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BD+ Resealed Once Again
IamTheRealMike writes "It's been a few months since we last checked in on how the Blu-Ray group was doing in their fight against piracy. In December 2008, a new generation of BD+ programs had stopped both SlySoft AnyDVD HD and the open source effort at Doom9. At the start of January, SlySoft released an update that could handle the new BD+ programs, meaning that Blu-Ray discs could not be decrypted for a period of time about the same length as SlySoft's worst case scenario. The BD+ retaliation was swift, but largely ineffective, consisting of a unique program for every Blu-Ray master. Users had to upload log files to SlySoft for every new movie/region. They would then support that unique variant in their next update, usually released a few days later. Despite that, the open source effort never did manage to progress beyond the Winter 2008 programs and is currently stalled completely; SlySoft is the only group remaining. This situation remained for several months, but starting around the same time as Paramount joined Fox in licensing BD+, a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable. There are currently 19 movies that cannot be decrypted. It appears neither side is able to decisively gain the upper hand, but one thing seems clear — only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+."
It's important to remember that a lot of people aren't yet focused on bluray. DVD ripping was a must have and many different open-source and closed-source programs popped up over the years because DVD had critical mass. As a previous ex-blu-ray-early-adapter, it may be that people just don't care about blu-ray the same way.. yet. I think if blu-ray ever catches on like DVD did, the story would be different.
I stopped caring about blu-rays, they became too much hassle (and too expensive) for not enough of a quality boost. Maybe in the future when they really start to overtake DVDs (on price too) I'll reconsider. But at the moment, I highly doubt I'm the only one who has no more than one or two blu-ray movies and rented the rest. The big reason I'd have wanted to rip was to keep a digital copy of my collection. Since I don't even have a collection, that will hold off till I stop caring about DVDs.
Blu-ray may yet die a horrible death..
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I don't care about your little IP war. All I know is, the first time I pop a blu-ray disc into my $300 player and it refuses to play because of one of your new little one-upmanship encryption schemes, I'm going to be plenty pissed. And I bet there are any number of ambulance-chasing trial lawyers out there are who going to be looking to make some big money off some nice class action suits everytime one of your new schemes renders all our existing players obsolete too.
P.S. And no, "Well you may be able to get a firmware update from your player's manufacturer" doesn't cut it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+
Maybe open source developers have better things to do than to do legally questionable things in order to circumvent copy protection on an overpriced, obsolete distribution format?
You mean I can't print screen anymore? Been a while since I was even moderately interested in blu-ray since they fixed that bug 3+ years ago. meh.
but one thing seems clear â" only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+.
At the moment.
I highly doubt that there's not a backdoor key in the encryption, no matter how much they try to block people from copying/backing up/ripping. Mainly because if someone buys a $300 player that can't play any current movies and has no internet connection, a law suit is just around the corner.
Time and again the drm has been cracked, why should we think otherwise for this latest iteration. I just don't think enough people are concerned / bothered about it to build up sufficient momentum in the open source arena. The closed source with a paying userbase just hasn't reached critical mass for them to devote enough resource
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
50gb Blu-ray RiP or 1-3gb DVD-RiP?
It's clear that it certainly isn't a straightforward thing to buy a BluRay movie (quite legally) and "just play it" - say, in your Linux PC. It's locked down as tight as they possibly can lock it down.
So, why would anyone buy something designed to be so restrictive to legit owners? I say: don't buy, don't pirate, just ignore the damn thing entirely. The only way the industry is ever going to change their draconian ways is if no one buys their crap.
You might say, "they'll just chalk it up to piracy!" But if no one is pirating either, it hardly matters. They will either go out of business entirely and a new thing will pop up to fill that market niche, or they will change their tune. Either way, it is consumers who have the power *if we are wise enough to use it*.
Is blu-ray still around? I thought it had gone the way that all the proprietary Sony formats had gone before. That is, it had faded into obscurity from disinterest. Let me know when players are less than $100 and discs are under $15. Meanwhile I will continue to use my HD-DVD player, which was purchased for $50 and for which I bought season one of Heroes yesterday for $9.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
AFAIK BD still have a small penetration and most people are still using standard DVD's (I even recall an article a couple weeks ago about avericans having more HD-DVD players in circulation than BD players!)
