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Ghostbusters Is First Film Released On USB Key
arcticstoat writes "Are you the USB keymaster? You could be soon if you pick up PNY's new 2GB USB flashdrive, which comes pre-loaded with Ghostbusters. A spokesperson for PNY explained that it comes with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. 'They have DRM protection,' explained the spokesperson, 'so customers can download the movie onto their laptop or PC if they wish, but they have to have the USB drive plugged in to watch the movie, as the DRM is locked in the USB drive.' The music industry has been playing around with USB flash drives for a few years now, but it hasn't been a massive success yet; will USB movies fare any better?"
no that is a terrible idea, the last thing I want is a ton of USB drives laying around while I try to find any form of media.
Waiting to hear news that the movie's been unlocked in 3... 2... 1...
Can't rip it, can't archive it, can't move it to my HDD without the dongle. And if the flash drive gets damaged, who you gonna call?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
O.K., so the Blue Ray just won the Hi Def Wars. So now we get into another format war? Sigh.
One thing about movies on USB keys: At least they won't be scratched like they can be on DVDs.
Proverbs 21:19
The DRM will be broken as soon as the first reasonably intelligent person gets his or her hands on one.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
No to mention the wasted space on the device...
Wonder though.. could you use dd to make a disc image of the whole drive and then mount it as loop and have it work?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Aw. That's adorable.
Can't rip it, can't archive it, can't move it to my HDD without the dongle. And if the flash drive gets damaged, who you gonna call?
The pirate bay.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
You probably can't even get Ghostbusters down at your local "Three DVDs for $20" guy on the corner; his stock is all newer. Everybody who wants this movie already has it. I can't even imagine who they expect to sell it to, except as a novelty.
Presumably they're keeping an eye on how long it will take for the DRM to be broken. People will break it for the challenge and because they hate DRM, but it's like stealing cockroaches from my kitchen: you're welcome to it.
The DRM will be broken as soon as the first reasonably intelligent person
who doesn't already own a copy of ghostbusters
gets his or her hands on one.
Which probably makes for a rather small set of people.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Can't put it on a portable media player, either. What's the point of digital media you can't take on the go?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Does anybody remember Dongles? Is this a glimpse of the future for DRM's - having to have a flash drive or dongle to play your music/movie/whatever?
-- I for one welcome our Dongle Overlords.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Sounds like there is DRM embedded in the video stream, so there's no way to decode it unless you have the right codec, which will look for the USB key.
It also sounds like it'll be locked to Windows, since I doubt they put that much effort into making it for Linux as well... Or even OSX.
It's really sad, because it's not like that's a hard movie to get... DVD, Divx... Just about every format imaginable is available on the web for that one.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Worse than starforce.
Damn thing is coated in an ectoplasm that clogs the fuck out of your USB ports.
With apologies to Ray Parker, Jr.:
If there's D-R-M, on your movie now,
Who ya gonna call?
The Pirate Bay!
If the U-S-B, key just died,
Who ya gonna call?
The Pirate Bay!
dooodooodit doo dit do dit doo dit doooo dit doooo dit dooo dooo dit dododo
I ain't afraid of no cops.
dooodooodit doo dit do dit doo dit doooo dit doooo dit dooo dooo dit dododo
I ain't afraid of no cops.
My blog
Apparently if it asks you if you're a god, you say YES!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Considering the DRM, how is it better than a regular DVD?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Oh come on. You're not buying the movie, it's a "value add". It's a stupid gimmick, but the usual soulful bemoaning of DRM is more than a little silly in this case. If it gets damaged, you've lost it, just like any other product. If I buy a keyboard or a hard drive or a glass crack pipe and it breaks, I've lost the product. I find DRM whining to be nonsensical.
