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No Region Codes for HD-DVD?
MBCook writes "According to Engadget something interesting has come out of the DVD Forum Conference 2005 in Japan. Here is the line from the post we've all been waiting for: 'But one statement from Toshiba Digital Media Networks' Hisashi Yamada was particularly intriguing: "We've gotten a variety of opinions about region controls. Even in the Steering Committee, they are extremely unpopular; we decided to not put them in. HD DVD probably won't contain any region playback controls."' Source: Japanese, English (via Google's Language Tools)."
Sure we have region codes now with standard DVD but it's easy to find a region-free player and discs.
Also, most of us can hack, and hacking DVD BIOS/software/players is pretty straightforward.
Thanks.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
If Blu-Ray doesn't match this, I think Toshiba just got a LOT more popular.
Does this mean we can import and play the HD-DVDs of movies that have yet to come out in the theatre here in Europe? (without special hardware)
I wonder what the movie industry thinks about this.
at least one copy can be made to an electronic format, and no region encoding? sweet!!!
I hope Apple jumps on this because then they could have all they need for a video iPod
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Japanese English?
-DB-
E-mail is like a prison: a prison with no walls... and no toilet. -Strong Bad
It's too bad HD-DVD is technically inferior to Blu-Ray. This just might make me side with HD-DVD eventually. I'm still holding out hope for one standard. Not a whole lot, but I can dream, right?
Brain kills internet cells.
DVDs code you!
Looks like the competition between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may benefit consumers in the end after all. Now let's see what Sony offers the consumer with Blu-Ray to convince us to go with them first.
...is that they're not supplying region code "functionality" because region codes definitely have increased piracy as a whole. When someone in a given country can't get a DVD because its not available in their market yet, they'll more likely just download the movie.
Region coding worked fine before information traveled so fast and so easily. You'll also see European release dates much closer to the U.S. release dates for the same reason -- if the movie isn't in theatres in your market, just download a bootleg and see it first.
Here again is another proof that information not only wants to be free, it wants to be available to everyone at the same time.
... after all it seems to me that most movies these days are released close to the same time all over the world now, instead of being spaced apart in different regions. There is just less need for the studios to try to implement this control any longer.
Didn't it used to be that a feature release movie in N. America took about 4-6 months before being released in Europe? The idea of region coding was that the movie could be in theatres in Europe, while already released to DVD in the U.S.
Of course, leaving the region coding off this new format could also be due to the fact that (as I understand it) the majority of DVD players outside of N. America just ignore the region code anyways.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
In my opinion the average end user won't want to wait 45+ minutes, (being conservative), to rip and encode an entire DVD. I'm assuming Apple would use one of their new HD codecs to encode anything from a DVD from an ipod, and as I remember those take forever to encode into even a web usable format.
If you're watching something on an ipod screen, or especially keeping a movie on your ipod and watching it on your desktop/laptop, quality is going to be a very big issue.
The only thing that's not going to matter as much is all the sound information, but that doesn't take up very much space on the DVD, anyway.
I don't think a video ipod is practical right now.
"Lead my skeptic sight."
I've always found it interesting how region coding was giving an advantage to Hollywood movies. Everything out of Hollywood, even the least interesting tripe, gets released in other region codes than north America, notably in the Europe/Japan zone (2). On the other hand, only a relatively few movies from Europe and Japan get an "American release" on Zone 1 DVDs. Hence the zoning works as a one-way filter and keeps American consumers from most foreign movies.
The theater release date argument toward zoning is not good because more and more of the most anticipated movies have worldwide release, and also because then why would zoning apply to old classics and other pre-dvd era movies that are still to be released ?
And the people rejoiced.
And the movie industry rejected HD-DVD.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
DRM is even more unpopular but it's being used even more.
