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New Sony DVDs Not Working In Some Players
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn't appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it's up to the manufacturers to update their hardware."
Just thinking about it, if they're selling them using the DVD label identifying it as a dvd, doesn't it legally have to be playable in dvd compatible players? If it wasn't, wouldn't that be a bait and switch scam? Just saying, they may have just opened up the floodgates to yet another massive lawsuit.
Isn't there a saying about someone burning you twice?
If you buy from Sony and don't expect this to happen, who's fault is it really?
-- lol pwned
I bought Casino Royale two weeks ago. When I got it home, neither my Toshiba in the living room, or the Pioneer in the bedroom would play it.
So I ripped it and returned it.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
that this new copy protection system will not stop the DVD from being ripped and will only effect people who legally bought the DVD.
It is things like this that make me cautious about buying media from Sony these days. I have no problem with buying DVDs however one of the reasons I buy a DVD is that I know it will work perfectly in any DVD I wish to buy (unlike XviD rips from BitTorrent or Usenet) however apparently this isn't true anymore so DVD is now no better than a rip downloaded from the internet.
It is a shame that the companies are worsening their products with these copy protection systems to help fight piracy when all they end up doing is ruining it for the people who want to buy DVDs.
One thing that I have wondered about for a while is how many DVD rips online originate from retail DVDs? I would have thought the majority (if not all) came from pre-release copies as the DVD rips are normally several weeks (if not months) ahead of a retail DVD release.
And once again, (also mentioned in a previous post) DRM has bitten the legitimate customer, but the "pirates" haven't even been slowed down, (or in this case, they didn't notice at all.)
What it HAS done, is forced the legitimate customer to turn to the 'black market' to get access to the material that they payed for.
"I bought this movie, and I can't play it, but it doesn't matter because I was able to grab a rip off the Internet that same day and burn a new one."
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
This copy protection prevents most people from renting/borrowing a DVD and making a copy of it. Until people download the latest software for cracking it. This is mostly targetting non-technical people who were given DVD Shrink by a friend.
There will be copies of the DVD available on the Internet, because someone will crack the protection. All it takes is one copy on the Internet to ensure that anyone on a peer to peer network can get a copy.
Sony is risking alienating a large number of people to stop a small number of pirates. Not just a small number of pirates, but the non-technical pirates. They are also annoying Walmart, Blockbuster, BestBuy and any other retailer who sells their DVDs. Who are the consumers going to complain to? The retailers.
Oddly, this could cost them money even if you ignore retail backlash. Companies which rent DVDs to the consumer, purchase DVDs based on rental demand. If someone rents and burns a DVD, the movie company is pissed, but it still increases rental demand. Higher rental demand, increases sales of the DVDs to the companies who rent them. If someone finds they can't rent and burn, they probably will just download the image from BitTorrent rather than buy the DVD. Not to mention the people who can't play the Sony DVDs, they'll want a free version which actually works.
Sony has the right to put any copy protection scheme they want on their DVDs, as long as it maintains compatibility. If you sell someone a product which is designed not to work properly on their DVD player, you better tell them first. Even if the consumer was willing to get firmware updates, do you think the manufacturers want to start sending out discs and supporting consumers through the update?
Sony Electronics was a great company until the bought the movies division.
Now, Sony Electronics tries to deliver great products, and Sony Pictures strongarm the electronics division into delivering defective products.
Just stop buying Sony altogether (Movies and electronics) until they become a customer focussed company again.
In the end the blame goes to the stupid Sony customers that allows Sony to sell them this defective crap, and then comes back for more.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Yes, Phillips did the enforcing on CD encoding standards because of their trademark control. The DVD industry has no internal standards enforcement, so this mihgt be the time to bring in external enforcement, namely the courts. If the box says "DVD" it should play in a DVD player. Sonys product is only DVD-like and as such should not be legal to sell as a DVD. It would be like a gas station selling ethanol but calling it gasoline, sure it still works in some vehicles, but it's not the same product.
We are all just people.
Why do manufacturers do this? I so would buy more DVDs if they weren't so bizarely priced and if I could rely on feature and quality stability. The movie industry would make tons of money. But no, they have to piss off their customers as much as possible. Would anybody of you give a damn about Bittorrent if each DVD would cost 8 dollars, come with all the extras, no CSS and no Region Code? I wouldn't. Sony and Co. would earn themselves a golden nose in the movie after-market called DVD-sales. But no, they have to chase away customers with crappy copies, a totally bizar publishing policy and DRM schemes that brink on the criminal. People go through all the bittorrent fuss just to get a movie. That should ring a bell with the execs. Then again, as proven before, probably only Steve Jobs is smart enough to see this.
