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Copy Protection Backfires on Blu-ray
An anonymous reader writes "The first two Blu-ray releases to hit the market encrypted with BD+ (an extra layer of protection designed to stave off hackers) are wreaking havoc on innocent consumers. As High-Def Digest reports, this week's Blu-ray releases of 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer' and 'The Day After Tomorrow' won't play back at all on at least two Blu-ray players, while load times on other players (including the PS3) are delayed by up to two minutes. 'The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung's BDP-1200 and LG's BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastrophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung's BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players ... Calls placed to both Samsung and LG customer support revealed that both manufacturers are aware of the issue, and that both are working on firmware updates to correct it. Samsung promised a firmware update within 'a couple' weeks, while LG said an update is expected in 3-4 days.'"
The players are probably programmed not to play shitty movies
Make movies so bad, nobody will pirate them.
The thing that's so darkly amusing to me is that if I was interested in viewing these movies, pirating would be zero-hassle. It's only when I try to view them legally that I get dicked over.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
From the head of the MPAA: "I KNOW! Lets put so much protection on the new discs that people can't even watch the movie! That'll stop those pesky pirates..."
This just in: Sony now says playing a Bluray disc you just purchased is pirating. More to come.
Obviously Blu-Ray DVD owners should have bought an Intelligent Chip and this wouldn't have happened. The "quantum material" would have upgraded and fixed all of their problems! :-)
Preventing people from having to watch Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer should be commended as a public service.
Why is this on the drive manufacturers to fix when all previous discs played? Isn't this on the shoulders of the disc manufacturers, to produce discs that are playable? By promising firmware fixes, aren't the player manufacturers both diminishing their brand value in the eyes of consumers and also opening themselves up to a lot of headaches when other discs don't play a month or a year from now due to even more envelope-pushing protection?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
this week's Blu-ray releases of 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer' and 'The Day After Tomorrow' won't play back at all on at least two Blu-ray players
That's awfully nice of them. Maybe they'll extend the service to the complete works of Uwe Boll next.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Use regular DVDs to subsidize the cost of selling Blu-Ray disks at the same cost as a regular DVD. In this newest format war, the first company to do this may end up setting the standard because they would have the cheaper movies. Right now, every next-gen DVD I've seen costs about $30 new. If all new Blu-Ray suddenly hit $20 through subsidies from regular DVDs, HD would probably be up shit creek...
Given the pace of these things being cracked, there's a good chance the torrents will be available before the new player firmware will.
No sig, sorry.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
A firmware update? For my bluray player? Yeah because the average consumer will know how to do this or even be aware of the possibility.
Samsung promised a firmware update within 'a couple' weeks, while LG said an update is expected in 3-4 days.'"
I'm sure that will be of great consolation to folks who rented the movies and have four "nights" (which most people refer to as three days) to have the movie back before getting hit with PMITA late charges.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Many players are upgradeable. For both HD and Blueray, you should make sure yours has an online upgrade capability. We know they're going to mess with the protection continuously - that was a given when the general public accepted HD-DVD and Blueray as viable formats.
The Fantastic Four Silver Surfer Blueray version of the movie played back fine on my PS3, no delays or other evidence of handling problems. It was fine for a comic adaptation. Don't know what everyone is bitching about as far as the movie itself goes - it isn't like the Fantastic Four was either great art or great writing in the first place. This isn't a McFarlane production (i.e., not Spawn, which was a tour de force.)
I remember giving someone a really blank look when they said that "Dumb and Dumber" was a "dumb movie." Same thing kind of applies here. You don't get a Fantastic Four movie in order to broaden your critical faculties.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Geez, it's at least ten times that at my local theater!
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I really like watching movies and was excited about purchasing a BluRay and/or HD-DVD player when they came out. But I decided to wait and see and have the companies work out the kinks. Well it's over a year later and there are still problems. When the main focus is not on enhancing the paying customer's experience, but on padding the pockets of the media execs, this is what you get. I should be #1 in their minds. After all, it doesn't matter how much DRM they put in their product if no one buys it.
So, these media firms have lost a faithful, paying customer. I refuse to buy all of their DRM'd HD crap. Since my HTPC upscaler looks almost as nice as HD, I'll just stick with regular DVDs until, if ever, the DRM crap is done away with. And since you can also record broadcast HD shows, there's no need to shell out another $30 to get the HD-version of a show compared to the regular SD DVD version.