Region codes may seem ridiculous and bothersome to the consumer, but it prevents us from ordering movies and games from less well off places where they're sold for maybe $2 instead of paying $10-$20 here. Unless the studios are willing to release material with a global price of 20 US dollars it's not going to happen. Or maybe they'll just change the name, it won't be called "region codes" by name but there will be something in place to restrict the playing of foreign movies and games. There's just too much money involved to scrap it.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Obviously, it could just be a case of HDDVD seeing how unpopular they are and making some changes to their strategy late in the day to get some support which they wouldn't have done if we hadn't originally shunned them.
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Click here or here.
That's very true ... so the only question is whether we can arrest you for it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
what, blue-laser disks aren't serialized that way?!
y'know, there's nothing that says that DVDs need to be region coded. It's in the current spec, but there's plenty of content released without region coding.
;)
The original reason for the region coding spec wsa ato allow controlled release of theatrical materials in multiple regions, according to the content prodcers' specification. There was also a secondary thought to piracy prevention.
I honestly don't think having region coding in the spec is a bad thing - I thin kthe legal and regulatory framework that's surrounding it is flawed. I also think that using or foregoing region coding is a good indicator of who's on the side of the angels
What I want in a DVD player (or any movie player):
I managed to get a DVD player that can do the first two (it also does PAL->NTSC conversion), but not the last (and I actually have an old TV with only coax input, so I must run the DVD (at the time, the DVD only had RCA analog out) through a VHS player which doesn't work due to Macrovision; I've been bitten and I wasn't even trying to copy... luckily I also have an old VHS player that doesn't have auto-tracking, woohoo).
I absolutely abhor shopping for these things because it's such an effort to do the research and find something that works how I want it to. It's tough being a discerning shopper. Is there a DVD player that can skip "non-skippable" things? Can I do this from Linux (in which case, is there a DVD drive that is region free? I assume Macrovision isn't an issue... even if I were to record analog with a VHS deck...).
So, yay to no region codes, but to the current DVD player shopping: AAAAAAAAAAAH!! #%$@!
I think broadband internet and region-free players have made both region coding and staggered releases less desirable. I'm really hoping that the movie industry sees the light, because while staggered releases used to make sense (I didn't say good for the customer, I said made sense):
1) The "big selling season" for movies has been spreading across the calendar - it may be that we're heading toward a year-round market. (Obviously there are movies all year, but the big summer and winter seasons are no longer as exclusive as they were.
2) Broadband internet allows people to get pirated movies even more easily than the dreaded bootleg DVD - and faster.
3) As if the dreaded bootleg DVD wasn't bad enough, since the DVD standard was established the market has generated region-free players (several years ago) which are now so widespread that frequently "late" movie market viewers can obtain "early" market legit DVDs before the movie hits the theaters.
Region coding is a zombie. Zombies can be hard to kill, however. (How many people are running pirated copies of software that they OWN because they can skip the registration/copy protection schemes?)
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
I know that our committee actually doesn't decide about that, but as I said above: let's make it look like we actually care.
I like raking in that million bucks in my account. I know you don't, but who cares?
We found a hack-proof way to put region-codes into the player without putting codes into the format. Just wait...
Any the moon probably isn't made of cheese.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Sorry, region coding and control disabling (which is what prevents you from skipping the adverts) are not the same thing at all. I think HDDVD will still have the latter. They like that feature.
I think this says a lot about the intelligence of the people creating todays DVDs.
Region codes was a bad idea to start off with. There are a lot of DVDs released that get region coding that will never ever be released for the remaining regions, thus cutting themselfs out of a huge market. All DVDs produced here in sweden inevitably get a region 2 coding, although they will never be released outside of europe. This means that I can never buy any of these DVDs for my friends in the US, even though they put english subtitles on them.
And honestly, in the cases where a DVD is released in the US first and then in europe, the majority of the EU market will wait for the EU release. First of all so that they can hold and feel the DVD in the store before buying it, second to get the proper subtitles and other EU specific content. Sales in stores is still vastly bigger then sales online, especially if you have to pay for delivery across an ocean and then deal with customs.