I hope Sony Entertainment chokes and dies on their new DVDs.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I find Sony's tactics deplorable and am offended by their pompous arrogance and complete lack of remorse. They have/are taking advantage of the good faith vendor-consumer relationship and don't deserve my business anymore. Screw em I have other options.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
Every DVD that doesn't play, opened or not, is defective. DVD players are a well-known quantity now. After Sony starts getting returns in the tens and hundreds of thousands back, they might change their mind. And if they refuse to accept even a single one for a full refund, then I expect to see the Mother of All Class Actions Suits launched against them. At some point, Sony just has to go down once and for all. They're a terrible example to every other manufacturer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I don't care how many branches there are. The DVD division ought to make sure their damn product plays.
Making Grandma update the firmware on a DVD player just to make it take two minutes longer for a pirate to copy a DVD is stupid.
So, your dvd's don't work? Sony says tough? Ok, here's the fix:
F iction/0/0/100,200,300,400,600/0 /0/% 20Happyness/0/0/0/
Stranger Then Fiction http://thepiratebay.org/search/Stranger%20Than%20
Casino Royale http://thepiratebay.org/search/Casino%20Royale/0/
The Pursuit Of Happiness http://thepiratebay.org/search/The%20Pursuit%20of
Isn't that easier then screwing around with a stupid broken DVD?
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Please stop using obscure and useless acronyms.
If I'm Not Mistaken... How hard was that? huh?
BRB/TYT/LOL/etc. were useful at a time when we had to "pay" for being online by the hour (or the minute for some) and had 10 private chat windows open, 5 IRC channels, etc.
Did typing IINM save you anything? A couple of keystrokes? Is it that widely used?
No, it doesn't make you look/sound smarter, because there are a LOT of acronyms that are just plain dumb.
Sorry for going off, I didn't mean to shoot directly at you, just the whole acronym thing is driving me up a wall.
When one branch of that multinational corporation is making discs specifically designed to play in another branch's hardware, then no, I don't think that's a little bit naive whatsoever. I don't expect the computer division to hit up the TV stand division about every little thing, but it seems like "we're making a new type of DVD, so let's call up the guys who make the DVD players and make sure nothing broke" is a thought that should have occured to someone.
Game... blouses.
You got to love how it comes full circle - disks with corrupt sectors? This reminds me of some floppy protection schemes from the 1980s. Also how the page lists half a dozen tools that'll get around it. If there's one thing worse than DRM, it's when they try to "fix" a broken system by making non-standard discs which break normal players while the patching tools get updated to work around it. Same thing with the "CDs" which don't play in CD players. The cat is out of the bag. The horse has left the barn. The genie is out of the bottle. The referee has blown the whistle. The fat lady has sung. He's dead, Jim. You're flogging a dead horse. Are there any more ways to say it? It's OVER. Get some therapy for your denial issues and let it be.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A good chance to perform a consumer service that will help others avoid this problem.
Go to Amazon, and give the movies bad reviews. State clearly that the movies themselves aren't necessarily bad, but the DVDs have a new copy protection scheme that will make them unplayable on many DVD players of different manufacturers.
Also, find other people's reviews like this, and make sure you mark that they were helpful, so they shop up on top. That will get the word out.
True Philips did state that any CD that did not conform to the Red Book specification exactly could not use the CD logo, but the response from the music industry was less then thrilling. They reply was basically "so what?" - the argument was that if it was 12cm wide and shiny people would put in their player anyhow, and they did.
:-
Copy Protection on audio CDs was always a less than satisfactory method anyhow - relying on part Orange Book multi session TOCs with looping or non-existent sessions or degraded EFM, interleave or error correction (of course Red Book players would ignore such things and data players would kill the audio or disc). What has killed audio copy protection is market forces, some labels have already dropped it and others look to be doing the same.
Conventional CD audio player (Red Book) are largely removed from the market, nowadays all CD player also play MP3 - in other words they are data CD players (Orange Book) in order to read the ISO9660 or UDF format and hence read the MP3 files. When this shift happened - we started dropping classic audio systems from the CD players we made in about 2002, and the market took a few years to follow - the industry suddenly found that a *very* large percentage of the hardware could not play their discs so the copy protection was dropped. That and the fact it was massively unpopular.