Just wait until more people use DB and I'm sure it won't be long before each new BD+ gets cracked promptly...
People, like me, are completely uninterested in bluray movies atm. Why would I pay $200+ dollars to be able to rent a bluray if I can just use my existing dvd drive to play any movie I want with already satisfactory quality? Plus bluray is much more expensive compared to renting/buying dvds. Wake me up when bluray *burners* are $50.
I win against blue ray every day because I don't own a blu ray player and have never bought a blu ray disc. I recommend you do the same. Don't buy the discs then get pissed and try to sue. Vote with your feet.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The data is decrypted at some point. Is it that hard to just capture the output from whatever device is doing the decrypting? We only need one person to rip it.
I don't buy DRM crap.
DVD/CSS can go to hell.
Ipods can go to hell.
Who needs Blueray/HDDVD anyway? They can go to hell too.
I do not even buy CDs if they don't explicitly state that they employ no DRM scheme.(*)
I really have no use for crappy music installing Trojans on my computer. If I want to listen to crappy music I turn on the radio, which I rarely do.
I have no use for a "calling home" video player either.
I have more important things to spend my money on than privacy-eroding, basic liberties eroding, greedy, amoral mega corporations.
People should stop watching so much advertising. Works wonders...
(*) A good sign that they do not is this old Redbook CD-DA Logo. Manufacturers are only allowed to put it on if they adhere to the spec. DRM is a spec violation, so no logo!
Captcha: educator hehe
Why can't people realise that movie companies aren't running a charity? Companies release films to make money! How many of those people who are complaining about the encryption here even pay for their DVDs these days? I'd love to place a wager on that!
The good news is, pretty much all of those movies (minus maybe the original Earth Stood Still and History of the World), to put it politely, suck and aren't worth even not paying for.
The better news is, if you absolutely, positively have to have a rip of "Marley And Me," a Hauppauge HD-PVR hooked up to your component outs will cure what ails you (even if it doesn't give you better taste in movies).
The arms race with BD+ mirrors exactly what happened with sattv hacking 10 years ago. The encryption starts out simple and uses a minimal implementation of the BD spec. Once that is compromised the ip holders inevitably move to the more complex implementation of the spec. Currently this involves uploading a code package with each new release that performs the decryption, blacklist checking, and ultimately a system integrity check (the latter makes sure that BD+ API has not been patched to allow unconditional decryption which is the method slysoft uses). With every release, the IP holder looks at how the system has been hacked and writes a specific code package to detect those changes. The end result of this game is that the system will become totally compromised as hackers will simply rebuild the entire BD+ VM and API in emulation and allow for patching outside of the VM implementation (e.g. the system will respond as a valid unhacked system to any checks via VM code packages but will still perform unconditional decryption) Once that happens its over for BD+ as the only possible countermeasure is to attack flaws in the emulator implementation and those are easily fixed. Give it a year or so...
Laser Disc is better than any DVD or Blue-Ray. It's the only way to watch japanese anime!
It appears neither side is able to decisively gain the upper hand, but one thing seems clear â" only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+.
That's like saying "only government funded, for profit individuals have any hope of working on the space shuttle". But the space shuttle isn't represented in the majority of homes yet. Come back when enough people have BD+ to make it interesting.
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And Cassius Clay couldn't possibly beat Sonny Liston.
OK, the clock starts...NOW!
I'm guessing there's an interesting story behind "iamtherealmike".
You are welcome on my lawn.
For those complaining about the "high" cost... You can now get Blu-ray players for Walmart starting from $125 meanwhile Amazon is selling disks starting at $13. Sure it's not as cheap as DVD, but it's gone down in price significantly over the course of 1 year.
Does anybody reading this own an early BD player that no longer will work
due to changes in BD+? Has anybody reading this had to get their BD
player firmware updated to play existing or new discs as a result of
changes in BD+ (firmware updates to get new features such as BD live
don't count)? I know that the design of BD+ makes this possible, but
has it actually happened?
After extensive (30 seconds) research, I take back what I said about iamtherealmike.
I'm still betting on the "part-time, non-profit amateurs", though. The road is littered with corporations who bet against them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
one thing seems clear â" only full-time, for-profit professionals are able to consistently beat BD+.
