Blu-Ray Facing Delays Caused by DRM Squabbling

Tomo Hiratsuka writes "Disney, Warners et al, the companies behind the AACS content management system, apparently can't get their act together to complete the standard they wish to impose on Blu-ray. The result? Pioneer has the first Blu-ray drive for PCs ready for market next month but is openly admitting the DRM issue may force it to delay." From the article: "The inability of the companies behind the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) content management system to complete their work has already caused Toshiba to put launch plans for its HD DVD player on hold. AACS is made up of a number of companies from the electronics and content industries. The group's founders include IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Disney and Warner Bros."

Comments

Title should say it affects Blueray and HD-DVD

[four2five]

I know the excerpt mentions it but both formats will be delayed by this, title seems a bit misleading.

Re:Not a surprise

[NutscrapeSucks]

Disagree: Hollywood wants to phase out the insecure DVD standard as quickly as they can get away with it.

Right now the studios are in the catbird seat with both BR and HDDVD trying to best each other with more and more DRM. But in either case they will end up with something significantly better for them than DVD.

Re:Good! Ship it WITHOUT DRM then!

[DrEldarion]

Unfortunately, Pioneer can't do that, because they don't control any media powerhouses. If someone like Sony were to decide to go DRM-less (not a chance in hell, but just for discussion's sake...), they could put out both the hardware AND the media without DRM. Then, when the DRM players came out, people's old media wouldn't work, and that would create the uproar. Without that media link, though, the Pioneer player wouldn't have anything to play, because the media companies are the ones that want the DRM.

Re:The fly in the ointment...

[pla]

as in SACD replacing Audio CD

I disagree. SACD nicely commented on the audio industry's real delusion... Namely, they seem to seriously believe that most of us sit at home in our sound-booth/home-theatre ne living-room, and play our music and movies on a dedicated player in a dedicated environment.

I seriously believe they attribute the success of iTunes to people sticking a computer in that same "home sound booth" model, rather than accepting the cold hard reality that 99.9% of us listen to music:
A) in the car
B) at work (mostly through our computers), and
C) while jogging/waiting to see a doctor/waiting for a train/etc.

That has held true for decades, and the industry still doesn't "get" it. The rise of modern portable large-capacity MP3/AAC/whatever players hasn't changed anything but the need to change discs/tapes/stations.


As for SACD... First of all, following the above mini-rant, nothing supports it except for what amount to standalone home-media-center modular units. Yeah, someone will probably point out a Sony/Philips portable player or even a CD-ROM drive that supports it. I've never seen one. I've never even seen it mentioned as a selling point while shopping for either of those two products specifically. Second, although it has theoretically better (high-end) frequency response (1hz-100khz) than a standard CD (0-22khz... interestingly, SACD cannot reproduce 0hz due to the encoding used, not that it really matters), neither my speakers nor any human ears can physically suffer the limitation of a standard CD. Third, although SACD has a slightly better dynamic range than normal CDs, when the idiots mastering them clip even on CDs (Hello? Didn't you guys learn the word "headroom" in Audio Engineering school???), giving anything short of infinite dynamic range won't matter, and even if we gave them that, they'd just use it to blow our speakers on the first note in the name of "volume". And fourth no matter how many channels you can encode, I still only have two ears (plus, arguably, a tactile "bass" channel).


So... Um... The actual topic. DRM sucks. Yeah.

Re:The Blue-Ray encryption won't be broken in a we

[metamatic]

One of the perceived failures of first-generation DVD was that its encryption mechanism of choice, called Content Scramble System (CSS), was spectacularly defeated, with the result being that the industry was forced to permanently and irreversibly support a now-worthless encryption scheme.

Only the player manufacturers were forced to keep supporting it. There's absolutely no need to use CSS on DVDs. In fact, there are commercial movie DVDs out there that aren't CSS encoded.