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Spielberg Bitten by DVD Encryption
diodesign writes "The Guardian newspaper has reported that 5000 DVD based preview copies of Spielberg's 'Munich' sent to reviewers in the UK can't be played due to the copy protection system involved. Human error at the laboratory where the DVDs were encrypted lead to the wrong region code being set, plus the reviewers use special players from Dolby that prevent the pirating of 'screeners'. An ironic twist in the on-going battle of DRM and media vs. consumers."
One reviewer commented that they don't have the time to review and consider every candidate movie anyway. When he chooses which to look at, the ones that require him to set up a special player separate from his usual equipment, and that does not allow him to screen them on his laptop when traveling, will end up in the bottom of the pile, unscreened.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
why are they even bothering to region code them?
Because they werent suppose to!The S-View system requires a fully authored standard DVD-Video project as input, with only a few restrictions:
1. Leave 200 MB free space on the disc (on Layer 0 of a dual layer title).
2. Do not enable CSS.
3. Do not set Region code.
4. Do not set parental levels.
5. Author the main feature as one continuous VTS, in MPEG 2.
6. Do not author angles.
7. Add a "Cinea Audio Track" as the last audio track for the title. "Cinea Audio Track" is a placeholder for watermarking data that the Cinea system generates. The content of this track is not important (the facility can use a track supplied by Cinea, or can generate their own). We can provide a Dolby Digital 128 kHz file (containing an audio test tone) 120 minutes in length, which is to be authored as the last audio under the entire feature.
http://www.cinea.com/fews.html
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The reason is pretty simple, though equally it's pretty rubbish.
Movie studios sell the distribution rights for a film to multiple companies, including CD soundtrack producers, toy companies, and DVD distributors, giving each one limited rights in what they can do, including what parts of the world they can sell the finished product.
The DVD distribution company then decides on things like the price they'll sell it to wholesalers at, what extras to include, the packaging design, does all the retail hand-holding, local marketing (if it's a major film the studio will still play a part in all this), and is responsible for the DVD manufacture and shipping out to the wholesalers.
The theory goes that if there wasn't region encoding, the distribution companies wouldn't be willing to pay as much for their monopoly rights to distribute a film in a region, as everyone would buy the version with the extras and packaging they wanted at the cheapest price they could find wherever it came from in the world, rather than pay full retail price in their local country for the version their distributor has decided to produce.