In this case, the "professionals" (hah!) would be the knuckledraggers at Sony who approved this fiasco. They beat BD+ so thoroughly that I have no desire to go anywhere near it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I never plan on touching a blu-ray as they are expensive and take up physical space. Terabyte (even multiple terabyte) hard drives are pretty cheap these days and can hold a LOT of movies. I can easily stream them to my TV through my xbox 360 and don't even have to get off my ass to change the movie.
I don't know why people are bothering with blu-ray, media centers ftw!
I would love to decrypt all my BlueRay discs. Oh wait, I don't have any, because I DON'T BUY DRM!
Hi,
my best guess is, that the attack angle will shift soon. Instead of decrypting the
content of the disk, there will be software/hardware to break the HDCP-protection.
It would be a lot more difficult close holes there, as thousands of devices are
already out (which cannot be modified but only blacklisted).
CU, Martin
a new set of programs came out which have once again made Blu-Ray discs unrippable
At best, 19 Blu-Ray discs are unrippable - the rest are even easier to rip than they first were, because the "break old BD+ encryption" method of ripping has been supplemented with the "go online and download an already ripped copy" method. So congratulations to the movie industry; a fraction of a percent of the titles they've released will take a little longer to join the rest being pirated. In exchange, they've had to pay for a complex encryption system whose existence has delayed the development of HD home theater equipment, stopped me from buying their products (I didn't buy into DVD either until it had solid open source support, which as a corollary implies that a format is rippable) and failed frequently enough to scare away other early adopters.
neither side is able to consistently gain the upper hand
That's an understatement. Fair use is still grossly inconvenient and/or illegal, and copyright infringement is practically unhindered. It looks to me like both sides are losing.
ambulance-chasing trial lawyers
Wow. Why the hostility toward trial lawyers?
I assume that "ambulance-chasing" refers to law firms who promote the idea of suing in general. The term connotes the use of controversial tactics to convince prospective clients that they have a dispute that is best settled in court.
lawyers don't sue people.
NON-lawyers sue each other.
Guns don't kill people; people who promote killing cause people to be killed. Likewise, lawyers don't sue people; law firms who promote suing cause people to be sued.
I have a Blu-ray player and HDTV.
I still buy DVDs, even when the Blu-ray disc is available, because Blu-ray isn't enough of a quality upgrade (compared to a DVD player with a good upscaler) to be worth the functionality loss.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Again, one more reason for me NOT to upgrade to HD / BlueRay... There is no incentive for me.
With 3 kids, I do not want to have to shell out THAT MUCH money when the scratch / break a disc. That's why my originals are NOT on the shelves. I also like having my homebrew HTPC... I can have my DVDs on hard drive, and watch/dvr my TV shows. I can't do that with HDTV or Blue Ray as effectively. Yes, I can get OTA ATSC, but that's what 4 channels out of the hundred or so I get now with Cable Ready and the hundreds I can get with a set top box connected to my DVR? With HDCP required, that blows that scheme out of the water. No homebrew DVR there...
Again, I see no compelling reason to upgrade.
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
Maybe open source developers have better things to do than to do legally questionable things in order to circumvent copy protection on an overpriced, obsolete distribution format?
How is BD so obsolete? In less built-up areas of the United States, the best home Internet access plans are satellite and mobile broadband, which typically run 5000 MB/month for 60 USD per month, and that equals an effective sustained throughput close to 15 kbps. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a UPS truck full of BDs.
Until they make it worthwhile to legitimately purchase their discs and play it on my hardware (no, not the hardware that they approve, I mean the stuff that I want to play it on), I'm happy getting x264 rips and watching them on my popcorn hour.
Unplayable Blu-Ray disc or playable Blu-Ray rip?
Until BD+ is truly defeated, Blu-Ray discs are not a viable consumer choice. I can buy a Blu-Ray drive and a Blu-Ray disc and still not have the capacity to watch the movie. So why would I do that? How do they expect to collect revenue? From one-shot sucker buys, where someone buys a single movie, finds out the fraud, and then never repeats business? I can't believe that's going to work. Fraud is for fly-by-night operations, not entrenched and known industries like Hollywood.
