Goodbye, HD Component Video

glogger writes "Jim Willcox, the video expert at Consumer Reports, bids farewell to our ability to get high-definition video via the analog component-video connections on Blu-ray players. Thanks to Hollywood pirate-paranoia, potentially millions of law-abiding viewers will have their choices restricted. Quoting: 'Hollywood studios now have the right to insert an ICT "flag" into a Blu-ray movie; if it detects that a player is using an analog connection that doesn't support HDCP, it downconverts the video's 1080p (1920 by 1080) native resolution to 960 by 540 (540p): better than DVD quality but only about one-quarter of full HD quality. This ensures that high-def video is available only through the copy-protected HDMI outputs.'"

Comments

i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

You need an HDFuryII http://www.hdfury.com/

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a problem with that. I rip all my BluRay films as soon as they arrive.
I don't even have a stand-alone player for this kind of reason.

If they ever change things so I can't rip my movies I'll just stop buying them completely.

Re:i know what you need

[davecotter]

sorry, i meant to clarify: the HDFuryII is for hooking a digital source up to an analog display, not the other way around as this article is talking about. But it means you can use the digital out connector (HDMI + HDCP) from your blu-ray player, pass it thru the HDFuryII, and on to your analog (component) TV, and it'll "just work". brilliant.

Re:i know what you need

[Z00L00K]

That site got slashdotted! :)

Re:i know what you need

[Moryath]

Better yet, why not just rip the blu-ray and put it on a network media center? Skip the middle man, and not have to bother wondering where your 3-year-old hid the disk or worry that he scratched it up since you can then put the disc away in a very safe, secure place.

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, how much room do you have in your NAS? Because mine tops out at around 4 TB, that's not that many HD movies unless you compress the crap out of them and then you've basically done what the ICT flag would do, reduced the quality.

I'm all for compressing crap I don't much care about, but what's the point of compressing your favorite shows that you spent extra to get in HD?

Re:i know what you need

[davecotter]

seems 4TB holds quite a few HD movies, at least according to my calculations. Take Avatar, a 3 hour movie. compressed to m4v, that's 30GB, still with stunning quality. that's about 136 3 hour movies. probably more since movies are usually less than 3 hours. i think.

Re:i know what you need

[Grishnakh]

For any BDs that use MPEG2 encoding, you should be able to recompress them in MPEG4 and use only half the space without any difference in picture quality. (I think most newer BDs use MPEG4 now, so this probably only applies to older ones.)

Also, you can leave out all the commentaries and all that crap, and save even more room. With 4TB, you should have enough space for 500-1000 movies that way, I imagine.

Re:i know what you need

[profplump]

I've done that with my DVDs, but I haven't yet found a playback solution for Blu-Ray that reads menus/etc. I can rip the main titles easily enough, but if you want to do any of the fancier things (like the PiP commentary/etc.) you need a full-fledged Blu-Ray playback system.

AFAIK the only option is PowerDVD, which is Windows-only and which isn't scriptable. Are there other choices? Preferably something that doesn't require Windows, but I'd even settle for "needs Windows" if the playback controls are scriptable and it won't complain about reading from imaged, decrypted folders instead of a physical disk.

And yes, I know the menus/etc. can sometimes be annoying (though Blu-Rays are much better than DVDs in that respect) but sometimes I do want to use them. Plus if the the playback interface is scriptable you can often default to "play the stinking movie" while still maintaining access to the menus if you want them, just like many HTC DVD systems do.

Re:i know what you need

[nabsltd]

Because mine tops out at around 4 TB, that's not that many HD movies unless you compress the crap out of them and then you've basically done what the ICT flag would do, reduced the quality.

Many Blu-Ray movies are encoded at essentially constant bitrate despite the fact that this is not required to maintain the full quality.

You can re-encode a 1920x1080/24p movie at about 10Mbps average and be 99% identical to the original 30Mbps encode, as long as you use a 2-pass encode to make sure the bits end up where they are needed. Then, toss out audio and subtitles you don't use, and it's pretty easy to get a movie down to about 10GB with no real quality loss. For movies with wider aspect ratios (where there are black bars encoded into the Blu-Ray), you can get away with even lower bitrates.