I remember sitting in lectures from the IPFI when they clearly stated that the CD patents from Philips would expire some day and people did not give a damn about the logo or not. The IPFI certainly did not, and as long as Philips got the license money neither did they. Certainly CD copy protection never made the job of building CE audio equipment any harder - we ignored it largely.
Now we have the same again, as Sony has changed the format of the DVD system slightly for *enhanced* copy protection - there is a slight difference as they also have patents on DVD as well as Philips and others. There are only a few things that can happen here
1. The people who make DVD systems will alter their FW and that takes a while to reach the market - but (trust me on this) the teams involved in most firms have had sample discs with encoding on for quite some time.
2. Market forces will force Sony into a humiliating reverse *if* sufficient publicity and bad press can be generated. What is takes is a very large number of bad tempered people and some media backing. I would be confident that Sony has tested this new system on a wide variety of player to get a feel for the market first.
3. The number of players that refuse to play them will be small enough that the MPAA/Sony/Others will be able to railroad in this change over a year or so (after all some people will assume that their player is fucked and just get another cheap one) - but as the hackers of this world have a formidable reputation for cracking these things in a week or so the status will largely return to normal in due course.
It's a matter of degree. CSS encryption, for example, really didn't have much impact on ordinary users of the DVD. The discs played and the encryption stopped the vast majority of people trying to copy the media using ordinary copy programs. Frankly, I believe that's all CSS was ever meant to achieve, and it did. They knew that sooner or later it would get broken and you know what? It was broken, and Joe Average still hasn't a clue how to copy that disc he just bought or rented so it's still doing its job. Many seem to count CSS as a failure the moment DVD Jon figured it out, but the fact of the matter is that CSS was a success and still is to this very day.
The problem is not so much the DRM (bad as it is) but that in their neverending quest to prevent copyright infringement (pardon me, "theft of their intellectual property") they've begun to deny legitimate purchasers of their product the ability to actually use that for which they plunked down good money. Oh, I'm sure Sony figured out well in advance that some number of purchasers would get screwed, but decided that the risk was acceptable. I guarantee it won't be acceptable to me, if I ever mistakenly happen to buy a Sony Pictures DVD.
This has got to run afoul of more than a few laws, and it sure as hell isn't a good way to run a business.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It shouldn't be called a "new type of DVD" nor sold as such.
Maybe I'm wrong, but like some "CDs" in the past that incorporated some copy protection and couldn't carry the CD logo/seal any longer on the cover, wouldn't the same thing apply here? Can Sony legimitately still call this thing a DVD anymore without being sued for fraud?
(1) Buy DVD, stick it in DVD player, sit down w/ wife & kids to watch the movie - no joy.
(2) Swap at store, still no joy. Try to return, get hit with restocking fee - take DVD home irate.
(3) Call Sony to complain, get told to update player.
(4) Call player manufacturer to complain, get told "sorry, we've no idea, your player is out of warranty, go away". Now you're broiling angry.
(5) Discover software that rips the CD, despite whatever security measure on it, and burns it to a DVD-R.
(6) Realize you can do the same thing with DVD-R images on the net, and start downloading.
Congratulations, Sony, for having turned a customer over to the Dark Side with your wonderful customer relations program!
Lets see. Sony loads worms and trojans into PAYING customers machines...who PURCHASED music media. LEGALLY.
:)
Sony makes media / movies PAYING CUSTOMERS purchase, that WON"T work as per the STANDARD. Hmmm. THey bork.
Sony says, sorry, tough - upgrade. Meh.
I say this. Sony, you'll never see my money again. Sorry. Your are tools. When PIRACY is EAISER then purchased media, when pirated content plays EASIER and better then yours...you have a serious issue with seeing the 'big picture'. You have to compete now with that. YUP its true....suck it up and be a bigger man and come back to the market with your BRAINS because your muscle is weaker then ever now...
Consumers are good. You want them. You want them to BUY your shit. TO enjoy it. TO be ABLE to use it. Those last two points, they are key. USE and ENJOY. Get it? Well it seems not.
You are so out of touch of reality it will be your down fall. It is your down fall. You ARE falling. These actions are just that, PROOF how stunned you really are.
Labels wonder why sales are low? Jesus could it be the customer is WRONG, dead last and A THEIF! Lets beat the guys over the head with a lead pipe who DARE, DARE to show up at a check out and purchase our products. How the fuck is this any different? I want to buy it and then GET punished for it? Sorry..i won't buy into that.