The first step to having customers, is to refrain from telling potential customers, "Fuck off, we don't want your money, but if you do force it down our throats by buying our product, at least we won't let you play it."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"Piracy wars are not solved by solving the halting problem. Piracy wars are solved by making the other poor bastard solve the halting problem..."
This is actually a really clever and somewhat unexpected approach that the BluRay DRM folks have hit on. Rather than doing DRM, have a program and basically force those who are cracking the disks to crack every title differently. Its basically force those who want to develop ripping software to do AV style analysis on every new disk that comes out.
Yes, the DRM on any individual disk will always fall eventually because all the data must be on the disk and recoverable from the disk by the player. But it makes it very VERY annoying for those writing the unauthorized decryption software.
Test your net with Netalyzr
But what will you do when they stop offering alternative and this turns into "the only game in Town"?
DVD replaced VHS not only because of picture quality but also because of usability: 1. instantaneous rewinding and fast-forwarding, 2. smaller form factor, and 3. players the size of a subnotebook or tablet PC for use by passengers in vehicles. BD's big advantage over DVD is picture quality, and you don't see even that advantage unless you're part of the 1/3 of the population who has an HDTV. DVD players cost about $30 now; with all the patents and copy-protection on BD video, I don't expect that to come down any time soon. So I expect BD and DVD to coexist for significantly longer than the nine or so years that DVD and VHS coexisted.
30Gb can't possibly deliver the definition I require for my 90,000p 200' television. That's why I use LTO tapes exclusively for my video pleasure.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
perhaps its more that HD-DVD is STILL outselling Blu-ray (even though it was discontinued)?
I guess he is probably injecting 3D movie-juice into his eyes already?
Actually, his name being something like Tux on speed, make that VERY probably...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There are certain reasons people want to switch to a new format (eg. VHS -> DVD or DVD -> Blu-Ray)
1) Convenience - VHS had to be rewound, you had to wait for it to fast forward in order to skip parts. DVD can be repositioned on the fly. Blu-Ray is similar to DVD in that regard, so no win.
2) Quality - VHS degraded over time and DVD had a much better resolution. Blu-Ray is supposedly better only if the original source was better than DVD. A lot of small studios don't have 1080p camera's, a lot of consumers don't have 1080p TV's. 720p or 1080i is the current budget format and unless you're going larger than 42" it's not really noticeable.
3) Price - Maybe that should be on top but DVD in the beginning was just as expensive as Blu-Ray. The only reason it took off fairly fast was because of 1 and 2. DVD only killed VHS when the prices had come down so low that there was no real difference between a VHS or a DVD player and a VHS tape or a DVD disc. By then DVD was cracked by a certain kid named Jon.
4) Features - DVD had features that VHS couldn't give (commentary, different audio tracks, extra's) and Blu-Ray has the same exact features. However the added features of Blu-Ray (internet connectivity etc.) will hardly be used because of the inconvenience of having to put in the disk. DVD's have the capability of similar features like games etc. on some discs but again hardly anyone uses them.
The problem that Blu-Ray has which will leave it dead is that the price can never be on par with DVD if the studios are trying to keep control over the Blu-Ray format. How much does it cost to keep re-encrypting, offering firmware, fine-tuning the DRM? You can put it on a DVD and press it for cheap with or without the encryption. Blu-Ray already costs more to press it but now you're going to have to keep remastering it as well and then you'll have to contact all the vendors and let them update firmware in their current stock, at the customers' side, deal with complaints and keep exchanging units where either flashing went wrong or the customer is too incompetent to do it themselves. This will keep the cost of both players and media high and then the customer will complain to their friends that Blu-Ray players are always having issues.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I don't have a BluRay player nor any involvement with BluRay at all. I just have an interest in DRM technologies. BTW the summary is correct - current BD+ programs have proved unbreakable to the open source community. That may well change in future of course. But for now the effort required appears to be prohibitive, as the previous open source implementors have said outright that it's too much work for them.
I do. Every movie I have, I paid for.
The catch is that I don't have HD. When I get an HD TV, I'm going to start seeing HD television from OTA. Then I'll get used to it and want to play HD movies in MythTV. And that's where things go badly, because Blu-ray hasn't got their stuff working yet. I can buy a Blu-Ray disc but if it isn't going to be playable, then I'm not going to bother.
