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Disney Encrypting Screener DVDs to Prevent Piracy
Sascha J. writes "Disney is continuing their war against piracy. To their Oscar reviewers they now send out special encrypted DVDs, which can be played only on a DVD player of the "Cinea" series. From the article: "The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those people are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players." Yet, Disney is alone on this. Sony and Universal Pictures said they won't follow that step."
Thats not a big problem at all...u just need 2 or 3 different sourses...combine the feeds using a noise canceling averaging algorithm and u can easliy remove the markings and get a clean print.
another option is to use the same amount of opaqueness and put a block covering up the text making it just a rectangular block. No need for 2 feeds in this one...just a good algo...
Besides people really dont mind having blocked out patches on video so much...
a lot of people download even telesync versions of movies which are missing parts of the screen...
I can't answer for Disney or Sony, but I get a good deal of screener DVDs for review purposes. I get about 10-12 per month from the many labels of EI Cinema (Seduction Cinema, Shock-O-Rama, Video Outlaw, etc.), as well as 2-3 here and there from Lions Gate.
With those companies as the basis for my statements, the screeners for direct-to-video films and about-to-hit-DVD films are fully-featured with all of the bonus materials and menus that you'd get if you purchased the DVD. Some things may change when the DVD hits stores (bonus features added, changed menus, things of that nature), but generally, they're the same thing you'd purchase from your retailer of choice.
Screener copies of movies that are currently in theaters or are about to hit theaters are bare-bones. You get the typical piracy warning before jumping to a very simple menu (with nothing more than "Play Movie" as an option), or it goes straight from the warning into the movie.
Actually, the wonders of modern technology suggest a rather simpler solution. Digital watermarking of video streams is a fairly well-developed field, with several companies offering working products. The "invisible" watermark is some extra bits of "payload" added by some transformation of the images -- nothing which perceptibly degrades image quality -- and can be recovered again by some simple transformation of the data.
Algorithms exist which embed this information "visually", in the sense that it is distirbuted across the whole or much of the image, and it survives "classic" image processing such as resizing, lossy compression, and recolouration of the image (not to any degree, of course, but you'd be ruining the movie before you got rid of the watermark), rather than just being a few specific bits which can be deleted or edited. Some of these techniques are also intended to be tamper-proof, in the sense that without the watermark-creator's key it is very hard to know how to remove or alter the watermark.
Such a watermark would seem to be much better than a glaring visual signal, for tracking down the originator of a leaked copy. It wouldn't stop viewers enjoying their leaked copies, but the leaker could be held accountable.