Then they are lying on the Argos web page...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=952461&cid=24862147
The deeper issue is that it is ridiculously overpriced.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There is a point in the process between the USB Data and sending it to the display and sound. That is where the weekness is. Sure there is always the analog loophole. But you can get quality loss there. But for the hackers there is a spot where the data is sent and unencrypted and uncompressed that is probably sitting on your PC's Memory Before it sends it to the screen. If it is windows only then it may be some extra work, but nothing impossible... Heck a hardware hacker could probably find a way to duplicate and queue the memory up rather easy without the OS knowing what is happening. But for Linux a couple of kernel hacks and maybe a pipe to the tee command would do the trick. And like any other form of DRM it really only needs to be cracked once and spread for it to be useless.
I undersand the want for these companies for DRM however it is a fools game where you put so much money and effort and acheaving nothing from it. The black market has always been in competition with the legal market and there is only so much they can do until the Legal market can find a way to be competitive with the black market.
I would think fancy artistic box covers have done more to keep piracy down then any DRM has ever had. I would suggest that they make their Media DRM free but put more effort in its box art and presntation of their media.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think this is cool, but it will it work with my USB keychain changer?
--- What?
I can see this take off actually, the product allows for all sort of novelty packaging and product shapes. Forget about browsing the alphabet of your closet to find Spider-Man, just find the Spider-Man shaped USB key! Collecting large quantities might make organised storage a bit of a challenge though.
Does USB mass storage provide a way to ensure read-only access though? I wouldn't want some virus to have the potential to delete my porn, erm, Star Trek collection.
> With apologies to Ray Parker, Jr.:
who in turn apologizes and makes a substantial payment to Huey Lewis for shamelessly ripping his tune off.
Can I play it with the video player of my choosing or do I have to install yet another video player? I don't really want to have 10 different video players on my system. I don't want to have to maintain/update every one of them. I don't want each of them thinking they need to change file associations.
So you need to have this USB key to play the movie (some hidden key file or internal serial number one suspects). That means we're back to hard to replicate dongles. Clearly the USB stick is of little use otherwise singe the movie takes up the bulk of the space on it (unless it's compressed down to crap quality), you can't plug it into your DVD player or television, and you need to take another one for each additional movie. Do you really want to go on a trip with 20 dongles just so that you can watch 20 movies? And I doubt it plays on your iPod.
I'm not impressed.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Physical media? Pff, what century is this?
qntm.org
And if you buy a keyboard with a glass crack pipe built in, and one of them breaks, then you are really boned.
Monstar L
I like to own media and do what I want
You do own the media. It's just the contents of the media, the message if you will, that you don't own.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
While it's fine for a small-physical-format solid-state distribution medium, it's just too costly compared to (piracy aside) a DVD copy at $5-10. If the device's price were reduced for such content, fine ... but since a common 2GB thumbdrive is about $10, by what sanity is paying a >$20 premium to have just one movie thereon (and occupying significant space) reasonable?
Thing is, you get a thumbdrive to haul data around in ... and do you really want to be constantly hauling the same single movie around with a bunch of other data? No. We're not talking an iPod which has your whole CD or DVD collection handily available, we're talking a device which you'll keep handy yet is significantly devoted to one content which you won't watch much.
Imagine carrying around the Ghostbusters DVD all the time. Preposterous, no? This may be marginally more convenient, but still goofy.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
DVD quality takes less than 1/4 of a DVDs size. On 2 gigs you could get maybe half a nearly bluray quality movie, properly encoded.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
How long before the DRM is cracked? I'll be generous and give it a month, tops.
USB movies, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Wasted space? What about wasted money? £29.99 for a 2gig pendrive with a film or £4.50 for one without.
Buy the DVD and rip it and still save yourself over £20.
Yeah, ok, it'll be broken in 5 minutes. With y'all there. ;)
But this is an interesting idea (if the industry is going to continue to insist upon DRM)... the only problem I have with it is whether a USB key for each movie would be too hard to manage and keep track of.
But a laptop is a PC...
I don't see the point in this. It seems that simply shifting between media is not the way to go: film downloads are the future. Be they rentals or outright purchases, movie downloads are going to kill the physically-sold film. (With devices like home entertainment computers and Apple TVs, it's just a matter of time.)