For SD, buying DVDs is an option (it's illegal (DMCA) for me to play the movies, but nobody really cares and tries to stop me) and it's basically the easiest thing to do, so that's what I do. For HD, piracy is the only game in town.
I'll realize it when they try to sell me an HD product instead of telling me that if I want to watch an HD movie, I have to pirate it. They've got to open for business if they want to be seen as a business.
Hollywood's luddite vision of everyone staying with SD is a joke; HD equipment is getting cheaper and cheaper and as people upgrade, they go looking for content. If Hollywood doesn't get ready for that market soon (by releasing all the BD+ keys and lobbying to repeal DMCA, or releasing a new format that improves on Blu-ray by removing the DRM) then "charity" might not be the most accurate label, but it's what they'll be wearing. If my choice is between buying SD DVDs or pirating HD files, I'm going to want to fill up those pixels, and if that saves me money too, well, that's just a bonus.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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No, it's the player software for failing to work without HDMI. If he downloads a ripped Blu-Ray from the net, or captures OTA HD TV, I bet it will output to non-HDCP HDMI port just fine. So obviously HDCP is not needed in order for HD movies to play. The problem must be somewhere in the player's software handling of Blu-ray discs.
Man, I see in Slashdot the smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation fighting encryption, cracking protection; slaves with DRM collars. Advertising has us chasing movies and music, using formats we hate so we can watch movies we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose of place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a format war; our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised by technology to believe that one day we would have universal formats, backwards compatibility, and ease of use. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
All it takes is one pirate with high-end equipment, and then it is on the net for everyone. Meanwhile, the regular users who want to play Blu-rays on their PC are fucked over.
BD+ runs on a VM (Java based IIRC) so just reverse engineer the thing and write a compatible VM. If the BD+ programming on a given disk balks at your VM because it detects its running in a VM, reverse engineer that BD+ program and find out how it works.
If you popped a Paramount BD into your Oppo Blu-ray player and it didn't pay, why would you sue Sony?
It might be possible to make incompatible discs with BD+, but it's possible to make them without BD+ too. Hell, you can make a DVD that doesn't work in regular DVD players by fooling with the scripting enough (idiot companies have done it in errant attempts to enforce region codes and such).
I'm actually pretty angered that I can't rip BDs again (and despite what the article says, there are more than 19 of them), but I can't blame Sony because FOX wanted to make Point Break unrippable.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
BD+ is not uncrackable but it makes it very difficult to extract the disk's volume key because a machine is required to run a program to obtain it. BD+ programs can be model specific and involve memory or timing tests making it difficult to emulate. Slysoft has just been able to cope so far because relatively few disks used BD+ and did so in relatively unsophisticated form. But if more studios come on board Slysoft is going to have severe trouble keeping up. This is ultimately what BD+ is meant to do - to delay and impede piracy (and fair use). The more disks that use it, the more cracks appear in the supported disk list. It's not inconceivable the big studios are planning a "big bang" where suddenly and in a coordinated fashion they all go BD+. Then it's lights out for AnyDVD. It will never recover from that.
but if there are Blueray (sic) players for the computer, can't
you just share the drive (samba); obviously the official Blueray drive can read the
disc and then re-sample (h.264) it on another computer which is connected to
the first one (with the blueray drive) via ethernet?
As soon as Hollywood releases a bunch of geek-friendly movies "only on Blu-Ray", that'll be the end of the effectiveness of the DRM.
Right now it sort of looks like Blu-Ray is winning because it's an active battle. But as I understand BD+, that battle can't go on forever. Once the entire virtual machine has been figured out, it's all over for the protection side. Furthermore, even if that isn't the case, each release is in itself a stationary target. So each will be cracked eventually. If Hollywood only cares about first-mover advantage, that won't bother them. But I think they're too greedy for that.
I stopped caring about blu-rays, they became too much hassle (and too expensive) for not enough of a quality boost.
I disagree. First of all, it can be as hassle-free as plugging one cable between a player and a screen. What's the big deal?