Sorry sony. I have not purchased your shit media, or electronics since the ps2 many years ago. NO longer. I vote with my dollar. Get the message? More importantly, do you UNDERSTAND the message?
Nope. Guess not. Not yet
Complaining to Wal-Mart is exactly the right thing. Piss off a few consumers and they will just ignore it. Piss off Wal-Mart and the movie companies will listen.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Sure, they got their fingers burned a little over the rootkit debacle - but they aren't sorry about it, nor have they changed their direction. Expect more outrages from this corporation that has already "jumped the shark".
What can us as consumers do? It's simple; just say NO to anything from Sony. If you'd been doing that since the rootkit, you wouldn't be bothered with these defective DVDs or their future mistakes. All they look at is their bottom line, and the only thing they'll pay attention to is when that bottom line suffers; quit buying their crap and they'll pay attention.
i just wish i had mod points for you. you hit the nail on the head
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
He would be guilty of copyright infringement if only it was a torrent or some other protocol that requires the recipient to upload parts he recieved. He said generic download. It's not illegal to download anything short of child porn AFAIK.
If it was just that... You forgot the "convenience" of:
-having to get dressed according to weather
-burn some expensive fossil fuels and put wear on an expensive car
-wasting a half hour in city traffic getting cut all the time -- both ways
-hunting for parking spots
-walk around a store full of unhelpful minimum-wage/comission employees looking for what you want (hopefully you won't impulse buy anything you don't need in the process)
-standing in line for a half hour to pay for it
-find out it doesn't play on your computer either (unless you shell out money for something like AnyDVD)
And possibly things like buying a new DVD player (more $) only to find out (if it even works at all) that there's unskippable previews and such crap (FBI warnings) on the disc too.
Whereas using P2P I can download the thing in mere minutes. No DRM, no protection that prevents playing, no rootkits, no unskippable previews, no FBI warnings -- none of the usual crap. No need to waste time ripping/re-encoding it in mpeg4 to put it on my video server either.
I would rather pay for a un-DRM'ed mpeg4 rip direct download then buy the DVD, but studios won't let us, much less for decent prices. Pirating is easy, fast (~30 seconds to start the transfer then downloads overnight), convenient and often provides you with a better product (at least an un-crippled one) -- and much cheaper too. As a bonus, you're not being treated like a thief by the pirated copy (oh the irony). So people pirate instead.
It is not functional and it is not the fault of your player. There should not be a restock fee. If there is SONY should be paying it not you. They are selling you defective merchandise.
Sony Electronics has gone down the tubes in the past decade or so (it started a while before that -- old school Sony TVs and CRTs had a full metal Faraday cage around the tube, and touches like that went sometime before then). Nowadays, Sony electronics is mostly living off of the reputation it developed up through the 80s or 90s, when it delivered truly exceptional quality products at a high premium. Sony still charges a premium (albeit a smaller one), while delivering mostly sub-par products.
The Sony laptops are light and attractive, but almost universally have mechanical problems (hinges and latches break). The MP3 players are a disaster. A relative bought one, and it wouldn't play MP3s -- he had to convert music into Sony's proprietary atrak format before it worked. He returned it and bought an iRiver. The headphones give reasonable (but not exceptional) audio quality for the price, but generally break after about 3 months of use. Cameras have nice imagers, mechanically filmy (but not horrible), but as with most Sony, try to force you into a proprietary, incompatible, overpriced technology stack with MemoryStick. PS3 was an unqualified disaster. Home audio equipment is okay, but suboptimal on the price/performance curve (e.g. Kenwood generally has better-sounding, better-quality equipment for the same price in my price range).
I also really, really, really hate the attempted "synergy." If you want the PS3, you need to pay for Blu-ray. Everything you buy will use MemoryStick, and where possible, use proprietary cables, plugs, and formats to try to lock you in to buy other Sony products, and not work well with non-Sony products.
Well it took me about 30 seconds to discover Ripit4me so I could backup Casino Royale and about 1.5 minutes to find a download that worked so yeah 2 minutes is about right.
Pissed off share holders, particularly those who might have personally encountered the DVD problem, are a very nasty bunch to deal with. They cause heads to roll when voting for new board members etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Let's say that the average consumer is looking at investing in a movie, but knows there is a 1 out of 10 chance that they're wasting their money. There is now a looming doubt if the thing will play at all. It may be a small doubt, but any transaction cost is real. Let's then say that 1 out of 10 decide not to buy, and instead... well, it really doesn't matter what instead, as Sony has already lost their money.