That would give you room for over 400 movies on your media server, which really should be enough for most people.

Re:i know what you need

[grub]

Hehe, they're probably wondering "What did we do to piss off Anonymous?!"

Re:i know what you need

[mitgib]

Time to build a new NAS then, as 4tb was probably good when DVD rained supreme, now 10tb is a nice starting point.

Re:i know what you need

[trollertron3000]

It beats what I saw at first HD Furry. Furries in HD *shudders*

Re:i know what you need

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

For all those saying that "this will just make people aware of other tools" I just learned about the HDFury. Not saying I'd need to use it - i pretty much rip all DVDs when i buy them. I haven't seen the need for a BluRay player. With the encryption broken I'd buy the BluRay disc and rip/encode it as well, which is legal (well for now).

I hate how they talk about plugging the 'analog hole' like it's some evilness from another dimension inflicted on poor defenseless conglomerate as they fought for us the consumers. Component video was a standard, written to and agreed to by, gasp, other conglomerates. It works between machines because large corporations saw value in having high quality video going over it. So now, after more convenient ways of 'breaking' BluRay surface they pull this garbage. Good thing they're getting this out now or else I'd see a lot of BDRips on TPB.

Re:i know what you need

[SuricouRaven]

Pirate conventions place an HD 720p movie at 4.4GB. Not because this is espicially optimal, but because it's convenient. It's the size of a DVD-R. One movie rip, one DVD-R.

Some pirates choose to put extra effort into compression and release smaller files, while some films due to exceptional length or visual demands need a larger file. But most are 4.4GB. Pirates tend to think in terms of filesize rather than bitrate, as filesize is what matters when distributing.

Re:i know what you need

[Digicrat]

Theoretically PowerDVD can be integrated with the windows Media Center and used with an MCE remote. I've yet to try it though, mostly because I don't have a working IR receiver for Win7, and the PC is nicely connected via HDMI to the TV, and DVI to my normal desktop monitors.

Re:i know what you need

[__aamnbm3774]

yea i mean, i'd much rather worry about off-site storage and extra local backups of my hard drives.
one strategically spilled drink could mean the end of All your movies. i mean RLY!

Re:i know what you need

[__aamnbm3774]

too bad those high-tech things called SHELVES are only for the most elite. better buy an additional entertainment center, complete with media centers. its the only way.

Re:i know what you need

[cayenne8]

"Better yet, why not just rip the blu-ray and put it on a network media center?"

What are some tools out there than you can use to rip bluray?? Linux tools?

Re:i know what you need

[ShooterNeo]

Or you could just head over to newegg and pick up more storage 2TB at a time for around $60-$90 for 2 TB. (depends on which special is running at the time you look)

A NAS with only 4 TB is a little long in the tooth. If it works for you, fine, just saying...

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still buy it on Amazon.

Re:i know what you need

[Manuel Iglesias]

I am a proud owner of an HDfury II, and I have to say that I found it incredibly useful to use non HDCP compliant monitors to watch HD content via VGA (play xbox 360 in 1080p for example). This way I was able to give "new life" and play mi videogames in old monitors and an old projector.

Re:i know what you need

[gmack]

makemkv but on it's own it creates 30 GB mkv files. I use the "backup disk option" from makemkv to get a decrypted copy of the disk and run the resulting files through handbrake to get a smaller copy.

Re:i know what you need

[gmack]

Audio commentary is often just an extra audio track and when it's not then it's an extra video file. Really the only thing you lose is PiP but then I *hate* that function anyways so ripping it to my media NAS is no loss for me.

Re:i know what you need

[hairyfeet]

And you just hit the nail on the head as to why BD is ultimately doomed. I've had several customers come in asking about BD and when they found out the extra gear and hoop jumping they'd have to do to rip it compared to DVD they were all "How much is an upscaling DVD player again?". Most around here have either figured out how easy it is to rip DVDs or has a relative that does it for them, and between that and media tanks like this one (which is one of my hottest sellers ATM, people just love the thing) while BD will have the videophiles I just don't ever see it reaching DVD level support.