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I can sell you a can of high tech USB scratch remover. For only $19.99, this spray will remove scratches, improve picture quality and cure your herpes, but wait, now for a limited time offer you can get TWO cans for only $39.99...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
" A spokesperson for PNY explained that it comes with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. "
BWAHAHAHAHAHahahha
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Modern Flash has a very long lifetime.
"What happens when your usb key fails?"
same thing that happens when your DVD fails.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Its hardly 'value add' when they're asking £23 more for the version with the movie on it.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
What is this obsession or draw to people thinking it's fun to watch movies on your computer? My computer room, and by extension my little 24 and 28" monitors are NOT the place I find comfortable to sit down and watch movies.
I realize some people have media center PC's, as do I, but I know I am in the very small minority. Full blown media PC's that can play movies off of USB are rare and not a lucrative market. So why this obsession with movies ON the PC? Now, if I had something like a DVD player that had a USB slot where I stick the USB key in and the movie starts playing, I could understand it... but I do not, and will not ever want to watch a movie in my computer room.
If I have a full blown media PC that can play this USB stick,then I sure as hell likely have a full blown broadband connection... so just let the download the movie. Why fuss around with hardware that's not needed? Hardware that will have certain requirements beyond what's required for a downloaded movie?
I won't be buying any movies on USB keys, that's for sure, just like I refuse to by physical media of any sort. I want to play it where, when and HOW I want... the USB key limits that, so who needs it?
And tell us here how it works! ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
OMG PNY!!!
I'm just not sure I see the point of this. It's a 2GB key, which means it's not going to be better quality than DVD. As cheap as these USB keys are getting to be, it's still more expensive than a DVD.
I can see the value of wanting a movie on a USB key, I suppose, but in that case I'd probably rather buy the DVD and the USB key, rip the DVD to a normal format, and drop that on the key. At least that way I can back it up, or use the key for another purpose without losing the movie.
Seems like a solution in search of a problem.
I bet it installs a horrible outsource written driver right after you plug it.
If they are more clever, they have also "hidden" it just like Sony. There you have a brand new thing creating problems and you don't have a clue if it runs or not.
All this happens on Vista which is said to be just almost stabilised on SP1.
Can't rip it, can't archive it, can't move it to my HDD without the dongle. And if the flash drive gets damaged, who you gonna call?
DRM Buster!!
(Disclaimer: Don't know if the site is legitimate, but at least it rhymes with the song ;-) )
Flash memory has a finite lifespan for the number of writes it can take, which these days works out to be several years. It also has a finite lifespan for the number of successful reads, which is what we're talking about here, that is so long you will have a machine with no USB port before you can't read it.
Can't put it on a portable media player, either.
Can't put it on a dedicated portable media player, but you can probably put it on a mini-laptop such as the Acer Aspire One that my cousin is thinking of buying.
Are they looking for a new distribution medium so movies don't cost as much to produce for retail sale? If that's the case then maybe this isn't such a terrible idea. Any type of DRM is already obsolete so we can remove that from the equation.
The sheep will use the dongle and be happy. Everyone else will crack and rip the movie to a different storage medium. Heck, I can even see moving it back to a thumb drive if the speed is there to watch it smoothly.
Now I'm no hardware person. I'll be the first to admit that. But doesn't reading from USB take less power and generate less heat than reading from an optical drive? And fewer moving parts means fewer chances for something to break.
The price is laughable if they're trying for proof of concept. This kind of thing smacks of the "Release something people really don't want for an outrageous price then scrap the idea because no one is buying it" type of thinking that has permeated the media industry for far too long. I can't even hope for anything different any more.
AND HOW MANY TIMES I wanted to grab my keychain and show them the scene I was alluding to, in the version I was alluding to.
And being on USB, I can carry each version on my keychain. I hope they are thoughtful enough to color code them.
WITH VOICEOVER, Bitches!
This is an excellent promotional idea for selling USB drives, but not movies: you are already buying the hardware dongle, might as well get the movie with it :)
On the other hand, I could envision "Movie ROMs" being pulled off if marketed properly. They would have to sell very cheap hi-def "movie dongle" players that hooked up to your TV. I'd buy such a device if it also played regular video files.
