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The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent

Posted by kdawson on from the nailing-jello-to-a-tree dept.

Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."

17 of 537 comments (clear)

  1. Sky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Burn the land and boil the sea
    You can't take the sky from me

  2. The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by Boap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space.

    1. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by solevita · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not really - Hard drive space is still cheaper per GB than HD-DVD is. If you want to store big movies, it's cheaper to do so by downloading them than it is to buy them on disk.

      In other words, if you can't afford to keep 100 HD-DVD movies on your computer, you really can't afford to keep then on HD-DVD.

    2. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by garcia · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Until the burners become affordable. The limiting factor is really the bandwidth, not the storage space.

    3. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by jonnythan · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you buy 100 HD DVDs you will have spent upwards of $2000.

      With 500GB of storage costing $150 or less, 2TB of storage space will set you back $600.

    4. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by Lazerf4rt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yea, this is a pretty wild way to spend your bandwidth. Supposing you get 150 KB/s sustained on the torrent, your computer's still going to be chewing on it for over 37 hours.

      On the other hand, if you drive to the store and back, you can probably have that HD-DVD in about an hour. That's over 5.5 MB/s of bandwidth. Pick up a few more movies at the same time, and your bandwidth increases to 22 MB/s. Sneakernet has a lot going for it, in this case.

    5. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by Total_Wimp · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I'm sure it'll fit onto a 700meg cd just like all the others - it'll look much the same on a 15inch laptop display. Like mp3s, it's more important to have a fair few to choose from, rather than filling your 300 gig hard drive with 15 highly polished turds.

      This is not meant to be rude. I don't feel I have any right to dictate taste or quality. That said, it's guys like you that keep me off of file sharing networks.

      If you want to compress a perfectly good HD rip down to CD size and watch it, go for it, it's your business. But when I see that stuff being offered to me as if it's some kind of precious gift, I'm flabbergasted. Why would someone give me Budweiser under the label "Chimay" and claim "it's just as good"? Why would I seek such things out?

      Besides the bad music that's rampant on file sharing networks, there have traditionally been quite a lot of bad rips. Often, there's no way to tell except to download and listen, then wonder whether the artist really wasn't as good as you thought, or whether someone didn't know how to work their ripper. Have you ever seen someone download a 128KBPS file from iTunes, then make a CD, import it at 192KBPS and tell you, with sincerity, and even honesty, that they "ripped it at 192KBPS"? Those are the files you're downloading.

      I know Budweiser has it's place. I've been known to down more than a little bit. Sometimes that's all you want or need. I'm more than happy to watch a certain amount of TV or movies on the ol' 13" TV upstairs. But when I'm looking for high quality, why would I want to download something labeled "HD-DVD" that's less than DVD quality? It's idiotic.

      I have some advice for you. If you want to make low-quality, overly-compressed movies for the "I don't care" viewer, save some money and buy it on DVD instead of HD-DVD. Then when you rip it, clearly label the source, source compression if relevant, output format and output compression for everything you rip. That way I'll know to avoid your work.

      Thanks,

      TW
    6. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by Malc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not necessarily. A download doesn't equate to a lost sale, no matter how much the like of the MPAA and RIAA say so.

    7. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you can do that, why not just stick with the DVD and upgrade the players to play MPEG4? Why are we creating new media when we could easily store an HD movie on a dual layer DVD?

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    8. Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. by codemachine · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, DVD sales have brought back TV series before, so if anything, buying the actual HD-DVD or the regular DVD would be a better move if you want another movie. Showing interest is not enough to help a studio profit.

      Though I assume you knew that anyways. The real news was back when the HD-DVD protection was broken. The fact that rips appeared online was inevitable after that point. One might argue the breaking of the DRM was inevitable too, but still possibly newsworthy to report when it actually happened.

  3. Best copy protection? just don't sell anything by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have a great idea. Just don't sell the product, or release it for distribution of any kind. I guarantee there won't be any piracy, but you'll have a hard time making money!

    Everyone complained about piracy when tape decks came out, but everyone knows in retrospect that the bootleg tapes, even the good quality ones (which could easily be as good as the one you bought) were actually helping bands get noticed. This is all about just controlling the supply line so that only studio-backed projects can get money. They want the ability to sh*t can a movie by not distributing it, and vice versa, to make money from only the ones they are investing in.

    --
    stuff |
  4. Yo. by neimon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not cool. Joss needs the money so he can make more cool stuff. Go buy the DVD.

    'nuff said.

    1. Re:Yo. by Xerotope · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mail him a check for $5. I'm sure that's more than he gets from the studios for an HD-DVD sale.

  5. 20GB is a lot now. But it won't always be by jmorris42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space.

    I'm sure people made the same observation when DVDs first became available a decade ago. 4.7 or 9GB over dialup or even early cable modems stored onto hard drives barely able to hold a single disc was not a threat to DVD sales either. But bandwidth and storage keep on improving while a media standard like DVD or HD-DVD remains constant for years. The reality is that if an HD movie is fixed at ~20GB the cost to move/store that will soon drop to managable costs.

    With the copy restrictions removed it is an absolute certainly that they WILL be copied. For now just to prove it is possible, to stick it to the man and to prove 313t3 5k177z but eventually it will be as commonplace as Divx;) CD-R copies are now.

    --
    Democrat delenda est
  6. For now. Maybe. by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Think back about 5, or even 10, years. Could you have imagined downloading 3-4 Gigs just for a movie? Or a game?

    When the CD came into existance, it was not thought that copy protection could ever be necessary, people did hardly have the space on their HD to store those 650 Megs on. Today, a CD is not even a deterrent to downloading it, storing is even less a problem.

    Give it a year, and you will probably not even think twice about transfering 20 Gigs just to check out the movie (and deleting it immediately afterwards when you notice that it is indeed copyrighted material, of course).

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  7. Yes, Look for my 3000 UUEncoded posts by meanween · · Score: 4, Insightful

    May take a while to find them all :)

    --
    http://www.guster.net : Mmmmm fresh Guster.
  8. Re:We win [not] by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Case closed. Give it up, MPAA, your days are numbered. Just like Windows, soon you won't be needed anymore.

    Ah, because "Serenity" (since that's the movie in quesiton) would have been just as good if made collaboratively by a bunch of volunteers with little or no budget and no expectation of making enough money to pay back good acting, writing, animation, and other talent? Who do you think the MPAA is, anyway? It's a trade association populated by the companies that moviemakers, actors, writers, tech people and all the rest choose to work for. People compete to work for these companies, and to make projects that will be well received and which will reward the risks taken.

    You may have no use for the trade association these creative people support, but you'd better also have no use for films as good as Serenity. No money, no Serenity. You don't "win" anything by ripping off the very people that you're hoping will scrape together the money, talent, and time to make another movie you'll like.

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.