Maybe I'm behind the times here, but how the hell do you flash an appliance to update the firmware? Do they have USB ports now or is it a special disc and some weird command from the remote?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Is it just coincidence that the affected players are from Samsung and LG, two Korean electronics giants that happen to be among Sony's biggest competitors? I'm just sayin...that's all...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This is one of the reasons I don't care about this format war, they both are wrong headed... I want content delivered over the wire (or wireless, you get the idea).
Dominant Meme
Dear God, what the hell is this crap? Are we now to allow manufacturers to produce shoddy equipment and promise 'firmware' fixes down the line? That is totaly unreasonable. I should not have to patch my DVD player, update my receiver, or flash my TV.
I should be able to buy some equipment, plug it in and watch my movies. thats it.
I know this is slashdot, so if anything goes wrong we must blame any copyright protection schemes in place, but according to insiders, it's actually a problem with blu-ray's java, and the players that are having problems just need a firmware update. And according to people with ps3s and the movie, the ps3 plays them fine, note how the article says the load times are *up to* two minutes. Don't you just love it when people leave things nice and vague so you can make the situation sound much better/worse than it really is? Although I'm a blu-ray fan, I'm not really apologizing (problems are problems), I thought I'd clarify, especially the bit about the ps3. I wouldn't know anything first hand, I don't like either movie, and Fox tends to charge too much for their blu-ray movies anyway.
Simply because as soon as they start "revoking" keys, yours could be amongst them, so you have to be able to somehow "upgrade" your ... waitaminute, isn't that key one of those things that can't be flashed?
Say, what happens when a key from a standalone BluRay Player (or, let's play it out a little, the PS3 one) gets revoked? You have a rather expensive brick?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am a member of the general public and I have *NOT* accepted HD-DVD or Blueray as viable formats. I have been waiting for something else to come along that promises my ability to view HD movies that I buy on future players. Part of the DRM system incorporated into both standards will "bind" the discs to the players and play them at reduced resolution in any other player. What happens when my player wears out? Must I re-purchase my entire movie collection?
JSL
--
This space for rent.
"This isn't a McFarlane production (i.e., not Spawn, which was a tour de force.)"
It may have amazing character design and art, but come on, the story was written by a drop-out mouthbreather who wouldn't recognize a cliche if he was reading a wikipedia page called "List of Cliches in Literature". Face it, McFarlane is a dunce who can draw pretty.
The more they do stupid things like this, the better I feel when I pirate.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Both the movies mentioned are long available as torrents all over the web. And HDCP protecting the transfer between various HD STB and HD TVs was broken before it was even finalized and small boxes decrypting HDMI signal on the fly are available in various shady places.
Meanwhile a paying customer cannot play the crappy, overpriced movies on his overpriced video player. And my national HD Sat operator's STBs still cannot authenticate via HDMI with my LG LCD. Which is not good, since HDMI/HDCP is a requirement for their VOD HD content...
Screw'em, gotta go and see what's new on trakcers...
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Hell, this is one of the reasons that I already gave up on Apple and their DRM laden music. When my wife buys an MP3, which would be joint property in a legal sense, and we can't have it on both our iPods simultaneously, that's just stupid.
Welcome to the wonderful world of DRM, where pirates watch everything with ease while you have to jump through hoop after hoop just to listen to/watch something that you legitimately purchased. Enjoy the show...while your player still works that is.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
You'd really think that, given they were releasing discs that work differently, they would test them out on currently available BR players. It's not like there's that many out there (to my knowledge). I wonder if there's any coordination at all between the software people and various hardware manufacturers (including Sony) in this area. What a stupid, stupid mess this HD crap has become.
Pardon, usually it's a CD and not a DVD. Seems to work with either on my player though -- it just looks for the magic file, regardless of what you stick in it. Most people with computers have CD burners, even my laptop burns CDs.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
What Sony desparately needs to know right now is whether BD+ is going to hold or fold. They are watching those torrents very closely.
BD+ was one of their main selling point to the studios. If it fails it can't be fixed, and they could lose studio support. That would be crippling to their format.