And it seems like the DVD producers have realized this since they are asking for regions to be removed for HDDVD. However, they are not smart enough to stop using region codes on normal DVDs! They still keep shooting themselfs in the foot just because they are given a gun.
MORONS!
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
Toshiba might well make HD-DVD region free, but don't expect Sony and Co to do the same with Blu-Ray. Sony will never implement a totally region free video format. I think even the UMD discs have region encoding.
I was rooting for Blu-Ray, on the simple basis of higher technical standards. But now HD-DVD is offering me a lot more choice, and most likely lower cost imports. I've just been converted to the HD-DVD camp and all it took was one press release.
See Sony. Consumers like it when you don't cripple their hardware with restrictions.
May the Maths Be with you!
And with Digital Watermarking, tracking you down might not be so hard.
(Watermarks will still be preserved if you re-record the music and re-encode it.)
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RIAA Sues All Attendees of DVD Forum Conference 2005
Most of "us" just pretend "we" are hackers on /. whereas "we" are really clueless. We just run programs real hackers have written.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I was in London last year for a couple of weeks and stumbled into a Virgin store or some mega-chain thing whatever it was. Anyway, lo-and-behold I stumbled on a gold mine of BBC classics on DVD, from Sci Fi to John Clease on Monty Python and Fawlty Towers and various other shows I was interested in. I was jazzed I picked up a basket and started shopping, I was ready to plunk down a huge chunk of change when I realized, oops..they won't play.
I was so dissapointed. What a bummer. What good did this do anyone? The store lost out, I lost out, the manufacturer lost out.
Yes, I can find many of those same DVDs locally here, but you have to understand being in London in a store that had nothing but these great classics , all together, all in front of me, all ready to buy. Ouch, still hurts to think about it.
In my humble oppinion, simple is better. Remove region codes; that's one less thing to worry about. Have a thicker surface; that means less scratches. Don't require an Internet connection; I can play DVD's in my car. Don't kill my DVD player; I won't have to call tech support. Don't require a full Java interpreter; my DVD player won't get a virus or worm or other malware that is now inside my local network.
While Blu-Ray has a little bit more capacity, I think that's the only thing it's got going for it. HD-DVD appears a lot more down to earth and a lot less prone to problems. It's got my vote.
Let me get this straight now ...
... so .... how can you backtrace just about anything ?
... in our country usual government workers get around 300$ or less a month, they spend around 150$ on their livingplace rent or loan, rest goes on taxes food and stuff like that. the usual cd-s over here cost around 15$ at least, so this is like 10% of the income that they can spend at all :s (while having a place where to listen to it). i'm not even mentioning how funny it seems to concider buying microsoft office to your home pc (yeah, the office stuff costs like 400$ a licence over here, so this is a lot compared to a 300$ salary, dont you think ?).
If i can capture both, the image and audio stream output from a media playing device, then re-encoding it will pretty definetly loose all the watermarks
i guess you can't really ever protect the media. if you want someone to see it/hear it, then it can be captured, and with appropriate equipment, the quality wont suffer much and the people who are accepting pirated products, can handle the few percentages of quality loss (heck, people even download cinema camera recorded stuff).
they should makes movies and music more affordable, that will stop the pirate business (working on any kind of anti piracy method is just an awesome way to spend money without any hope to achieve anything). it might seem weird that people cant afford stuff like music cd-s
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Or in the USA for $20 and in the UK for £20 ($38).
The problem is, a lot of people travel between regions, and when their DVD player wont play the DVDs they bought somewhere else, they complain to the drive manufacturer and the disk seller.
Its beginning to dawn on some people that slapping your customer round the face with a wet fish is not good business practice.
Have you explained region codes to your mother today?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
We have two competing formats, Bluray and HD-DVD, both of which may soon be Betamaxed by HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc). HVD disks should be able to hold one or more TB of data, which amounts to a lot of DivX movies. HVD has backing from many companies including Mitsubishi and Fujifilm.