As for quality, try watching something like Planet Earth in full 1080p resolution. Many of the scenes are positively breathtaking in their detail and clarity. I happen to be watching on a bargain 72" TV. At this size, DVD's are very visibly inferior in resolution. I recently rewatched Terminator 2: Judgment Day on DVD and was struck by how noticeable the quality difference was. It really detracted from my enjoyment of the movie until I became caught up in the action enough to stop thinking about it.
I've sat beside people who simply can't tell the difference, however. I suspect these are the same people who stretch standard 4:3 aspect ratio programs across their wide-screen TV's and are oblivious to the distortion.
Until it is trivial to rip to my media center I won't spend a dime on BluRay. We also take great pride in owning the physical media for everything on our media center (nothing stolen).
"Blu-Ray is supposedly better only if the original source was better than DVD. A lot of small studios don't have 1080p camera's," Say what? Did i miss the boat? When did film suddenly require a "1080p" camera? By default all analog cameras are high definition. It's the subsequent post processing and scanning that converts them to high definition digital format.
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
BluRay is ALREADY OBSOLETE. Yes it's a bitch to rip. But who cares. Media is all online and streaming now. Broadcasts are in HD 1080p. There are SOO MANY OTHER WAYS to get the same content. ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT YOU CAN HAVE A 4GB HD MOVIE THAT LOOKS THE SAME AS A 30GB BLURAY. All this 1080p content is becoming available as torrents, just download as normal (hint searching for mkv files may help).
The blu-ray discs could certainly be decrypted after that period of time. And the unrippable discs of today will certainly be cracked tomorrow, or the day after, simply because the movie studios will continue to use the same method until it's again cracked.
If you can live with not having the disc on Day 1 then the movie studios lose. If you've simply gotta have it on the week of release then they win. They believe that you have no self-control when it comes to your viewing habits and unfortunately too many of you keep proving them right.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You may not initially realize that it's refusing to play. You may attribute your blank screen to an unusually long loading and initialization time endemic with blu-ray.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I enjoy watching movies at my "cabin" in the woods, because that's when I have the time to do it. I have a blu-ray player and an hdtv in my cabin BECAUSE I don't have internet access. If I had internet access I'd just download movies. I don't have a phone line and cell phones don't work, which is why I have time to enjoy the movies.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
I have this flow setup and tenuously working:
Netflix-born-BluRay -> AnyDVD-HD -> 2TB HDD buffer -> Virtual Clone Drive -> PowerDVD (don't get me started) -> 46" 1080P Sony LCD seated at 45-degree viewing angle (THX recommended minimum is 36-degree)
I delete the rips after I watch them so I'm not stealing anything -- just time shifting. Though I'm sure I'm breaking the letter multiple BS laws. My conscious is clean (with a little guilt thrown to Netflix, but they enjoy a steady stream of good money from me). If anyone were to try living with the above setup for a while, you will never want to give it up. BluRay and DVD look amazingly different at that viewing angle and level of quality. I'm not just a believer, but a junky. The blurriness of DVD hurts my eyes now (even though PDVD's upscaler is quite impressive). Hell, even my stock-feminine wife could see a big difference when we switched from DVD Madmen to BluRay. And she sits on the bed behind the Captain's Chair at ~30-degree viewing angle. So to everyone here crapping on BluRay, you're flat wrong. You just don't have the proper environment to appreciate it, but you probably will within 2 years or so. So quit downplaying important technology (to me now, to you tomorrow).
I've bought BluRay movies in Europe and Asia and they play fine on a PS3 bought in the USA.
As far as I can tell, almost none of the BluRay movies are region locked. There are rumours that such movies do exist, but I've yet to see one.
DVDs have the same unskippable feature, so there's no "one up" for DVDs there. I suspect your DVD experience is made up from more pirate DVDs which typically have that cruft removed.
Slaves with DRM collars? Speak for yourself. There's more to life than DVD's, MP3's and computers man. Go for a jog now and then, there is a bigger world out there.
You can enjoy any movie you want at home.
Just ignore the internet and turn off the phone.
And if you're into bluray and you didn't understand that all players have to be updated, then it's your fault for being ignorant.
You can update most players via cd or usb drive, if you must. It doesn't have to be over the net. Grab the latest firmware and take it to the cabin along with the movies you plan on watching.
