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DRM Group Set To Phase Out "Analog Hole"
eldavojohn writes "In yet another bid to make your life a little more annoying, our DRM overlords at the AACS Licensing Authority have released a new AACS Adopter Agreement. The riveting, 188-page PDF will inform you that — in the name of Digital Rights Management — there will be new limitations set on devices that decrypt Blu-Ray discs. HDMI already has the awesome encryption of HDCP between the device and the display unit. But Blu-Ray still has the Achilles heel of analog players that allow someone to merely re-encode the analog signal back to an unencrypted digital format. So if you have an analog HDTV, hang on to those analog decoders and hope they never break; by 2013 you won't be able to buy a new one. Ars points out the inherent stupidity in this charade: 'Particularly puzzling is the fact that plugging the so-called "analog hole" won't stop direct digital ripping, enabled by software such as AnyDVD HD. And even the MPAA itself recommends using a camcorder pointed at a TV as a way to make fair use copies, creating another analog hole.' And so the cat and mouse game continues. On that subject, DVD Jon's legit company just brought out a billboard ad for his product doubleTwist next to Apple's San Fransisco store. It reads, 'The Cure for iPhone Envy. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds.' So while he's busy taunting Apple, I'm certain there are others who might have some free time to look at Blu-Ray and the 'uncrackable' AACS."
The content industry has not made a compelling case for me to ditch my DVD collection. My upscaling DVD player makes most of my DVDs look great on my HDTV. Why should I subject myself to DRM and an incomplete spec by upgrading?
What's more, if Apple succeeds in making HD downloads seamless and reasonably fast with their new compression technologies (and/or internet bandwidth improves significantly in North America), then it's game over for Blu-Ray. Why should I invest in Blu-Ray and bother driving to a brick-and-mortar store when I might not have to?
Apple left out Blu-Ray from Macs for a reason.
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I suspect that we will see the same thing with video that we did with music.
The normal consumer when presented with the choice between "quality" and "convenience"
will choose convenience. The ability to have the bulk of your DVD collection in the
palm of you hand where ever you go will probably be considered more desirable than
image quality on a large screen that you many not have or may not percieve or may
not care about.
Give a kid the complete Ben 10 in the palm of his hand and he
won't even realize that there is a much bigger TV in the room.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Can you try calling them entitlements? When you call them rights, you play into the hands of those you philosophically oppose. Telling someone you want to take away a group of peoples rights always sounds bad and closes the discussion before it's begun. Tell someone you want to take away a group of peoples entitlements and suddenly they want to discuss the merits of your proposal.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Good plan. You were lucky. If AACS thinks that stopping an analogue hole is going to help anything at all they are seriously stupid, people are breaking copy protection on blu-rays all the time just to watch their discs:
I recently built a new computer and decided that while I was upgrading hardware I would buy a blu-ray drive and see the latest and greatest. So I went to Target and first was completely shocked at the prices of new blu-ray. That's okay, even since the winter holidays the blu-ray discs have been on sale fairly often (e.g. buy two get the third free) so that at least brings the price down to DVD levels. I bought a few movies I thought would look good in Blu-ray like the newest version of Bladerunner and pop it into my drive and VLC won't run the blu-ray movies because of the DRM. No problem, I boot windows and start up the powerdvd that came with the drive and low and behold, I get a helpful message that my widescreen monitor is not HDCP compliant so I can't watch the movie in high resolution. So I head over to doom9 and download dumpHD, but no dice, my drive has had its firmware updated and that blocked the access key dumpHD was using. Okay, well, I thought, I'll get anyDVD and strip that copy protection right out. So I do that and now the movie plays at full resolution, except that the powerDVD that came with my drive is a crippled copy and won't play surround sound, only stereo. No problem, I go back to vlc which now helpfully plays the un-DRMed m2ts files and play the individual movie files (just not the virtual machine). Only problem is now I have surround sound, except if the disc has DTS, the channels are mixed up so the center channel is the surround and the surround left is the center and the surround right has nothing. What I'm left with is having to boot into windows to run AnyDVD, then run eac3to.exe to strip the DTS sound file to an AC3, then run tsmuxer to remux the sound and video files, and then watch that using VLC (not to mention the amount of hard drive space I need for these movies is huge).
All of this crap just to watch my legally purchased blu-ray movies on my legally purchased blu-ray player on my legally purchased computer. What a load of horse shit, I hope Sony goes completely completely out of business and blu-ray goes extinct.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Mine screen is 1080.
Ja!? So ist mine!
Vell be happy! Mien schreen hazen ze dead pixels! Not so wunderbar nau, ja?
My work here is dung.
Indeed while the Samsung LED TVs are not true LED TVs, I noticed that they are using free software in them. Page 91 of the fine manual reads...
GPL software: Linux Kernel, Busybox, Binutils
LGPL software: Glibc, ffmpeg, smpeg, libgphoto, libusb, SDL
Kinda neat, though I wonder what kind of VD they have in mind for their software manager...
-l
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And so we move another step towards the future described in Karl Schroeder's novel Permanence, where even the military has to pay microtransaction fees continually to keep their equipment running... even when they're chasing down people who refuse to take part in the "Rights Economy".
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video
Most major motion pictures are shot on film. Film is a very high resolving medium, with resolution measured by testing its ability to resolve pairs of black and white lines, the unit of measurement is cycles/mm - one "cycle" consists of a pair of lines and is equivalent to two pixels, one black and one white. Film by itself can commonly resolve from 50 c/mm to 400 c/mm (100 pixels/mm to 800 pixels/mm) depending on emulsion stock. However, since the image on film is formed by exposing it through a lens and this lens also has its own resolution limits, the final resolution on the photographed negative is always less than each component's individual resolution.
Depending on the year and format a movie was filmed in, the exposed image can vary greatly in size. Sizes range from as big as 24 mm × 36 mm for VistaVision/Technirama 8 perforation cameras (same as 35 mm still photo film) going down through 18 mm × 24 mm for Silent Films or Full Frame 4 perforations cameras to as small as 9 mm × 21 mm in Academy Sound Aperture cameras modified for the Techniscope 2 perforation format. Movies are also produced using other film gauges, including 70 mm films (22 mm × 48 mm) or the rarely used 55 mm and CINERAMA.
The four major film formats provide pixel resolutions (calculated from pixels per millimeter) roughly as follows:
Academy Sound (Sound movies before 1955): 15 mm × 21 mm (1.375) = 2160 × 2970
Academy camera US Widescreen: 11 mm × 21 mm (1.85) = 1605 × 2970
Current Anamorphic Panavision ("Scope"): 17.5 mm × 21 mm (2.39) = 2485 × 2970
Super-35 for Anamorphic prints: 10 mm × 24 mm (2.39) = 1420 × 3390
In the process of making prints for exhibition, this negative is copied onto other film (negative interpositive internegative print) causing the resolution to be reduced with each emulsion copying step and when the image passes through a lens (for example, on a projector). In many cases, the resolution can be reduced down to 1/6th of the original negative's resolution (or worse). Note that resolution values for 70 mm film are higher than those listed above.
Typical high-definition home video uses the following resolutions:
1280 × 720
1920 × 1080
Usually when studios master movies for home video release they use assets in high resolution and then master them to 1920 × 1080 and/or 1280 × 720. For standard definition applications (e.g., DVD or SDTV), they are also anamorphically compressed and mastered to 720 × 576 (PAL) and 720 × 480 (NTSC).
So yeah. Even those really old movies will look much better in HD since the original films from even 1955 exceed 1920x1080 resolution. Quite a few old movies I see that weren't recorded in digital film are 'grainy'. That is, you can see the grains from the film.