Don't call it until you can see it on your monitor. All else is rhetoric.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
BD+ is actually part of the BluRay standard, as is AACS. Just like DecSS was part of the DVD-Video standard.
It's a brave new world, son.
You know, I understand how people complain that HD DVD isn't as open as DVD but to be honest, to me it is more open because I didn't have to worry about buying a region free player. On the other hand, BD is far more locked than DVD since there were region free DVD players available fairly early on but so far none for Blu ray. Until Blu ray is at least as open as DVD (ie can be made region free) then I will go with HD DVD all the way. Sure, it isn't currently as easy to rip them as with DVDs but it took years before DVD could be ripped.
I just don't understand why people are supporting Blu ray......
The other day I was looking at disc prices. The typical price for a BD here in NZ is close to $50. HD DVDs are about $35 and regular DVDs are $30 for comparison. Also, there are no discounts to be had on the PS3 and while the US looks to be getting a new SKU at $399US ($525NZ) we are expected to pay $1200NZ which works out at $910US. Think about that.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
You know, if this happened to me, I'd have them mail me the CD. For free. Or cash back. Yes, I do have a computer, yes, I have internet, yes, I can burn a DVD, but when it starts being a money sink for them, they might reconsider supporting the content industry shackles.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that disc would "bind" itself to a player... care to cite a source for that? In order for that to work, the BD/HDDVD player would have to have an Internet connection, and register every single time a disc is inserted in a machine... How else would one player know if a disc had been played in another player? If I remember right all HD-DVD players have network connections, but not all BD players do.
The degraded resolution has to do with the Image Constraint Token. I believe that ICT is implemented in all HDDVD/BD players, but content publishers have "promised" not to use it for a couple years at least. ICT would downgrade the resolution if the video output is not HDCP-compliant. This is bad, but it's not as bad as what you described, and it's not being used, at least not yet.
I'm not 100% sure here, but I think you're wrong. How would a disc get "bound" to any one player? Unless your player is networked it can't communicate with the other players to let them know that it is the chosen one for that disc, and even if it could that would be a ridiculously expensive thing to keep track of AND the player would have to be hooked up to the internet whenever you played a disc. For the disc itself to store that information would require that they be recordable somehow and that the player could then burn to that disc. Unless I'm missing something, you were misinformed.
Dear Sony:
... which isn't logical.
Let me explain this to you by way of a simple 3-party model, since you are too clueless to understand the actual technical details:
Encryption was designed to protect communications between Alice to Bob from the evil Eve. It was not designed to cope with the case where Bob and Eve are the same person. As a clueless DRM proponent, you are trying to give Bob access to an item without giving Bob access to the item
If you don't understand that then I have nothing else to say to you, and any brain cells you may have are entirely superfluous. I recommend eBay as a good place to sell them off.
Kind regards,
Joe Public.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yep, welcome to the brave new media world. Each and every new disc will require a firmware update just to play. Think of it as a kind of 2 factor authentication, only it sucks.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
If those fuckers didn't make us suffer this we wouldn't have to STEAL their shit. You're right. It is always the assholes...
Whether any of us agree or not, this is a legitimate argument. He is plainly stating that as a member of "the general public" he is has *NOT* accepted either of the current HD disk formats. He then makes a few more statements. None of those statements is flamebait either.
I hope this was a mistake. I know I've screwed up and hit the wrong selection when modding.
Someone with mod points please override the "Flamebait" moderation.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
He said "online upgrade capability"... he wasn't talking about an Internet connection being required, he was talking about being able to have an Internet connection... whether you actually plug it in is up to you, but having the option of online firmware upgrades is much better than not having the option, and having to wait for an upgrade disc to get mailed to you, or having to download an update on your PC and burn it to a disc before you can have the upgrade.
I guess the point that you're trying to get across is that we shouldn't have to have upgrades to get around bugs that are introduced by the crappy DRM to begin with, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, for people who already own players that won't play their legitimately purchased discs, they really should be able to ave the most convenient options for getting their players up and running. Especially since these players are still pretty expensive.
