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Here We Go Again — Video Standards War 2010
Andy Updegrove writes "Think of the words 'standards war,' and if you're of a certain age you're likely to think of the battle between the Betamax and VHS video tape formats. Fast forward, and you'll recall we just finished another video standards war between most of the same companies, this time between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Well, here we go again, except this time its the movie studios that are duking it out, and DRM issues are a big part of it. On the one side are five of the six major studios, dozens of cable, hardware, software, distribution and device vendors, and on the other side there's just Disney — and maybe Apple as well, and that's enough to have the other side worried."
Another "slave to the server" DRM scheme. Those have a finite lifetime.
What's the longest-lived "slaved to a server" DRM scheme? Has any such scheme been working for ten years? iTunes may be the oldest, but they didn't support video until 2005, and they've been moving away from DRM on audio.
Think of what al-Queda could do with the signing key for Windows Update.
Ok, I read TFE, and it seems to me that for consumers (which is what I personally am concerned about) there's a clear choice -- buy content (if reasonably priced) from Warner Brothers, Paramount, NBC Universal, Sony and Fox, and torrent content from Disney. What standards war?
Of course, if both solutions are confining and/or expensive, neither will be adopted en-masse. For the first time, consumers have a third choice -- free -- and to compete with that, content providers will have to provide something that benefits consumers instead of annoying them. I wonder if the content providers get this yet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
All the major media companies except Disney and Apple are supporting a media-purchase-validation system that won't work unless your purchase is DRM'd. Disney and Apple are proposing one that works equally well with un-DRM'd media.
Jobs is at it again.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
-I.E., DVD/BluRay discs, any DRM is useless and will be subverted.
Encode the bits all the way to the monitor/TV display. It makes no difference. Someone, somewhere will figure out how to convince the data stream that it's driving an encryption compliant display, while in actuality, that now unencrypted data stream is being written to a hard drive as an H.264 video/audio file.
Even if eventually, everything comes from the cloud, the Chinese will be happy to sell you a greymarket flatscreen TV/Monitor with all the audio/video out ports you could ever want on the back of the display. All ready to plug into your computer.
Until then, ffmpeg and Handbrake/MacTheRipper are your archiving friends.
As for torrents, I look at the Internet as my own personal Digital Video Recorder that automatically edits out the commercials.
Oh, and lastly, I buy almost all my DVDs used. No point in paying the studios/networks/production companies that DRM their products.
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Now, these numbers are slightly skewed by the fact that seasons of TV shows count as single DVD or BluRay titles but each episode counts as a separate streaming title, but it's more interesting when I look at the numbers added in the last three months:
They're still adding a lot of new DVD titles. That's still where their money is. I don't have a BD player and I watch things on a projector that only does 800x600. The streaming titles look a bit worse than DVDs, but not much. Things I stream from iPlayer are very close to DVD quality now, and I'm not even watching the 720p streams. By the time I replace my projector, in a couple of years, iPlayer will probably have increased the 720p streams to 1080p. There doesn't seem much attraction in renting BD over streaming.
If you buy films then it might make sense, but I rarely watch films more than a couple of times, and I'd rather watch a new film than re-watch an old one. I have a library of around 100 DVDs that I almost never watch. I can rent more than a dozen DVDs over the course of a month for less than the cost of buying one BD, so there's no incentive to buy.
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You _aren't_ going to get a key for "The White Album" you are going to get a key for "the 2011 release of 'The White Album" in MP3 format from Sony Interactive for use on sPlayer #xxxxxxx" simply because they _can_ be that specific and they _don't_ want to sell anything once that they can sell a million times.
DRM == RENT, and illegal prior restraint, and a scheme that can never actually work because it is a system that violates every principle of both software engineering and cryptography. No matter how you slice it, DRM is a stupid waste of leptons, time, and money. It is a system based on a complete lack of modularity and locality.
DRM is a classic case of "who will watch the watchers?" and not just at the corporate and financial and cultural levels. As a simple exercise in software engineering DRM must fail. It is a system that must be part of every element of a system (which is the failure of locality and modularity etc) to the degree that you need to have DRM policing the DRM system.
DRM is the Perpetual Motion of Software. People keep inventing new versions of it that don't quite work because no version of it can _ever_ deliver what is promised. Companies keep buying into the hype because they are blinded by "the potential". The only difference is that we are all being forced to buy these perpetual motion machines. Sure _this_ one has a battery in it, _that_ one has to be hooked up to the electrical mains. Some other one needs a waterwheel or a solar panel, and they will all tear off an arm or crush your child if you aren't careful... but we are _almost_ there... just one more scheme and we'll have it right...
The whole thing is a tax, levied by the stupid, paid by the sheep, and ready to break businesses when, I don't know, say Microsoft (or whomever) forgets to update a certificate (or whatever) before it expires (or whatever).
Where the heck do I find the Opt-Out?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press