I think this highlights a real danger in investing in new technologies. Suddenly some new company comes along with something 10 times better and you stand to lose billions.
I'm in the middle of moving with my family from Europe to the United States. Besides the fact that things with electrical outlets won't work as everybody knows -- the very idea that I can't view my purchased movies I bought in this European country to play on my DVD player in the United States is absolutely ludicrous. It's not in a different "voltage", it's just a simple friggin' MPEG-file on a piece of plastic!
Worse is that if I would ask around where to make my American DVD player region free they wouldn't help me due to the DMCA.
Region codes were flawed from the start: It's not the discs that should be region locked, it ought be the DVD player. And it's not the DVD player that you should have changeable regions, it ought be the discs. We'd still have regions just like the movie companies want us to have -- but at least we'd be able to move from one continent to another and still use our completely legitimately purchased wares.
But alas, since this is impossible due to obvious technological limitations, we ended up with this half-assed excuse we have today.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
All the features are going to be the result of centralized planning, comrade. This politburo knows what we need, better than weknow. And these people and companies are called "capitalists?" I have to laugh at the irony.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I am sure the marketers and their executve buddies will see to it that region encoding will be shoved down our throads like the DVD format.We'll get someone like DVD Jon to take care of this executive marketing bulls**t.
There are watermarks that survive microphone+cam recording in theaters. If it can survive that, I'm pretty sure it would survive a re-encoding. If someone put enough time in, theoretically the watermark could probably be disturbed though.
I fully expect at some point in time every disc you buy will have a unique watermark and will be somehow attached to your credit card at purchase so that the only way to get around it is to buy in cash or shoplift, even then theyll still know which disk it originated from and likely pin it to the ip it first came from.
If you want full access, don't buy prerecorded discs. Shoot your own video, edit it together, and burn it to a disc. But then you might run into some post-production problems where you can't find any royalty-free music to use.
Yeah, cause Grandmas and 5 year olds and such are always hacking their electronics since they are capable of such things.
Any solution that involves the word "hack" is not a solution. People don't mess with there stuff or look for work arounds. They want it to just work.
At least most DVD players will take care of the PAL->NTSC conversion at no cost
Here, "most" isn't "virtually all", so if you want to import all-region DVDs, make sure to read reviews before buying a DVD player. My $60 Apex AD-1200 (NTSC region 1) plays Wobbl and Bob vol. 1 (all region PAL) just fine by converting the picture to NTSC mode, but my $150 Sony PS2 (NTSC U/C) just gives "TV system doesn't match."
If i can capture both, the image and audio stream output from a media playing device, then re-encoding it will pretty definetly loose all the watermarks ... so .... how can you backtrace just about anything ?
If I draw a digital picture and put a "visible" but non-intrusive (so you can't notice it - e.g. a seemingly randomized pattern of "noise") watermark on it. And you grab your camera and take a snapshot of it develop the film, scan the photo into your pc, and then print it out give it to a friend and have him scan it into his computer, guess what: the watermark will still be recoverable in that digital-analog-digital-analog-digital transformation. And FWIW its MUCH easier to add a similiar watermark to a video or audio stream because you can now spread the water marking over time, which means it can have 'error correction' and much less of it needs to be 'visible' at once, so it can be much more non-intrusive. And it would, of course be similiarly preserved.
A water mark is not a simple invisible ditital code within a media file, its an overlay onto the content itself. And as such, reproducing the content in any form reproduces the watermark. Watermarking isn't infallible... but it needs to be actively defeated... simple copying or re-encoding won't do it.
(And of course actively defeating it would be a dmca violation in any country moronic enough to implement that legislation)
That watermark may be manifest as subtle noise or distortortion or overlay that we as humans don't even notice when using the content, but it would be easily detectable by software designed to look for the watermark.
