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"Iron Man" Release Brings Down Paramount's Servers
secmartin writes "Shortly after the release of Iron Man on Blu-ray on October 1, people started complaining of defective discs; the problem turned out to be that all the Blu-ray players downloading additional content brought down Paramount's BD-Live servers, causing delays while loading the disc. Which really makes you wonder what will happen when they decide to shut down this service in a couple of years."
The PS3 has an option to allow/disallow Blu-Ray discs to connect to the Internet. It might be for just this sort of thing?
People will get BD players that don't suck?
I bought Iron Man shortly after work on Tuesday, and put it in my media center (currently running a demo of Arcsoft Totalmedia Theater). The branded "loading" screen spun for about 10 seconds, it gave me a warning saying it couldn't connect to the BD-Live server, and threw me to the disc's main menu.
(Of course, there is a secondary WTF for the disc being mastered to try to download from BD-Live in the beginning, instead of when you go to the appropriate menu, but the primary WTF is the other players out there not failing gracefully to the disc.)
Today I put the disc in again, and this time it downloaded the content.
(Granted, there are real concerns about the key servers for authenticating BD/HD-DVD discs, but this discussion is just within the scope of downloading extra content via BD-Live.)
There is no requirement to actually utilize the BD-Live features to watch this title. I picked it up the other day, popped the disc into my PS3 and let it load. You know what happened? A screen came up ASKING wether or not I wanted to download the additional content. I chose not to, and it continued on its merry way to the main menu and I was able to watch the movie without any issues whatsoever.
No BD-Live just means I can't have the option to have random quiz questions pop up on my screen during the film like "What kind of plane is shooting at Iron Man?" (F-22, btw). So no, it won't cause the world to end if they shut down the servers. All you have to do is click "No" and continue on to watch the movie that you actually bought the disc for.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
The answer is there are no circumstances under which a BD player truly needs to be hooked to the internet. In fact many BD players don't even have network connectivity. The only "advantage" to a player that does offer internet connectivity is that it offers a way for the studios to monitor what you are watching, and to deliver extra material to your player, and a way to obtain firmware updates for the player.
My experience is with a PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, but I'll answer the questions as best I can.
No.
No.
Not to view the movie, but the BD-Live content would require you to have an active Internet connection.
You would have all of the content of the disc available, but none of the extra features (whatever those may be) that come from the BD-Live segment.
I think there was more to it than just the BD-Live issues.
Around 9:00pm we tried playing the disc on a first-gen PS3 80GB (just for reference) and it kept getting stuck at the loading screen (the ARC reactor and nothing else). Finally at 9:50pm we went back to the shop and exchanged it. Back home by 10:10pm, popped the disc in and it went through to the regular menu on the first try.
Did the server manage to come back to life in the 20 minutes it took to get a different disc? Or were there really a bad batch of discs?
both blue-ray and hd-dvd have the remote kill switch option of the drm standard. why do you think it requires a net connection?
Actually, yes. If a player is discovered to be compromised, it can be added to a "bad guys" list and locked out. The list can be updated remotely or by trying to play a newer disc.
I read the internet for the articles.
Though to be fair, my linux computer can't shut down correctly, either, because it gets to "unmounting network filesystems" and just sits there forever.
No, that's not fair. A network mounted disk is very much a horse of another feather, or something like that.
If you have any local state that has not been written back to the disk, it will be lost forever. In that instance you want to do a umount -f and kiss whatever data you most recently dealt with goodbye.
Definitely NOT the same thing.
I use to download, but it's too traceable. And slow. So I upgraded to a 'download by mail' service. For about the same cost per bite as my dsl line for DVDs (and significantly less for HD content) they send me DVDs, HDDVDs, and BlueRay disks of all the movies I want to watch! I just pop them in my ripper and next thing you know they show up on my media server just like I downloaded them! And when I'm done, I just mail them back. It's like downloading DVDs just the torrent client is your mail person!
Just an fyi. Superbowl xxx already happened.
On interactive TV forums I've written extensively talking about how web infrastructure isn't really for national TV and large events with not 100 or 1000 but multiple millions of people try to access the same data within a few seconds of each other.
This is on a smaller scale but certainly proves the point; I do feel there are solutions for pre-caching to tiered servers through the network fabric; but some day when SuperBowl XXX runs and 200,000 TV sets try to access the same JavaTV Applets at the same time... that real fun begins.
The problem is that we're using unicast when we mean to broadcast. IP isn't really engineered for broadcast like TV is but that's what mass media needs. 200M people want the olympic opening ceremony? The main stream gets broadcast. Only things that are truly on demand, or only required by a few, is it reasonable to unicast -- be they Klingon subtitles or the names of the current members of the IOC.
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
Actually HiDef (not specifically bluray) is that much better when played full screen on a computer. Do the comparison sometime yourself and you will see that the difference is not subtle. However, I concede that the difference is not so great or obvious on many TVs. Also the degree of difference depends on the title. Some transfers are better than others and some of the older prints do not do so well on HiDef. On those titles there may be virtually no difference at all.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.