Slashdot Mirror
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."
That is one compelling reason to not upgrade to Blu-Ray, if you ask me.
And wish them a heartfelt "goodluckwiththat".
I'm still stuck with these ridiculous analog eyes and ears. Stupid forced upgrade path.
HDMI already has the awesome encryption of HDCP between the device and the display unit
As usual, an encryption system that (likely) cost millions to develop, can be defeated with a simple device.
http://www.hdfury.com/
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this company in any way; this is not an endorsement, only a link to a potentially useful resource.
Presumably, this it the 'analogue hole' that they have talked about 'fixing' for a number of years now with a number of DRM companies coming out of the woodwork to say they can do it, ripping off some money and then disappearing with their directors retiring to some island somewhere with naked women?
Any techology that relies on a device sold and physically owned by a consumer denying access to said consumer is doomed to failure. Rinse and repeat.
It's one of the reasons, but certanly not the main one, why I am totally non-plussed by so-called 'High Definition' and BluRay. I did try setting up a theatre system once for someone with a receiver box relaying video through HDMI to a TV. HDCP refused to play ball because the BluRay player didn't like the arrangement. Hmmmmm. Not only do I get to not watch something because of a DRM system, I also have to buy completely new content that is currently a lot more expensive. Bound to be a success.
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.
This space left intentionally blank.
> "I'm certain there are others who might have some free time to look at Blu-Ray and the
> 'uncrackable' AACS."
On the other hand, one could simply ignore BlueRay altogether. Believe it or not, you almost certainly can live without it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Now I know why TV died in the era of Star Trek. People just got tired of all the DRM.
On the up side, they did invent warp drive and transporters...
So, maybe DRM isn't all bad.
I don't own a Blu Ray player. I briefly owned an HDTV but went back to the old analog TV. Sorry, but I'm opting out. The digital entertainment revolution today isn't selling anything that I'm buying. If that means I miss out on things, so be it.
When it was easy to back up a DVD, I legitimately purchased over 600 movies. As the copy protections became increasingly difficult to work around, I simply stopped buying. Hollywood stopped getting my money. I took all that money that I was spending on DVD's and bought a motorcycle instead. Now instead of sitting on the couch wasting 90-120 minutes of my life at a time, I'm spending that time enjoying getting around (rain or shine) like never before.
It's been a year since I ditched the HDTV and maybe 2 years since I stopped buying DVD's. I don't miss it.
Don't like the terms they are giving you? OPT OUT!
As somebody who crossed to the other side- I can agree.
I got a nice 50" plasma and decided it was time to upgrade to blu-ray to make sure I'm geting the most out of my set. So I went out and bought myself a nice Sony Blu-ray player and set out for an adventure. At first I was a little dissapointed, I needed a flash drive to get BD-LIVE to work, but none the less I was determined to get everything out of my $300 that I just plopped down. I plugged in my USB drive and started up BD-Live, only to find out it's literally just trailers for other movies. Why is this a feature? There are other "BD-Live" apps, which if I recall correctly, are written in Java. I always thought the idea of Java really opened up the doors for the platform, but it turns out nobody cares, nobody's trying for anything revolutionary. There's a program to Re-Edit a movie with your own notes and captions, and there's this trailer app. And you need the disc in to use them.
To keep this short, I'll say this, the BD-Live features seemed like something the studios should be paying me for. I really don't understand why a new venue for advertising to me is a feature I should be excited about.
Anyway, the picture quality itself was good, but rewind, fast foward and similar features responded so slowly, that they were useless. It felt like the remote just wasn't connecting- but if you pressed the button once and waited five minutes, it would eventually pause/rewind/fast foward.
I decided I didn't like it, and returned it for a samsung with netflix and pandora- oh what a mistake that was. The features were minimal. No animated menus, clunky browsing, impossibly slow, same issues as the last- but this one had tracking off on both digital and analog audio signals. I can't make my audio receiver make the audio faster- only delay. The TV, unfortunately, don't have any such feature for the delay. How annoying.
TLDR; Blu-Ray has been aroung long enough that it should be a stable technology. They're selling shit for big prices trying to convince people it's better, but it's worse than DVD (and dvds and players are cheap). There's no reason to upgrade. Even if the picture is nicer, I don't care.
P.S. I'm returning my last Blu-Ray and not buying a new one.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
BluRay really does look better. A lot better than a DVD. However, most people aren't willing to pay extra to get that better experience. Just like everybody could spend $3000 on a computer to play all their games at ultra high resolutions with really high framerates. But they don't. Because whatever quality they get is good enough, and the extra money doesn't justify the cost. If they really wanted to make BluRay catch on, they would price the discs the same price as DVD. A new movie isn't worth an extra $10 just because the resolution better. I'd rather buy 3 DVDs than 2 BluRays.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
But the DVD did not have netflix streaming. The DVD did not have online instant download purchase and rental. The DVD did not have the legacy of broken promised that the DVD delivered. Who believes that producers are going to invest in fully utilizing the Blu Ray features.
It seems to me that given the increases in bandwidth and processing power, in five years the movie industry will be at the place that music industry was a few years ago. Desperately trying to protect content, adding increasing layers of copy protection to the media, and losing sales because they made the purchase product so much less attractive than the alternatively acquired product. The reality is that the DVD is easy to crack, but sales are still very strong. Back in the VHS days, the copy protection did little to stop the coping of tapes.
If the copy protection is done right it will be transparent. More than likely no one will care. But I suspect that the copy protection will add costs to the products, which will make them less attractive. I suspect we will see DVDs for a long time, and when they are gone, people will just download the content. I can't imagine that Blu Ray will ever be a major player in the average household. It will be like plasma tv. An interesting plaything for people who can afford it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
My biggest problem with Blu-ray is that there's a huge entry cost and the return is little to none. Most of the movies in my collection were never filmed in high definition, so the quality improvements in switching to Blu-ray would be minimal. To get those minimal improvements, I need an HD TV, a Blu-ray player, and then I need to pay the exorbitant extra cost for Blu-ray media. I can understand why the entertainment industry doesn't understand this though. They still have not figured out that originality and quality of story are far more important than special effects and rehashed garbage if they want people to continue to legitimately purchase their product.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
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!
I thought about this too, but I realized something: movies shot with analog film have a much better resolution than the DVDs they were later transferred to. Unfortunately I can't find a nice link right now for it, but ultimately the resolution of an analog film is determined by the size of the light sensitive crystals used on the film roll when it was shot. Regardless of what that is, it's much better than the 720×480 (for NTSC) that DVDs are. A blu-ray is getting closer to the resolution of the original film that was lost with the DVD that followed television standards. E.g., when I watched full metal jacket on blu-ray on a big monitor, you could actually see the graininess of the film. I don't remember seeing the last time I watched the movie on DVD. Maybe it's because they needed to do a restoration and re-master before they cut the blu-ray, but I was impressed.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
"Now available on DVD and blu-ray disc. Digital copy included"
This means there's a second disc containing an AVI, yes.
That AVI is DRM-protected, such that you need special plugins for WMP or iTunes (or a handful of other media applications) to be able to open them, which needs to be authenticated against an internet server every time you want to watch or transfer the copy.
My guess is so that they can say "Look, we gave you the video in a digital format, and still you download it for your iPod, all your claims are now null, and we own your soul"
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.