It would surely be possible, with complete understanding of the watermarking system and/or the watermark detection algorithms that we could destroy or even forge watermarks... but it is foolish and naive to assume that simple Digital-Analog-Digital transcodings will do it for you.
> There are watermarks that survive microphone+cam recording in theaters.
Oh, you mean the annoying patterns of dots typically shown right after a bright flash, that can be effictly removed by temporal cleaners and smoothers, which can be detected and obscured fairly easily with software, and which are easily subjected to collusion attacks (record it in multiple theatres to find out which frames are used, and make a 3rd unreadable copy)?
If you're getting caught by those, you just aren't trying hard enough.
As for the unique disc identifiers, those will greatly increase the cost of production. It wouldn't be unreasonable to add a small recordable area to the disc to add a unique ID, but it would be up to the player to embed it in the video. Hack the player (either from a hardware standpoint, or modifying the memory in a Virtual Machine), no more watermark.
I can't see them burning every disc that comes out, especially when the cost would still not affect someone paying cash and using a wifi hotspot to upload it. If you don't let people cash, you lose a lot of the Wal-Mart crowd, and cutting out Wal-Mart really hurts economically.
The real evil is UOP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_operation_prohi bition). It is truly amazing that it is even legal. IMHO the people behind that technology should spend one second in prison for every second they have wasted other peoples time by refusing them to skip parts of the dvd, change audio/subtitle during the movie etc.
hi
i live in a third world country
price around US$20 too
I hope that answers your question.
The software companies had different motivations at first because of the way they released movies over time. It made sense to insist on region controls. Today the software companies are moving toward symultanious release across the world and digital distribution. Region controls make less sense today.
Of course, none of this made any difference to the high volume "pirates" who just copied stuff that was popular with zero difficulty.
woohoo! I hope blu-ray does the same.
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
I suspect that the reason for omitting region controls is actually a legal one. With current DVDs and games, it is often necessary to circumvent copy protection to circumvent region controls. Courts are more likely to call circumvention of region controls "fair use", and this provides legimitacy to programs and devices which circumvent their protections.
By removing region controls, they can say to the courts (and the lawmakers) - "look, if you circumvent our protection, you must be a pirate!". Right now, all it would take is a a rule from the Librarian of Congress to provide an exemption for cracking those protection schemes to make it legal. This is _far_ more likely to happen for regions than for backup copies.
Being a person that travels reguarly between North America, Europe and occasionally Africa, i can attest to you that DVD region codes have always been entirely pointless. The two main reasons region codes were implemented was A) to control movie/dvd release timings in various parts of the world and B) to prevent people from purchasing cheaper versions of DVDs from foreign countries.
In actuality, neither of the above two have actually occured for the following reasons:
The majority of the people that complain about region codes are (excluding those guys that love their asian porn and japanimation) people that travel and move between different continents. Anyone that does falls into either of these groups, already has a DVD player that ignores region codes...thus making them pointless.
People who just can't wait to watch a movie that has come out in another part of the world will find a way to watch it regardless....generally by downloading a movie off some p2p network.
The above to points together make argument A entirely moot.
Arguement B is entirely disproven by a combination of factors as well. The following facts are true: Many people do not have faith in the internet and thus are very sceptical about ordering stuff online...much less from a website in asia/south-east asia where dollars signs are replayed by little Y's with lines through them. Americans are lazy, they'd rather buy DVDs at walmart at the same time they get their size 60, Route 66 pants. If a person doesn't want to pay 15 dollars for a DVD, there are much easier alternatives than ordering Moulin Rouge (Mombay Edition) over the internet; you can walk (i mean drive...forgot this was america) to your cities local china town where 'buy 3 DVDs get 10' offers appear on every corner. Generally, no one is going to order dvd's from foreign countries.
Im greatly looking forward to HD-DVDs not having region locking. as for blu-ray....its gonna end up like every other piece of sony technology (Mini discs, magic gate memory, UMD, etc) -> proprietary and dead.