And the entire point of a cabin in the woods is to enjoy the surroundings. You can be a nerd in a cave at home, internet or not.
Yeah. So they are spending more and more money creating new 'protection schemes' to prevent piracy? they same type of piracy that cost's them almost nothing?
Meanwhile the high dollar pirates, the onse that just make bit by bit copies and restamp them, still go unchecked? Way to go.
Also, if the movies cannot be decrypted, then they can't be PLAYED.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why limit yourself to file sizes defined by disc media? Hard disk prices and broadband speeds have effectively killed the disc burning market. Netflix can stream dvd quality movies instantly, and you don't have to wait in line for a new release (my point being that you don't even need disc media for distribution).
For large data transfers, hard disk-to-hard disk can't be beat for ease of use, transfer speed or storage cost.
I don't know where you got your "standard" from.
Hahahahaha. This is actually quite funny! Good job in writing this. You should write for money, rather than waste your life trolling.
The answer is to boycott Blu-Ray all together.
And if you're into bluray and you didn't understand that all players have to be updated, then it's your fault
and I guess it's our fault as well when the company that made our bluray player goes out of business and we can't get updates as well right?
DRM .. WILL .. EPIC .. FAIL
Just let it play and record your desktop at 1080p resolution ;-)
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Seriously, you seem to think that the BD+ has won. If anything you're missing out on a few interesting points here.
First, if they won, then even Slysoft wouldn't be able to create new patches to circumvent the encryption. The issue here isn't whether they will or not. The issue is, how long will it take them to get around it this time. If anything, it keeps things a little entertaining, but it's still a non-issue.
Second, apparently BD+ is losing in many ways since there's not even enough interest in Blu-Ray for the open source community to waste their efforts in making the format consistently playable. Therefore, it's not an issue of trusted computing as much as a "Who really gives a crap" type scenario.
Third, high quality movie rips are entirely possible through many alternate methods, even if they are more time consuming and less convenient. As long as a film can be played, it can be copied. It's only a matter of how long does it take. For the moment, the convenience level is low since the resolutions are high enough that the time required to re-encode an HD film is high. Using new technologies like Intel's Larabee will change the playing field by quite a bit since there will be more processing power for running x264 or other encoders coming around.
I work in the world of hardware video encoders and real-time in full-HD is still a challenge, even with specialized hardware. These days, it's the average time it takes to rip and re-encode a DVD with 2-pass high quality encoding is 15 minutes on a not-so-special PC. To do a roughly similar job from an unencrypted Blu-Ray takes 24 hours at least.
Don't mistake lack of interest as being defeat. There just isn't enough interest in busting the encryption on Blu-Ray because the time to reencode is just TOO much. Once the CPU power for HD encoding becomes more readily available, if Blu-Ray even still exists, it will be cracked and present in a lot more systems.
Seriously - who cares about Blu-Ray?
Why pay out in the order of a thousand pounds to completely replace your entire TV system - from screen to player to the stand that the TV is on to replacing the shelves on the wall behind the TV with ones that can accommodate a flat panel display - everything has to go. And for what? No increase in quality and a lot more hassles.
I don't see this entire generation of technologies getting sufficient traction to make me replace everything. I'll look at the issue again in a decade or so and see if anything is still surviving then.
(I should point out that it was the wife's idea to get a TV. I was perfectly happy with the radio, and that's still mostly what I use the TV system for, since it's radio reception is better than the analogue radio. I might try looking at DAB when it's settled down a bit.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Lets focus less on the 16 disks we can't yet rip, and a bit more on the thousands of discs that rip fine, but then have difficulty playing back (particularly TrueHD audio).
Nice misquote.
It's your fault FOR BEING IGNORANT.
It's not your fault that the situation is shitty.
Lots of people (myself included) will take the shitty, will make an informed decision as to what player to by (PS3), and will enjoy themselves because they view the pros as outweighing the cons.
Lots of people (myself included) will take the shitty, will make an informed decision as to what player to by (PS3), and will enjoy themselves
You got right ahead and be the dumbass and buy your pretty shinny box. We'll see how long before sony drops support for it after the new one is out.
And I'll misquote whatever the fuck I want and I do so just to mock your Nazi ass as if there was a 'right way' to begin with.