Such a scheme would not deter the hard-core hackers, but I could see people buying into the idea of "owning" a movie on a USB dongle that was difficult to copy and more durable/compact that a DVD.
Sure there is always the analog loophole.
Not necessarily. Yes, the analog hole works with movies like Ghostbusters, but it fails with video games like Ghostbusters .
...required me to keep possession of a USB-key-sized physical object in order to maintain access to it, then I calculate that I would need to keep about two thousand pounds of USB keys, which would be enough to fill approximately twenty desk drawers.
I guess it's not impossible on the face of it.
I could store them in shallow drawers, vertically, alphabetical order, with little P-touch labels on the end of each one.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
And we've been criticizing the movie industry for their outdated business models and lack of innovation. Now they have discovered USB thumb drives? Will someone please tell them that they can stop selling VHS?
Does anyone besides me see that this is just another ridiculous attempt to bind media to a physical medium in order to control customer ability to enjoy content?
Well I'll store all my torrent files on external hard drives from now on... maybe they'll release one of those with a keycard soon.
Sheesh.
Porn, this kind of DRM would actually be great for Porn. Nobody else can watch unless they have your USB drive. Other than that it seems pretty lame.
So, it's not just LOADED on the stick, it's PRE loaded! What will they think of next? These men of science.
And thank goodness we don't have to buy used cars anymore. Used cars suck. Give me a pre owned car. It's like new, but cheaper, right?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
This is insanity. I can download a copy of that stupid movie without Dumb Restrictions on Media from TPB, or I can just watch the tape I already paid for over ten years ago. Now, I'd buy the key with the movie pre-loaded, but to pay good money for crippleware when I can get a perfectly useable copy for free is just brain-dead stupid.
DRM doesn't affact copyright infringers whatsoever. It only inconvieniences paying customers. The only rational explanation for the MAFIAA's insanity is drugs - cocaine. It must be all the coke they're snorting/smoking/shooting that makes them behave like a bunch of thieving, distrusting, irrational crack whores.
I just started reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (HTML version linked; there are other formats here), and its preface has something to say about the insanity that is DRM (I've abbreviated it a bit):
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If you want a medium I hear Zoltar is really cheap and he can pop out a card that will shrink you and your willie for a quarter.
Being able to do it doesn't make it legal, but the "Fair Use" clauses in copyright say he's allowed to make a copy for personal use, ripping it without the DRM is fine, he should give the reason "DRM means I can't watch it with the video player I currently have installed." if asked, although technically he doesn't even need to say WHY he did it, just that it was only for his use.
on a 2 GB flash drive? DVDs are 4.7GB, so is this thing compressed a lot or low resolution or what?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
If nothing else, write your own video and audio drivers that "displays" the movie to a file.
Windows Media Digital Restrictions Management allows a file to require use of the Protected Media Path in Windows Vista or the predecessor protocol in Windows XP, which rejects drivers that lack a WHQL digital signature. You'd have to use the actual analog hole, which might involve a camcorder and, like other methods based on output capture, would definitely not work for the video game adaptation of the movie.
And that's using Canadian money!
(That was much funnier before the dollar tanked.)
You said "Flash memory has a finite lifespan for the number of writes it can take, which these days works out to be several years."
Do you realize that the number of writes is not a measure of time, right?
Its a measure of the number of writes and cannot be translated into time. You would have to include a scaler value with a time dimension in order to translate the number of writes into time. One such scaler value might be writes per second (commonly denoted writes/second.) With both the mean maximum number of sustainable writes and the number of writes per second, we could then calculate some measure of device lifetime.
My 10 year old 64 meg compact flash card that originally came with my digital camera still works fine. Modern flash memory has a relative lifetime several orders of magnitude larger. Here, I get to evoke the measure of time without considering writes/second because I am simply comparing relative values both with a time dimension.
Have a nice day.