I actually have an old TV with only coax input
Most electronics stores sell RF modulators that turn any composite NTSC video signal into an RF signal on channel 3 or 4 and, unlike VCRs, never get confused by Macrovision gain control BS. (U.S. law mandates only that VCRs in record mode get confused by gain tricks.)
This means that I can never buy [Swedish] DVDs for my friends in the US, even though they put english subtitles on them.
Notice the words "colour", "lorry", and the like in the subtitle track. Those are words in English, the language of England. They don't speak English in the USA; instead they speak American.
(Separate reply for separate issue.)
And it seems like the DVD producers have realized this since they are asking for regions to be removed for HDDVD. However, they are not smart enough to stop using region codes on normal DVDs!
Actually there's a good reason. Music licensing contracts for current films often specify a territory because the DVD format allows enforcement of such contracts. This entices the music publishers and record labels to offer less expensive licenses for single-territory use than for worldwide use. The movie industry wants to back out of those contracts, and a format that isn't capable of enforcing territorial licenses of underlying works would be a good tool to use against those major record labels that aren't affiliated with a movie studio. (Sony BMG is with Sony MGM, but the other three major labels aren't now that Vivendi sold Universal Studios to NBC and Time Warner spun off WMG.)
They still keep shooting themselfs in the foot just because they are given a gun.
It's that the studios want to point the gun at UMG, WMG, and EMI instead.
buy a wavetable synth
Who owns exclusive rights in the waves in the wavetable synth's memory?
by creating all the components of the music on your own PC you avoid any licensing issues.
I wish that were the case, but what is the best way to defend against allegations of infringement through subconscious copying?
I disagree with this. What it is, is an informal attempt to hypothesize a natural law of information escapology.
Two things that immediately occur to mind:
For DVDs, hacking is actually more widespread and accepted than in most other areas. Even in your average electronics supermarket, you could find offers of making DVDs region free, just as getting a stand to your tv or cables to the dvd. At least that has been the case the last few years here in Sweden. I think the companies have recognized that, the people willing to go through the trouble importing discs, wouldn't mind the minor hassle of breaking the region coding. What they have proposed though, could be used to implement a much stronger protection for them. By requiring an online validation system they actually can stop a disc bought in one country to be used in another country. So they do not have region codes as we know them now, but in effect keep the market segmentation in place, with a much stronger system.
"did you just say that all philosophical arguments are inherently meaningless? If so, I really must respectfully disagree."
Why is that? Do you have any rationale behind it, or just the good old "we should be working for a better tomorrow" nonsense?
This is just the nail in HD-DVD's coffin. The studios are now going to flock straight to Blu-Ray with this announcement. Sucks but true.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Who owns exclusive rights in the waves in the wavetable synth's memory?
doesn't matter i said to create your own patch sets specifically to avoid issues of wave data ownership, though it is likely that the data which comes on a synth would be licensed for royalty free use in final productions because the manufacturer wants people to buy and use their product
the other issue is just an asinine abuse of copyright law, hire a hit man to off the tosser who accuses you.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I did (when I bought some DVDs from the UK that I can only watch on my computer). Her response: that's stupid. If more people knew about this, there would be a public outcry. Problem is, it doesn't affect enough people.
** Spoiler Warning for The Ring **
I was just watching The Ring yesterday, and it occured to me that these days, if the MIAA got their wish, everybody would be dead, because nobody would be able to make a copy of the tape. In fact, the whole film wouldn't even work if the MIAA hat their say, because the audience would be going Make a copy? But nobody can do that! And it's illegal!
Of course it might get rid of the MIAA altogether, because to hear them speak, they are the only people around who don't make copies. So, send a DVD of the cursed Ring video to your local MIAA member, wait seven days, and all this DRM will be taken care of in no time. Evolution in action.
You know, that little girl is just obviously misunderstood.
Now that Mod Chips Are Legal who really cares about region codes? just wait for the DVD player mod chip!
----- Concentrate on promoting more than demoting.
