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DVDs w/ Built in USB Ports for Copy Protection

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the april-fools-coming-early-this-year dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Aladdin has come up with a new way of restricting the data stored on optical discs. It's 'XCD' format has a chip built directly into the disc and which fits into a USB port. So, a user needs to plug the disc into their computer to access a cryptophic key before being able to use the data stored on the disc (presumably in some sort of proprietary player)."

3 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. dongles anyone? by TheRealBurKaZoiD · · Score: 2, Informative

    why don't they just ship a damn dongle with everything that can be possible used with a pc? rip the cd/dvd/game/movie all you want; it won't work without the dongle. as a matter of fact, give the fucking media away. charge for the dongle. been doing this shit for thirty years now.

  2. Re:Stupid stupid idea by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hence the continued popularity of soft ice.
    Install soft ice, insstall program, trap dongle call with soft ice, done.

    Note that if you do a re-install you will need the dongle again, but at least for day to day operations no more 3-7 dongles packed onto the parallel port conflicting with each other.
    -nB

    --
    whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  3. Re:Media-less society (O/T) by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Informative

    If properly encoded, H.264/AAC beats DivX/MP3 hands down. H.264 is "part 10" of MPEG-4, so it's like the latest version of MPEG-4. You wouldn't believe the difference if you're using the same bitrate for both.

    There's also the fact that nobody uses DivX/MP3 in the media, but H.264/AAC is being used today by broadcasters and the television industry. Never mind the fact that there's a lof of DVD players compatible with DivX, they exists only because people illegally download movies from the net.

    Not to mention the fact that most DivX .avi files aren't even valid as far as specs are concerned (VBR MP3 breaks the specs, or so I've heard). Trying to play most .avi files (DivX/XviD) on OS X is like trying to play Quicktime on Linux (I guess). Too many CODECs, too many versions of DivX, etc.

    I'll stick with H.264/AAC .mp4 files, even though it can take about 12 hours to rip a 2 hours movie from DVD to H.264/AAC (quality setting 60 in HandBrake) on my G4/1.42GHz. I don't care about the encoding time, in the end it's the playback quality that matters.