"His name was James Damore."
gold masters have infinite lifespans as far as I know.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"which looks set to be a part of the next revision of the DVD standard. "
Are you saying DVD isn't on the way out?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
"This is Piratebay, we're not in at the moment but at the tone you can leave your threats of lawsuits. Beware; everything you say is going to be seeded."
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I can't see that there is any way they can release something that is just *impossible* to copy. If you can read it, you can copy it.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
The drive works with all OSes, the film only with Windows most likely.
Much like when Argos says that a webcam/software set works with Linux, when actually only the webcam does.
Although that's not usually a problem, sicne I don't expect the software to work, and the software is just something you get with the webcam, not the product itself, but this could be considered kinda deceitful
As I can't fathom cocaine users, I asked a crack whore why she thought the coke shooters running the movie studios would do this.
"Sure, I'll tell you, but it'll cost you twenty dollars".
"Twenty dollars??? Sorry, babe, I'll buy you a double cheeseburger at McDonalds, how's that?"
"OK, that'll do. See, they want this to FAIL and fail hard. They're doing this to prove that the concept is unworkable."
"Ok, I'll take you to McDonalds now."
"Man, I ain't goin' nowhere, I'm tweakin', dude. Just go get the burger, it's for my dog anyway, I'm not hungry. OK?"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Hell, these are just dongles! I haven't seen one of those since the '80s. They worked about as well, then, too (not so much).
Haven't seen the film, then?
I'll take 1000 of your infinite lifespan data storage devices please.
Oh, sorry, Mr. Lewis. With apologies to Ray Parker, Jr., and Huey Lewis.
My blog
Uh, yes, as frequently as the topic is discussed in Slashdot threads, I didn't feel the need to include the phrase "given typical usage patterns." I figured anybody reading it would understand that's what "works out to be" implies. But feel free to be pedantic.
That wasn't the point, anyway. The point was reads, which are apparently so reliable that nobody feels the need to quote read reliability at all. According to this, flash memory can be read up to 100,000 times before it needs to be refreshed. Given the date on the article is 2006, I speculate that more modern flash memory chips may include built-in refresh circuitry.
I give it a week, and somebody will crack this silly DRM. Probably with some "virtual USB drive", or something else that simply strips the DRM-ness right out of the file. They can't stop it. They can't see it. They don't know what it is, or where it comes from, but it hits them every day. It's called freedom.
point is you never bought the product... you only licensed it...
How long is the license? as long as the media lasts?
They either sold you it... or leased it..
NOT BOTH!
Which is why I've not bought media since napster died.
If you want to buy your albums again and again and again just because they think that they can gouge money out a new format - that is your problem, not mine.
The want they hardware keys back!
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
It's not about the particular film or about the DRM or even about the PNY. It's about a means for distribution. I saw an advertisement about a year ago for a company in Ireland that was working with IBM on a similar technology that allowed for fast USB sticks to have a movie downloaded from a Kiosk to a flash drive. You buy a memory stick (not sure if it was a proprietary one) and their set top box. You pick out your movie on the kiosk, insert the USB stick and it downloads while you wait. They were trying for a thirty second transfer time but I think it was taking more like three minutes which can be an eternity with the kids in tow. Regardless think of the possibilities. They could put them anywhere and you would never have to go back to return the movie. And they could create an internet Kiosk across your home connection. Why do you think Comcast is going to throttle their bandwidth... too much video.
DRM, in this case, is a choice between DRM'd content and no content at all. I'd rather have DRM'd content than none.
I, on the other hand, would rather do with none than with DRM.
I made that choice when the DVDs supplanted videotape and didn't buy DVD movies - or buy or rent any movies at all - until after CSS was cracked and the movie industry gave up on their attempts to stuff that genie back into the bottle. No blu-ray players for me, either. Stopped buying CDs, too, when they started experimenting with the early computer-speaker-blowing "copy protection" that corrupted the data and depended on the error correction on players to recover the music (and thus corrupted it when you got real errors from a dirty disk) and never really got back into purchasing new music after that.
Never actually MADE a backup copy. And never downloaded a "pirated" song or movie, either. I just don't buy encumbered stuff.