But what really pisses me off about the *.A.As is the double standard bullshit they try to pull. They say "oh you didn't buy the (insert movie/game/CD) you bought a license to use it!" (and thus getting around first sale). Okay, I'll play. That means I get to replace it for free if anything happens to the media, right? After all I already have a license to use it? "Oh no" they say "You bought a copy thus you have to go buy a replacement!"

BULLSHIT! Total unbelievable bullshit! Never in history have we allowed ANY company to use either/or when it comes to copies and licenses.Physical media and licenses have clearly written rules and obligations under the law, and what these bastards are trying to pull is getting the protections of both and the responsibilities of neither. We are already being held back by a bunch that if anyone would have listened to them back in the day both video recorders and recordable media would have never existed, and now that we are finally getting all the pieces to where one can simply have all their media in a box that you can access anywhere they are holding everything back once again.

All they are doing with this kind of bullshit is yet again making piracy the more attractive option as there isn't any hoop jumping or bullshit to back up or copy that .MKV rip, no different than how the DRM and limited activation bullshit is making the pirate version of most games the more stable and nicer running version compared to the legit. If they would just listen to their damned customers for once, and give them good value in easy to use media, maybe we wouldn't have all this BS in the first place. Instead the *.A.As don't seem happy if they aren't finding a way to actively fuck over their customers, so is anyone surprised when the customer fucks them back?

Re:i know what you need

[Stregano]

I am not going to lie dude. Thread over, you win. I am posting a reply like this since I ran out of mod points to mod you up. I am seriously not reading anything else here since nothing else needs to be said. Nice

Re:i know what you need

[Dahamma]

If HDFury wants to keep their HDMI/HDCP license (and from their website it sounds like they do), they will have to follow the same restrictions as the BD players...

Re:i know what you need

[markass530]

it's probably easier just to download them, if you have the bandwidth. it's def cheaper

Re:i know what you need

[markass530]

yea that thing is WAY overpriced, .

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I prefer the WD Live. Has an HDMI output or component if you don't have HDMI, can support USB devices, as well as access to your SAN via an ethernet connection, or you can buy a USB WiFi dongle.

Re:i know what you need

[sixsixtysix]

not sure about linux tools, but here is what i use:
Ripping:
anydvdHD, which costs money
dvdfabHD, which has a free version for just ripping.
Transcoding:
ripbot264 to encode/mux to mp4 or mkv.
My process:
just grab the biggest m2ts file from the bdmv\stream folder. not always the case, but more often than not. from there select the video/audio/subtitle stream, let it demux those. then, adjust some parameters(cropping/resizing, desired output size, etc) and let it go. about 15-30 hours later, there is a file that can be served (via Serviio) over the network to my blu-ray player.
Misc:
i'll use tsmuxer to get the "core" dts stream, and use one of several tools to convert bitmap-based subtitles (idx/sub, sup) to a text based one (srt), if needed.

Re:i know what you need

[Belial6]

But what really pisses me off about the *.A.As is the double standard bullshit they try to pull. They say "oh you didn't buy the (insert movie/game/CD) you bought a license to use it!" (and thus getting around first sale). Okay, I'll play. That means I get to replace it for free if anything happens to the media, right? After all I already have a license to use it? "Oh no" they say "You bought a copy thus you have to go buy a replacement!"

That is my single biggest complaint as well. We can either license, or we can buy. They can accept my money for one or the other, they need to pick which one they are doing.

Re:i know what you need

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Well, all you need is the encryption key for HDCP.

It goes something like this:

This is a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit
        hexadecimal numbers.

        To generate a source key, take a forty-bit number that (in
        binary) consists of twenty ones and twenty zeroes; this is
        the source KSV. Add together those twenty rows of the matrix
        that correspond to the ones in the KSV (with the lowest bit
        in the KSV corresponding to the first row), taking all elements
        modulo two to the power of fifty-six; this is the source
        private key.

        To generate a sink key, do the same, but with the transposed
        matrix.