**Note #1: I think the Internet connections should be for the convenience and utility of the end user only. I know HD-DVD player manufacturers are required to include an Internet connection for the sake of using online special features on the discs, and probably for bug-fix firmware upgrades (but noone's forcing the end-users to plug the Ethernet cable into the box). I don't believe these connections should be used for disabling decryption keys or otherwise restricting how the user uses the player/discs, or that they should be used for reporting which discs are being viewed on which players. That said, I'm sure the connections do get abused in those ways... I just don't like it.
Note #2: I don't own any HD-DVD or BD players, and I probably won't for a long, long time.
This is a BD-J issue, not an encryption issue. They usually fix BD-J issues quickly. Notice no problem with the Pioneer/Sony player.
[1] This one doesn't go in quotes, because it's surprisingly accurate in the current context.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If I take a CD and I stick into my computer, it plays. That same CD plays in my truck, on my portable CD player, in my TV's DVD drive, on my various consoles, etc... I don't need an "update", there isn't a menu and I don't have to select a checkbox. It. Just. Plays. This concept has been lost in the music community now, and it looks like the MPAA is throwing it out the window too.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
Those players contain a new feature which keeps you from playing movies that suck.
Every time a DVD (Blu-Ray or other) fails, a new Pirate gets his wings.
No, that is a decryption key for the AACS encryption scheme. It is used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
... It was not until unauthorized copying and distribution became mainstream that companies felt they needed to add copy protection to their products. You must be blind or a shill if you don't see where the real push of the music industry is targeted (so i guess i am wasting my time anyway). It is going one way only: perpetual copyrights, criminalization of the public domain (and thus potential competition), and developing technological solutions that make you pay incrementally for every time you listen to music. You know why? Because that is the most painless way to guarantee what the music industry has now -- monopoly profits, and multiply them many times over, by what economists call discriminatory pricing. incidentally, it means total control over the supply market as well. And why is it happening now, and not 20 years ago? Well, only one reason -- now they have the technology to do it (and due to the massive profits from the 80s and 90s -- the cash to finance the bribery of the various parliaments all over the world). The fight against downloaded music is an aside -- the music industry types, being the myopic idiots they are, simply had not expected the general public to adopt the same tools they use. They thought they were way too smart.That was the *first* answer to AACS (see sig for the second, there may be a 3rd and 4th by now). Up until now AACS was used by *both* HD-DVD and Blueray. The same keys were used for both.
Now there are disks using BD+, which of course we don't have a key for. Or AFAIK even a working implementation.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Right, because you KNOW that they didn't care...
/. even linked something recently wherein someone from Sony BMG said that they consider ripping your own CDs stealing.
Wait, what's THIS then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._v._Universal_City_Studios Here's a little fact that's become blindingly clear; they don't WANT you to have ANY rights when it comes to their "content (if you can even call it that). They want to be able to make you pay for the content as many times as possible. Heck,
Face facts: the music and movie industry don't care about you. They care about their own pocket books.
My sig can beat up your sig.
...yet...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
1) Build an HTPC with an XBOD USB HD-DVD drive (cheapest drive available).
2) Install SlySoft AnyDVD to disable content protection and HDCP requirements.
3) Enjoy your HiDef movies
The more firmware-pushing-screw-ups the better. Every firmware upgrade released into the wild is another chance to take a peek under the hood of these blue-ray players. This is just another vector pirates can use to get inside.
I hope more screw-ups follow.
There is no per player DRM. What you all are talking about is HDCP. In its simplest form, it only allows the full resolution output to an HDCP capable device, which is intended to prevent a capture device from grabbing the full picture. If you hook up to a non HDCP HDMI connection, you'll get a scaled down version. So if you shell out a few hundred bucks for a black magic hdmi capture card, you're SOL.
Of course, no one would ever think to crack the encryption and write some software and rip it straight from the disk.
and i'm sure that car 'theft' would similarly be quite common if there was a way to duplicate a car with no inconvenience to the person who owned the original, for less than the cost of a can of coke.
Okay, you're not blind. You dislike the drive for extension of copyright terms and DRM, and believe those are primarily there to protect copyrights, not limit consumer choice and eat consumer surplus. Fine. Now, two questions.
Why has the drive to extend copyrights started long before there was even tcp/ip, not to mention file sharing?
Why has the music/movie industry consistently opposed limited, fair-use sharing "even [though] when it first became easy it was no threat to copyright holders"? Why would they sue the makers of VCRs at the time, when copyright abuse wasn't a threat?