Instead I found other ways to amuse myself. (For instance: The amazing number and variety of animals outside the place on the high desert put on a continuous show that's quite entertaining - especially when I flush the well and create a puddle that draws them in from miles around. And there's lots of amusement on the net that is not "pirated" copyrighted content.)
Interestingly, I don't really miss the corporate "content". Either the quality took a nosedive around that time or the product stopped matching my (quite broad) tastes. (Though from what I hear of some local bands it's more the former than the latter.)
We all make our choices.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I could see this being a cool idea for a rental machine you pick a movie it copies it to a blank thumbdrive and registers the thumbdrives code to a central server. You can then play it on an internet enabled computer/media centre. No more guessing required to figure out how many copies of a movie to keep. This would especially make sense once USB3 is common, they could fire movies on to the thing in a few seconds and as the resolution of movies goes up they'll probably be a larger capacity thumbdrive available that they can use.
Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view to a certain extent, but what is clear is that Hollywood isn't planning on abandoning DRM any time soon. As a result, they're not going to adopt any form of writable media to store digital copies unless it has some kind of DRM system built-in.
And as a second-order result of that they're going to miss the fast nickels while chasing the slow dimes.
But private enterprise is all about being free to make stupid business decisions and taking the resulting consequences on the bottom line. (And losing the fast nickels is NOT one of the consequences they'll be able to lobby their way out of.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's a 2GB key, which means it's not going to be better quality than DVD.
Only if you are keeping it in MP2 format. There have been many advances in video encodings/compression since the early 1990s
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Two comments:
1. I've often wondered if porn were purchasable this way. Not that I want to buy it...but I see a market if such a product doesn't already exist for something along the linse of this: you buy this USB key with X application on it (some modified portable version of [insert OSS app here]) that would appear as a legitimate application, and work as advertised, but have a hidden mode that is activated via some super secret hot-key combination plus password the user sets to launch the hidden porn stash/viewer and another quick hot-key to go back to normal mode. The idea is for the man on the go who wants an easy way to hide his porn stash in plain sight.
2. Since SD-RAM cards are so cheap now, and almost every device I have supports them, I've been considering transcoding my DVDs to MPEG4 files onto 1GB SD cards. Before I go spending all that time doing it though...Anybody think this is ill-advised?
Hulu has Ghostbusters 1 and 2 freely and legally available to watch online. You have to deal with commercials, but meh, it didn't bother me, i watched it last week!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Seriously. As thumbdrives get cheaper and cheaper, this makes sense. DVDs (and Blu-Ray discs) are just too fragile A USB drive is durable as hell. Plus, and most importantly, USB ports are *dirt cheap* and *small*. Imagine how many USB ports you could have on your "USB Movie Player" device. 20? That would mean 20 movies available instantly, all the time. Hell, screw movie players- imagine having console that used nothing but high-capacity USB drives! You could keep all your games plugged in all the time, and the load times would be fantastic.
Is that as good as downloading movies? No. But let's fact it, we just don't have the bandwidth in this country to support millions of people downloading HD content all the time.
I feel like this is more of a "proof of concept" that flash memory as a media can replace something like DVD or BluRay. In other words it is just an attempt by PNY to diversify their product into a new market for hopefully increased revenue.
My opinion is it is still overrated since the internet is quickly proving that you don't even need a media to play a movie. You can just stay connected to the internet and download or stream the video on demand. Just like how MP3s, itunes, and such are quickly making the Audio CD go extinct, I think the same will inevitably happen to movies.
I wonder what kind of crap this will install on computers.... remember Sony ?
I mean in the past copy protection forcing you to use the floppy was so successful, why dump this magnificent copy protection and go for the USB? /sarcasm off
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
By reading the title I was ready to buy it because it sounded like such a cool idea and I wanted to own a piece of history. Then I read the part about the DRM. Nuts to that! Why do companies keep repeating the same mistakes everytime? After being burned by some software that used DRM and then they went belly up; I will not by anything with DRM, ever, period!
a week later in a meeting somewhere...