        6692d179032205 b4116a96425a7f ecc2ef51af1740 959d3b6d07bce4 fa9f2af29814d9
        82592e77a204a8 146a6970e3c4a1 f43a81dc36eff7 568b44f60c79f5 bb606d7fe87dd6
        1b91b9b73c68f9 f31c6aeef81de6 9a9cc14469a037 a480bc978970a6 997f729d0a1a39
        b3b9accda43860 f9d45a5bf64a1d 180a1013ba5023 42b73df2d33112 851f2c4d21b05e
        2901308bbd685c 9fde452d3328f5 4cc518f97414a8 8fca1f7e2a0a14 dc8bdbb12e2378
        672f11cedf36c5 f45a2a00da1c1d 5a3e82c124129a 084a707eadd972 cb45c81b64808d
        07ebd2779e3e71 9663e2beeee6e5 25078568d83de8 28027d5c0c4e65 ec3f0fc32c7e63
        1d6b501ae0f003 f5a8fcecb28092 854349337aa99e 9c669367e08bf1 d9c23474e09f70 ....

Sure you can google for the rest. :)

Re:i know what you need

[ShakaUVM]

But what really pisses me off about the *.A.As is the double standard bullshit they try to pull. They say "oh you didn't buy the (insert movie/game/CD) you bought a license to use it!" (and thus getting around first sale). Okay, I'll play. That means I get to replace it for free if anything happens to the media, right? After all I already have a license to use it? "Oh no" they say "You bought a copy thus you have to go buy a replacement!"

This is a tremendous problem these days, and will require a law to fix: "The doctrine of first sale is held inviolate." Alternatively or additionally: "If you license a digital product, you must provide reasonable means to replace it if a copy is lost."

Itunes, I'm looking at you. Why the fuck can I not download an album I bought off iTunes on both my laptop and PC? Why the fuck do you make me throw it onto a USB drive and copy it manually? It's not like you don't restrict me to five computers anyway. Be more like Steam.

But, unfortunately, both the Republicans and Democrats show not the slightest interest in fixing it.

Re:i know what you need

[buttersnout]

So I spent $60 on a Blue Ray player, $1150 on a projector without HDMI inputs and now I have to buy a $250 converter. At least I can find pirated Blue Ray disks that will still let me use the equipment I purchased and had intended to use legally.

Re:i know what you need

[Brad1138]

I've had several customers come in asking about BD and when they found out the extra gear and hoop jumping they'd have to do to rip it compared to DVD they were all "How much is an upscaling DVD player again?".

Really? Your customers biggest concern is how easy/hard it is to break the law? And because BD makes it difficult to break the law, BD is doomed?

I really don't get you or your customers.

Re:i know what you need

[ToasterMonkey]

They say "oh you didn't buy the (insert movie/game/CD) you bought a license to use it!" (and thus getting around first sale). Okay, I'll play. That means I get to replace it for free

If you buy a piece of hardware with a license to use the copyrighted content within and the hardware breaks, no you are not entitled to a free replacement.
And because you own a physical copy of a copyrighted work, that does not entitle you with the same rights as the copyright holder.

I don't get whats so hard to understand about this.

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to build a new NAS then, as 4tb was probably good when DVD rained supreme, now 10tb is a nice starting point.

I assume your DVDs are not falling from the sky. The word is "reigned" you dumb bastard.

To hell with your sig. Get your shit straight and the "howwible grammar nazis oh noes!" will leave you alone. See, now that would require an understanding of basic cause and effect. Cause: you can't use your native language worth a damn. Effect: you feel bothered by grammar nazis. Naturally you blame them so you can cover up your laziness and your pathetic English skill. You're fooling no one.

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't aware it was against the law to have an old 720p component only HDTV. Or, for that matter, a 720p that only has one HDMI port that's already in use. Or, for that matter, an old player that no longer plays new disks because the DRM changed. Or, having a stereo that doesn't support HDMI audio decode/encode and still wanting to listen without the added distortion. Or, trying to use a DVI monitor that doesn't have the HDCP decoder in it. ...lets not even get into the 1-2 minute boot times and the 20 minutes of unskippable advertisements, the higher price, the unnecessary subscription services, or how hard it is for many people to actually see much of a difference between an upscaled DVD and BD, especially when it comes to cheap 60Hz panels.