Major movies like the Matrix have made a big point of doing world-wide releases. Region coding was a bad idea, the consumers lose and the studios don't actually gain much of anything for it. Maybe it stopped a few people from ordering cheap DVD's from abroad. But really, those people who would would also be the people who knew how to bypass the coding anyway.
It solved a problem that didn't really exsist and probably actually ended up costing the studios in lost revenue for potential niche markets.
Quack, quack.
Its beginning to dawn on some people that slapping your customer round the face with a wet fish is not good business practice.
Let me guess... you hang out quite a bit on IRC?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
HD-DVD! Thank you, thank you.
Next story please...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
I have a pioneer DV-470. Be careful if your DivX videos aren't set to "DivX Home theater" resolution, some of my anime fansubs (NON-licensed of course, so they're legal) have the subtitles clipped at the bottom of the screen, so the DV-470 becomes practically useless for this purpose. Bummer.
My thought wasn't necessarily in the DVD realm, or even in the next 2-5 years.
But I don't see why the industry couldn't come up with a way to embed a unique signature in every disc, even if it meant burning every copy (32x, 64x burns in the future? or perhaps an ability to generate a pressed cd directly from an image).
Current burner technology isn't there, and current pressing technology probably isnt (don't know much about it).. but youd think with the money they claim to be losing, they could invest heavily in developing such a technology and it would pay off with minimal work.
Every disc would essentially have a serial number and theyd scan your card and scan the serial on the disc like when you buy a product service plan or an expensive piece of hardware. DVD's R and up require ID anyway and movies R rating are a lot less likely to be pirated. So you can the dvd, scan the id, scan the serial barcode, and you're done. The store would then be responsible for uploading the serial number to a central tracking server marking it as sold (or returned, etc).
If you threatened the stores with no longer selling your company's dvd's at their location if they sold one without scanning it or had 'excessive' shoplifting of the dvd's, the stores would guard those assets pretty heavily- much like they did for the harry potter release.
Every disc would essentially have a serial number and theyd scan your card and scan the serial on the disc like when you buy a product service plan or an expensive piece of hardware. DVD's R and up require ID anyway and movies R rating are a lot less likely to be pirated. So you can the dvd, scan the id, scan the serial barcode, and you're done. The store would then be responsible for uploading the serial number to a central tracking server marking it as sold (or returned, etc).
Sorry, but if they start requiring ids for purchases then they've lost me as well as many other buyers. As it is now in some stores I will only pay with cash and never with check or credit card, and I no longer buy anything from MGM liquor stores because even if you use cash they still want your id and will enter it into their computer. I value my privacy and don't want ANYONE tracking me! This is one reason I only buy movies, I don't rent what so ever. Once I checked about renting from someplace and was told I needed to fill out this application that asked for a bunch of credit info they had no need for, it seemed as though I was applying for a loan or credit. That application quickly found it's way into a circular file.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That may be so, but most of the population struggle even with the documented features of their device, nevermind applying cracks to them.
I'd say most people don't even RTFM.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I am talking about the manufacturing costs, not the extra costs due to marketing and politics. What you are saying supports my point... it is not that American's don't want European releases, it is that the way movies are distributed makes it unprofitable to sell European movies in North America. I can't just place an order for a European movie from an online store and have it shipped to Canada, and a chain like Best Buy can't just buy 1000 copies of a movie direct from a European company. The movie has to find a North American company to manufacture and distribute it, and if it isn't a big movie, there may not be a company in North America willing to put up the money.
If region codes were eliminated, this would not be a problem.
The vast majority of DVD players sold around the world these days are region-free, including from major DVD Forum members like Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba (on other continents). It's really only the US that's still clinging to this concept, because the Hollywood studios want it and US consumers generally aren't affected too much by it (unless you are, like me, a fan of foreign films and music). But even here, I can walk down to my corner deli and buy a region-free player for $50. So really, the only people who put up with region controls right now are the people that want to.
