x352 video. Scaled up, that would get you a little over 12 minutes of video per CD.