But, this isn't about reality is it? It's about propaganda...

So...how's the creative marketing field these days Brad?

Re:i know what you need

[feepness]

And you just hit the nail on the head as to why BD is ultimately doomed

Wow. This old chestnut. All formats are ultimately doomed. BD is here, and here to stay for the foreseeable future.

It will probably be the last physical format I'm guessing, but it will be the last. Not the last attempted.

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK the only option is PowerDVD, which is Windows-only and which isn't scriptable.

Of course it's not scriptable. There's something about automation that offends the very soul of Windows users.

Re:i know what you need

[BitZtream]

I don't have a problem with that. I rip all my BluRay films as soon as they arrive.
I don't even have a stand-alone player for this kind of reason.

If they ever change things so I can't rip my movies I'll just stop buying them completely.

I still get surprised everytime I see someone on Slashdot buying disks.

I'm not saying you should be pirating, but personally I decided after the HDDVD/Bluray bullshit that neither format was the winner because both were trying to tie me down to their crap for another 10 years and just decided the intelligent thing to do would be to not give the studios any more money for things provided to me the way they want rather than the way I want for no reason other than it makes their pockets fatter.

I believe there is a time and place for proprietary software, I'm not an OSS zealot, though I fully approve of OSS, contribute too and release almost all of my own work under a BSD license, I also work as a developer of proprietary software ... but what I do not believe in is proprietary formats for data, it does no one any good long term. I've moved our own software to 'open' formats (they aren't really open imho as they aren't documented publically in anyway, but its just easy to figure out XML files and work with our server communications) because its easier for US too. Yes, someone MIGHT take our format and do a better job than we do, but ... its not something I'm afraid of, I'll just make ours better and sell our service because it will be the better service.

Lets hope these fuckers and their proprietary DRM encrusted crap dies a quick and horrible death by people realizing how wrong this sort of shit is.

Re:i know what you need

[BitZtream]

Theoretically PowerDVD can be integrated with the windows Media Center and used with an MCE remote. I've yet to try it though, mostly because I don't have a working IR receiver for Win7, and the PC is nicely connected via HDMI to the TV, and DVI to my normal desktop monitors.

That only works for local playback and does you no good for media center extenders.

I have one Win7 PC running media center and 4 xboxes through-out the house acting as extenders for actual display, the Win7PC sits in my networking closet.

Re:i know what you need

[BitZtream]

Why the fuck do you make me throw it onto a USB drive and copy it manually?

You paid for a license and a download, you got both. You didn't pay for a license and unlimited downloads in case you lost it. They told you this when you agreed to the terms, and they aren't really unreasonable. They probably should offer some sort of re-download service at a significantly reduced rate though, but as we've seen, Apple has pushed rather hard to get to where it is now without requiring DRM on everything.

However, as far as your statement, they did provide an entirely reasonable means of replacement, make a backup copy. Thats what you want to copy DVDs and CDs for ISN'T IT? not to pirate them but to back them up? You can do that and are encouraged to do so with iTunes ... now you want them to also fix the fact that you're irresponsible and lost the originals? I'm sorry, thats just not how the world works, thank god. Sometimes you actually have to take some personal responsibility for your possessions and stop expecting someone else to take care of you.

It's not like you don't restrict me to five computers anyway. Be more like Steam.

You mean you want them to make it more restrictive? Steam allows you to use it on one instance at a time if you are online, not 5. Try playing HL2 on 5 machines all connected to the net with steam ... then when 4 or all of them are unable to play, you'll be rather happy that you can at least still listen to your itunes library.

Your being rather ridiculous.

Re:i know what you need

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow some balls and don't hide behind AC, certainly you've never made a grammar error in your life with such a shinny glass house.

Re:i know what you need

[udoschuermann]

Thank you, hairyfeet! (seriously) The honest (aka stupid) get fucked, the rest skip the rape and get their stuff another way. It's no surprise at all.

Re:i know what you need

[hairyfeet]

Don't forget the kids! That is what switched my customers, it was the kids. You don't have to replace those kid videos more than a couple of times before you get sick of it.