Count me, in being a fan of foreign (and art as well as independent) movies and music that is. I've got a bunch, well maybe a dozen, foreign movies on tape, and a couple of them on dvd. Actually my fav theatre, Landmark Theaters, shows quite a few. They're showing one now, "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, I'd like to go see.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Great news for the consumer, but I wonder if the film studios will be prepared to release their lineup on HD-DVD now?
exactly my point, lossy encoders like xvid (or any kind of mpeg4) and mp3 (or ogg or aac), will remove the digital watermarks or at least make them unrecognizeable ...
:s)
:(
and do the hollywood or music industry guys really think that asian pirate kings even blink their eyes when they see a watermarked movie/hear a watermarked song ? n-o-p-e (and the riaa wont be there to sue them too, they are far too corrupted for this
ps , sry about the loose vs lose syntax error, my local language unlike the english/french/ pronounces as it is written (meaning if there are not 2 vocals in the row, it wont be stretched long), so it's awfully easy for me to make such typos
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Encrypt the media. Embed a client SSL certificate in each authorised player. The player dials home (you could even put a cell-phone in it for this purpose if you didn't want to require a 'phone or network connection), creates a secure connection (SSL with both parties using signed certificates is practically impossible to crack) and then downloads the decryption key. The key is then used to decrypt the disk while playing, and is stored (encrypted with a player-key which is not readable from the decryption chip) in battery-backed volatile RAM. If the circuit to the RAM chip is interrupted at any point, then the key is lost.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, sorry, watermarking is not so easily removed, and your knowledge of modern video codecs is profoundly lacking. The RIAA won't sue people because the RIAA is corrupt? I imagine this is a result of your local language causing you not to make sense. Either that, or once again you just don't know what you're talking about.
I can't think of any better methods of promoting the creative commons. Just imagine how 50 years of the creative commons will absolutely flood the media distribution network with free content. It will end up being a flood that drowns existing copyright content and naturally enough eliminates any need for any kind of DRM.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Step 1: Super cheap ($36.99) DVD player from Target (Cyberhome DVD-320): Check.r home+CH-DVD+300
link
Step 2: Region-Free hack (takes 1 minute, you do it with your remote): Check.
http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks.php?select=Cybe
Step 3: enjoy your region-free dvd player.
> if such a system has been proposed or patented, i'd be interested in reading more about it.
0 so originality isn't a requirement at the office of Patenting The Obvious.
Here's how it worked back then.
- to run a protected program, you had to start it with the "key floppy" in the A: drive *WITH WRITE-PROTECT TURNED OFF*
- most of the key floppy was writable, just like an ordinary floppy
- small portions of the key floppy were *NOT* writable
- on startup, the program would read certain sectors of the floppy, write to them, and read them again
- if the writable sectors had changed *AND THE NON-WRITABLE SECTORS HAD NOT CHANGED*, only then would the main program launch. Which sectors were writable and which were non-writable was presumably encrypted in the startup code.
You could make a bit-for-bit-identical copy of the key floppy, but the copy would be a regular floppy. The "non-writable" sectors would be written to, and the data changed, alerting the program that it wasn't using a genuine key floppy, and it would refuse to start.
So it's not really a new idea. But what the F, go for a patent anyways. Microsoft recently got a patent for re-inventing sudo http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/22123
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
To even casually analyze your comment, however, it's obvious to any educated person that grammatical and spelling errors increase the "noise" in any attempt at communication (the content being the "signal", if you're not following). Someone posting could, in fact, have a brilliant, insightful idea or comment, but even a few errors make it more difficult and time-consuming to read and understand. In extreme cases (which, alas, I've seen all too often), an intended point is completely lost in a miasma of misspellings and poor construction. The point of my concluding statement, which you seem to be wilfully ignoring, was simply this. Taking the extra 2/100ths of a second to type a word correctly can have a dramatic effect upon others' perception of one's intelligence level and/or credibility.