If what you say was true, any of these would be very difficult to explain, don't you think?
Per your own sentence, it's a playback prevention mechanism. If I were a BD-player owner (and the way things are going I'm not planning on becoming one anytime soon) who couldn't play either disk, I wouldn't feel very "protected".
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
I don't know where you heard this. One option that is available, but noone has put the money forward to implement, is that connected blu-ray players can catalog a movie when it begins playing and check an online service to determine if that particular disk has been played in any other non-authorised players.
You can authorise as many players as you want on your account, including those already authorised on other accounts. The system supposedly also cross checks not to see if you're playing a copy of the movie at multiple locations, but if it's insterted into multiple players "at the same time" at which point it was supposed to determine the movie was pirated and lock down ALL copies of the movie from playing in any player.
Unfortunately, to do this, every copy of every movie stamped needs an individual serial code, and all the players would be required to be network connected. This was unreasonable to the consumer and extremely expensive for the industry, and as yet is not implemented in any fashion that I am aware of or that I could find a reference to. This was a reccomendation the industry (or some designer) made when the platforms were up for standardization, but I can not find proof that this made it into the final product.
The only restrictions (as of this week) currently in use are: 1) advanced encryption in the disk to prevent copying (which won't last a week) and 2) HDCP which prevents movies in HD from playing through non-HDCP compliant equipment (to prevent stream copying by intermediate devices).
For those of you with PCs with aftermarket blue ray or HD players, keep this in mind: even if you have a DVI or HDMI connected display, if your OS, motherboard, video card, and display (as well as a few chips inbetween) don't support and are certified for HDCP, then any disks that require it (just 2 so far) will not be playable on your system. For those of you with HDTVS, not only must you have a proper player (with a functional BIOS) but your TV must specifically implement HDCP, and so must any swith or stereo amplified inline between the 2 points. As of Christmas last year, less than 50% of TVs being sold supported HDCP. CHECK WITH YOUR VENDOR BEFORE BUYING A PLAYER TO MAKE SURE IT WILL ACTUALLY WORK!!! Many of you already experienced this when hooking up your PS3 to unsuppoprted hardware...
If you're buying a new PC, Stereo, or TV, make SURE it has native HDCP support. This is most important in computers. Only DX10 video cards support this so far, but your motherboard must also be HDCP certifies as well.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I don't know... looking at your UID, /. now has over 1 million registered users. How many more are not registered? At what size does a population need to be to qualify for "general public"
/. would make you not "general public". But we have all sorts here, not just the tech heads.
I would agree that actually becoming motivated enough to post on
I don't pirate video, so I've not much to worry about, but if I did, I'd rather there be a definitive encryption system that I know I could crack, and know I have done so completely because I can see or hear the difference between encrypted and not. This is far better than the watermarking technology they're hinting at implementing (and rumor they're leaking into peer to peer networks as we speak) in downloaded music and movies. Each watermarked file is unique, and because the watermark containing your personal information (or the person who didn't know any better and uploaded the file) is buried in the digital layer and imperceptible to your eyes and ears, and even to the h264 decoder playing the file, it's impossible to identify watermarked files. It takes comparing dozens or even hundreds of copies of the same file to determine the specifics of the watermark in order to strip it, and each file released can use a unique schema for the watermark data, meaning you'd have to have a crack tool with a database of millions of watermark keys to clean files, something you really can't develop. There's no single key to unlock a watermark like there is for AACS, and worse, it's impossible to tell if it's unlocked or not.
Personally, I'm skipping blue/HD. In 3-5 years they'll have 2.8:1 true widescreen at 2-4 times the resolution of current HD max resolution. DVD is fine for me now. HD vids ripped from HBO are even better (and I get dozens of them per month for $8.99) Sure, I have to wait an extra few months for it to air, but if I wanted to see it that bad, I'd see it in the theatre.
I've got a few TV shows I love too that I'm not only ripping, but first I pass them through a scene detector and strip the commercials. I also pack 2-6 episodes together and insert new scene cuts (titles) before ripping it to DVD. Sure, it takes about 2 hours to prep and rip a disk, but I'm getting free complete TV seasons, commercial free, on DVD for not much more than my time and the cost of blanks.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.