Another poster recommended the WD Live and I have a few that have picked it up, but they usually start with the Nbox because it is REALLY kid friendly, and ripping all the kid movies means a whole lot less crying because Suzy accidentally scratched the Dora the Explorer disc. The Nbox has a nice little menu with only 4 big icons (and the movie one looks like a TV so kids get it) and it is all alphabetical with a preview button so even the ones that can't read yet can look at the picture(although they quickly pick up how many clicks get them what they want to see) and it is cheap enough they can get it without committing any real money in case they don't like it. All it took was me converting ONE family and the next thing you know their friends and relatives are showing up (and telling THEIR friends and relatives) because nobody likes crying kids and busted discs.

And as for "creative marketing Brad"? Dude the current setup IS FUCKING STUPID okay? I don't care how much "you're a pirate ZOMG!" marketing horseshit you spew it doesn't change the fact that the current sitch IS STILL FUCKING STUPID! I mean WTF is the point of having all this kick ass high tech cheap if we can't use it? I mean we could all go back to silent 8mm which I'm sure would make the *.A.As happy because it would be hell to copy BUT IT WOULD ALSO BE HELL TO USE so what is the point?

The simple fact is folks want simple, folks want easy, folks want cheap and useful. You add that $30 Nbox to a $30 320Gb Hitachi portadrive and BOOM! No more crying Suzy, no more hunting for the discs, it is all easy peasy. With today's ripping software like Fair Use Wizard anybody can rip DVDs and drop them onto a media tank, and more importantly why the hell should we listen to a bunch of congress bribing bastards who want to charge for every format shift? Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.

To quote an often used expression they are the buggy whip manufacturers of America and everyone else is driving cars. As you pointed out there are millions of sets that won't jump through their hoops and would have to be shitcanned otherwise (hell my monitor at 1600x900 has a great picture and DVI but no HDMI so I'd be SOL) and for a good 99.995% of the public upscaled DVD looks just fine to them. So I'd remind Brad of a little thing known as SACD/Audio DVD, where two standards competed on who could fuck the user more and got kicked by "inferior" MP3. If the choice is perfect picture and hoop jumping (not to mention higher costs and replacement media purchases) or decent picture and easy backups and copies to media tanks I don't think the average family will be hard pressed to choose, do you?

Hell I even switched my 68 year old Luddite father who now just hands me any new DVDs he gets and says "Rip 'em so I can have them on the good box" because once you go media tank watching discs is about as fun as reel to reel. Instant search, never having to switch discs,entire box sets played in order without interruption, it is just nicer in every way. And more importantly what the hell is the point of all this progress if we can't enjoy the fruits of it? I know having my entire 13 box set Joss Whedon collection a single button press away is a hell of a lot nicer than having to crack open the box every fourth episode and my dad thinks being able to just pop the off button when he gets a call and have it start back up right where he left off and still have it play series in order is about the coolest thing since sliced bread.

If you haven't tried one AC I HIGHLY recommend the Nbox. it is cheap, built like a tank, does 720p (or you can spend $15 more and get HDMI along with MKV and 1080p support) easy to operate and runs cool with little power usage and makes a nice gift for family. A hell of a good deal and sure beats dealing with discs! Give one to a family member with kids along with an offer to rip the kid videos for them and you are a God to them!

Re:i know what you need

[penguinchris]

He's referring to iTunes with the 5 computer thing. You can enable five computers on your account, and they can all access all your paid-for stuff. This extends to iPhone apps, where you can install all of the apps from another account and still use your own account!

Also, there's a difference between buying a physical object and taking care of it and buying a piece of data and taking care of it, particularly the fact that the actual value of the data (and the bandwidth required to transmit it) is effectively zero, whereas e.g. a physical CD has certain costs.

Re:i know what you need

[ShakaUVM]

Irresponsible? FFS, I just want to be able to listen to music I bought on my laptop while on the road with my PC. And not have to pull out my laptop, boot it up, and copy the file. I do realize it's hardly an insurmountable problem, but since we can only buy a license to listen to music for one person, that license should extend by default to all machines I have authorized

And yeah. It should allow me to redownload videos I've bought and deleted to free up space. Why not? They have to maintain a copy of the files, so why should I?