Let's also say that the average pirate is looking to change their ways, and is now out of college and making enough money to support paying for movies. Their incentive to do so is threat of legal persecution and, more significantly, a moral imperitive to support artists that they care about. Now, suddenly, on the other side of the equation is this looming doubt over whether the thing will work at all. If the scales had tipped one way earlier, this might just be enough to tip them the other way.
So in other words, Sony has succeeded in alienating a section of their customer base, prevented another section from becoming legal customers, and all the while (judging by the wide availability of pirated copies of the movies mentioned) had zero effect on the piracy of their movies.
Brilliant. Is it time to put Sony to bed with SCO yet?
The ______ Agenda
Sony will say that because of big bad rippers they had to update the security. The ones who will look bad in the media are the rippers. Sony knows damn good and well that this will barely cause a hiccup in illegal copying of DVDs. What it does is give them an opportunity to demonize the copiers. Remember, the media giants who own the news outlets? Well, they care about their digial rights and copyright as well. They WILL NOT come out in favor of the consumer on this. You'll see.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
You think Sony did this by accident? ha ha!
I wish I had mod points for you, buddy.
Anyone remember this article about bugs and programming?
Committing the "black or white fallacy" is destructive everywhere, both in politics and programming. Saying that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans because they're both politicians is good for one thing:
letting smug, lazy cynics feel somehow that by not doing anything, they're intellectually superior.
All that makes you is a part of the problem.
In which case the guy DEFINITELY won't be buying any more DVDs, since he won't be able to afford them.
Yup. All part of their plan to scrap DVD players in favor of more costly Blu-Rays.
I found it necessary to decrypt a rental DVD to play a it on my computer. It kept complaining about enabled YV out.
Bypassing copy protection should never be the only way to access protected content....
The Law should be yes, but Sony isn't going to listen to the law...
What Sony will listen to - is if Walmart, etc Say: Remove to Copy Protection that causing us to lose sales - Or we'll stop selling your DVDs.
This is the point that is being made - Big Business is about Money - and lots of it. Not the Consumer; Big Business could care less about the consumer.
Only Small Business cares for the consumer, sometimes because they like to, sometimes because they have to they garner sales.
When small business' gets Bigger, its starts to lose consumer focus - and starts focusing on money, and then once a company is public - they don't care about money so much either - they care about shareholders - because shareholders care about money, and they vote weather Mr. CEO and Board Members get to keep their (Very Highly Paid..) jobs or not.
DVD = Digital versatile disc. This does not imply whether the content written on the disc is data, video, audio, or anything other than "just data".
An earlier poster suggested there may be legal implications if Sony had used "DVD-Video" but AFAIK DVD is not a guarantee of any specific type of content.
That's the genius of disc DRM - the rippers bypass it easily while the paying customers can't watch it.
I'm slightly surprised that the incredible disaster of CD DRM hasn't actually resulted in Sony learning anything.
If anyone from Sony is reading, this is what happens when a customer buys a disc with DRM that renders it unplayable. Joe Sixpack simply returns the disc. A N Other Slashdoteer rips the disc and then returns it. Joe Sixpack then uses BitTorrent to download the rip made by A N Other Slashdoteer. Mr Slashdoteer thinks twice about buying another disc, as does Joe Sixpack.
I love how it's necessary now to use tools that only pirates are supposed to use in order to get these dvd to play on a DVD player.
I know that Sony just wants to make sure that people can't pirate their movies, but it's too late for that. It's game over for DVD, at this point the toolchain for ripping dvds is so advanced that it's almost an open format. You might as well avoid all the pain and suffering of trying to encrypt the dvd and just release all DVDs as open format without encryption.
A simple download of a tool and the right DVD drive is all it takes to make a protected DVD into an open one.
I think that it was a smart move on the content producers part that they also used MPEG-2 for HD, when they could have used MPEG-4. MPEG-4 would to have increased the amount of content they could put on a BluRay/HD-DVD since the same movie would take less room on the disc. I think that they wanted the massive amount of data required for MPEG-2 HD content. It only makes it harder for the pirates to rip/burn/transmit a large movie if the source material is huge as well. It makes the pirate re-encode the movie since less people will download a 20+ GB movie. Re-encoding causes the resulting movie to look slightly worse then the original since it is very hard to re-encode a movie in a lossless fashion. It can be done, but usually takes multiple encodes as finding the right bitrate to keep the loss imperceptible is not something the tool does for you (AFIAK).