I already bought it, dipshit.
It's still considered the best Bluray player on the market.
Oh, and guess what, it plays games, runs Linux, and does all sorts of shit I'll never even need.
Oh, and it's been updated time and time again.
Oh, and it's the fucking player that made Bluray win the "format war".
Oh, and it's from Sony, the fuckers behind Bluray.
Yeah, I'm confident that support will be there far longer than I need it to be.
Nazi ass?
Wow, we've got a special kind of retard in ae1294.
HAH! ok sex con ker!
Like I said enjoy your shinny box from your god... Sony...
Wow, we've got a special kind of retard in ae1294.
O... and your doing it wrong....
The difficulty ripping blu-rays, the forced warnings and trailers, the bugginess of players... all suck.
However, I can easily say, if you are watching movies on a 120" projection screen, at 1080p and even at 720p, there is a significant improvement in picture quality. Just as standard def TV looked bad when shown on 42"+ TVs, DVDs (including upscaled) can look similarly bad on 120"+ screens. I've got an Oppo DVD player, known as one of the best upscalers out there. It does a good job and animated films look great projected. But for movies with real actors, a quality Blu-Ray film blows away a DVD on a large projection screen.
Projectors are so cheap these days (a good 720p projector can be had for about the same as a good 40-50" plasma) that I wouldn't be surprised to see many more people adopting projectors. There's something very different about sitting down to watch a movie with friends or family in front of a 10' screen compared to a 42" TV.
I'd love to see Blu-Ray without the cumbersome, anti-fair-use (aka anti-"toddler insurance") crap. But I want the format to succeed because nothing else offers video quality that holds a candle to it. Some people think we'll skip mass adoption of Blu-Ray and go straight to digital delivery... okay as long as your net connection stays up. If you've got backup power and a library of disks, you've still got a movie night when the power goes out in the middle of a snow storm. With a physical disk and a player, you're not at the whim of your ISP, cable, or fiber provider when you have people over for a movie.
"Hey Albert, Good luck exploring the infinite abyss."
Seems to me that going after the LVDS stream to the display panel would be a much easier method of a good rip that cannot be easily prevented. Capturing the audio is trivial. It's only a matter of time before these hardware hacks are implemented and kits are provided to mod 1080p panels to spit out a convenient signal to either record or dynamically re-encode.
Eventually HDCP will get hacked.
To paraphrase an old movie quote: "The tighter Sony's grip, the more the system will slip through their fingers."
On the quality issue:
Sony lost the VTR wars because Beta did not bring enough improvement in quality to overcome the VHS Consortium's low-cost solution. Sony has a long history of being head of the pack on creating new formats and then finding that the market just is not willing to go there in the long run because superior quality alone does not trump affordability, choice, and enhanced functionality. VHS to DVD was a no-brainer for the consumer.
DVD to BD... not so much.
On voting with dollars:
I personally do not support the media on their IP war. I refuse to purchase their products, and if eventually that means I have NO access, so be it. It's not entertaining any more.
The media companies have made the value proposition untenable as far as I am concerned. I have simply taken my dollars to entertainment formats that do not have such thorny issues. Should there come a time that there is a must watch movie, the secondary market avoids giving the IP wars any of my money to fuel their folly.
The only thing that will stop this senseless war is to take the money out of it. Don't buy it, avoid using it, even on the secondary market. Eventually they will sell us exactly what we we want. We just will need to be clear about what that is, and refuse to compromise.
If enough people can apply a little discipline to their entertainment funds, this IP war can be won very quickly.
If 50% of the market were to participate in a boycott the media companies would probably capitulate in less than a year.
BD can support unencrypted media as easily as encrypted media.
Watermark it if you want to chase down criminal bootlegging. (commercial infringement) I don't mind having my copies serialized and traceable to me if that will help put this piracy nonsense to rest. However, the encryption bullshit must stop.
I was considering a BD drive for my HTPC. I was ready to go for that HD quality. But it sounds like this arms race will probably render it hopeless at playing movies.
Either it won't play the latest BD+ or I will have to pay regularly for upgrades to play new movies.
This kind of war is the kind that keeps legitimate customers on the side lines.
I am not buying into a new format until they address the anti user features.