Engineer #1: This DRM scheme has obviously failed. There's a version of Ghostbusters on PirateBay now.
Engineer #2: But of course there is, there has been for years. It's probably from the original DVD release.
Engineer #1: No, this one is new. And it's in the top 100 downloads list. It must have happened recently, and the only recent release is this USB dongle here
CEO: Well scrap this scheme then, it's causing piracy already
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
The article cites the price of the USB key is £30 - which is close to $60.00US.
Even if 20% of the price covered the value of the USB key (generous, I think) that leaves £24 ($48US) for the movie. This is ridiculously overpriced.
This is a boring sig
Great. Now I can imagine digging through my junk drawer looking for a USB drive with "The Dirty Dozen" on it. It's just something else that will end up going through the laundry.
Apart from the geek factor, this is probably one of the dumbest ideas for movie distribution since animations made by flipping large stone tablets. Give us movies via download or stream. No more tapes to warp, disks to scratch, or dongles to lose.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
> And if the flash drive gets damaged, who you gonna call?
HE-MAN !
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nobody cares. much cheaper at amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Ghostbusters/dp/B000PEX1IE
this has great application for distributing films to be viewed by critics, or giving them out to youth as door prizes at baseball games, but beyond novelty uses it's dead in the water, i think.
Ooh, Biblical reference. Nice.
I run Ubuntu skinned to look like a Mac on a PC. Go figure.
You can get one or both of the DVDs for a lot less than half that!
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters 1 & 2
Bring back Sirius Punk!
No.
LOLCat sez: Do not want
They are thinking old fashioned media distribution channels. Get it through your thick skulls idiots in the music and movie industries. We want media free content. Just the data. The container doesn't matter anymore. All we want is to be able to access the content we like, anytime we want to, anywhere we have a device that can play it. If there's internal storage in that device I should be able to copy it as many times as I want across as many devices that I want. If some people use that freedom to steal, LET THEM. There are plenty of people who will still pay for it (I know I would simply to stay legit) and you'd still make more money. Oh... and lower the goddamned prices while you're at it!!!
K-thnx
Bai
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I've worked out that if I converted all my DVD's into thumb drives, they'd be the size of a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.....
"The music industry has been playing around with USB flash drives for a few years now, but it hasn't been a massive success yet; will USB movies fare any better?"
I don't see any reason it shouldn't Cost aside people put a form of "dongle" in their DVD player all the time. Plus if all the anecdotal slashposts are to be believed? USB drives are more durable than plastic disks. And one has the same advantage in that one can loan it out to others. Now those who believe in "information wants to be free" might have a problem? But then that's an impossible bunch to please.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
If memory serves, movies are MPEG2? Encoding them MPEG4 (DivX) might make it possible to fit it onto a stick.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You'd be surprised. Nowadays, they're packing up to 8 movies on a dual layer DVD (just over 1 gig each) and the quality isn't that bad. You can get avi rips off the internet that are less than 800 megs and they're pretty good too. I can easily see them putting a decent quality movie on a 2 gig USB key.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
I use an ASUS A730W as my portable media player - it wasn't noticably more expensive, and occasionally the ability to browse the web or IRC from it comes in handy. If these USB key movies become popular, there's no reason people couldn't use similar devices to play them portably.
I am trolling
Can't rip it, can't archive it, can't move it to my HDD without the dongle. And if the flash drive gets damaged, who you gonna call?
The pirate bay.
You can find it by legal means: http://www.hulu.com/watch/25534/ghostbusters
Full length streaming movie. There are occasional ads, but they are neither long nor annoying.
My page.
Great, so what, you're going to have some highly compressed HD movie into 2GB? Compression has gotten better, but it's not magic.
Retail, a 2GB usb key costs at least something like $10, while a DVD that holds twice as much is closer to 20 cents when purchased in any volume. You can even get a bluray disk for about $10, and that will hold more than 10x as much as the USB key. So what kind of sense does it make as a distribution medium?
Can someone tell me what happens after Bill Murry says "Okay, I have a plan. I know exactly what to do. Now stay close, stay close. I know. Do exactly as I say. Ready, ready, get her!"? this cheap Chinese import Ghostbusters USB stick turned out to be a fake 2gb, it's only a 128mb stick.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Two points
1) The Ghostbusters video game, based on the original movie, is set to be released October 31. So this may be part of that hype.
2) This is likely a piracy experiment. They've embedded a watermark in the copy of Ghostbusters on the key, which they've protected with over-the-top DRM. The DRM is eventually cracked, and the watermarked copy of Ghostbusters is uploaded to P2P web sites, which the vendor then tracks. Basically, I think they're trying to measure the "spread" of piracy here.
Indeed.. but if we are to truely remain true to topic... who in their right mind is going to play Ghost Busters 100,000 times? There is no "typical usage pattern" for Movies on USB Keys, and when there finally (if ever) is such a thing, its going to be way less than 100,000 times.
"His name was James Damore."
Ghostbusters
I tried that, but then a giant Ballmer came marching down the boulevard with a massive chair in his hand, and started smashing buildings.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
There is only Zuul!
You have got to be kidding me! Where are the Ghostbusters quotes and obligs. You guys are really slipping.
Sig this!
VBR lame-encoded MP3s, with not a speck of DRM! Effective by design!!! And if you drink Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, and other Pepsi products (although paradoxically not Mountain Dew, dammit) you can get FREE tunes. I've had iTunes for years and never bought anything. However, I've bought from Amazon.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Screen capture software anyone? I hear they do sound lately too. Son of a gun, what next? Digital Wristwatches?
Speak for yourself.
Maybe PNY imgine it might take the place of rentals, or something.
Maybe they hope the tech will be built-in to digital TVs in the future to get around "man-in-middle" recording.
I can't imagine that they ever considered that peeople would build a movie collection on USB sticks.
...is whether or not PNY's USB key with Ghostbusters loaded on it is cheaper or faster than any other USB key.
DRM content has zero value - therefore the fact that a key has a DRM movie on it is irrelevant to any decision about buying a PNY key.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
If I buy a keyboard or a hard drive or a glass crack pipe and it breaks, I've lost the product. I find DRM whining to be nonsensical.
Traditionally, media licenses have made a provision that you could make a single copy for backup and archival purposes. The reasoning is, since it's cheap or free to make the copy, you can easily protect your investment and there's no good reason to prohibit you from doing so. Keyboards, hard drives, and crack pipes are slightly different in that the price of a "copy" is equivalent to (probably greater than, if you have to make it yourself) the price of an "original", thus it wouldn't make sense to "copy" your device for backup or archival purposes.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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Errrm....but Missouri is a state.
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The point being that the provider is under absolutely no mandate to facilitate or even allow that copying. And often allowing it is not in their best interests because people like free shit and it costs you nothing to distribute the content you don't own. So I have nothing against you making backup copies, but the fact is by "backup copies" most people mean (wink wink) free shit. Ergo, we have DRM which is a necessary evil.
The point being that the provider is under absolutely no mandate to facilitate or even allow that copying. And often allowing it is not in their best interests because people like free shit and it costs you nothing to distribute the content you don't own.
It's also not in their best interest because if you can't make a backup and the original gets beaten up to the point where it's unusable, you'll have to buy another one. OTOH if you made a backup copy there's no need to buy another, which they see as a loss of revenue. However, copyright laws specifically state that the copyright holder has to let you make copies for your own use (fair use) or for backups. So basically, they are required to let you.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
They are not required. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement charges. So if you make a copy and they sue you, you can say (and prove) it was fair use. They are under no obligation to facilitate (via technical means) this copying. This is why DRM is perfectly fine in terms of the law. DMCA is the problem, the pendulum has swung too far the other way. It should be perfectly legal to crack DRM or any other technical protection.
I think we're saying the same thing. No, they aren't required to facilitate copying, but cracking DRM for the purposes of fair use or backup should be legal. Your original comment, "if it breaks tough luck", was what I was responding to; in essence, "no, because making a backup of digital data is free, unlike copying physical objects."
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.