Re:i know what you need

[ThePhilips]

Cost of the "movie license" - say $20.

Cost of the disk - less than $0.20.

So, if the $0.20 disk breaks or scratches, why I have to pay the $20 again?

And nobody's talking about free replacement: people ask that they can replace damaged movie disk for the price of the disk.

Re:i know what you need

[RDW]

'I still get surprised everytime I see someone on Slashdot buying disks.'

Sometimes you just want to watch a movie, and: http://xkcd.com/14/

Re:i know what you need

[imthesponge]

Because those are the terms of the license you agree to by purchasing the product.

Re:i know what you need

[Garath]

That would be a legitimate answer only if there was an actual license agreement that came with the disk. As it is, there's no such thing.

Re:i know what you need

[MachineShedFred]

I used the guts of an old PC to install OpenSolaris 10, and create a ZFS pool with as many 2TB drives as the case would hold, and make it available to my Mac / AppleTV via iSCSI.

I guess you could say that my NAS (SAN) can hold 10TB with redundancy, and I spent all of $600 to do it.

Confused

[Anrego]

So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?

I’m actually confused here. Do people actually copy digital media this way any more? What does this prevent?

This kind of sounds like something that has been in the works for a while and is now irrelevant (now that AACS has been dealt with), but the guy’s at the top are two stupid (or afraid of getting fired) to stop it.

Re:Confused

[Abstrackt]

This kind of sounds like something that has been in the works for a while and is now irrelevant (now that AACS has been dealt with), but the guy’s at the top are two stupid (or afraid of getting fired) to stop it.

The whole thing seems like putting a band-aid on a gangrenous leg. I think it's more a case of trying to prove to shareholders that they're doing something to combat piracy.

Re:Confused

[Jeng]

Doesn't matter. Once consumers get hit by this they will freak out and the studios will find out how much of a bad idea this is.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply another reason to not buy Blu-Ray players, discs, or pretty much anything else associated with Hollywood. Of course, they treat people not buying their products and ignoring them as evidence of piracy, so what does it matter? I wouldn't even bother actually pirating their stuff. Irrelevance is a much better sentence for them.

Re:Confused

[Anrego]

* are too stupid

may the great fire cactus forgive me... it's Friday :(

Re:Confused

[Z00L00K]

I agree - and where are my mod points when I need them? Parent to me modded "Insightful".

The movie industry doesn't seem to get it at all - and the big issue isn't Blu-Ray copying anyway - the future will be streaming video on the net instead. Then the movie industry can try to get paid per view instead.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Once consumers get hit by this, they will freak out, go to the store and buy a new TV and Sony will find out how much of a good idea this is.

Re:Confused

[MozeeToby]

Even more worthless than that That means it would be trivial to make a transceiver that takes in HDMI (complete with HDCP support) and outputs component video.

Re:Confused

[Pentium100]

It does not. They lower the resolution, but if you record to (S)VHS you will get an even lower resolution (especially with VHS) so there is no difference. SVHS records about the same resolution as DVD, so there is no problem with the downscaled video.

This move is stupid - HDCP was completely broken, devices like HDFury are available. So, again, the only people who will have problems are the honest paying customers who have an older TV. Some of them will now learn about ripping, TPB and HDFury type devices.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

It basically requires you to have specific hardware to view BD disks with this enabled. Not all HD TV's have HDCP, therefore they won't play BluRay at true HD anymore. Have older (or less expensive) HD hardware? Guess you'll have to upgrade or watch those new movies in 540p.

http://xkcd.com/129/

Re:Confused

[kingbilly]

Agreed. Before HD televisions I would copy my friend's family guy DVD's to VHS before they closed that hole. It wasn't scrambling, but the color kept shifting. Anyway, on our crap tube tv I really wasn't noticing the difference between the DVD and VHS. Now that we have a 42' HDTV and our cable is only standard definition it is too crappy to watch. I can't imagine there is anyone who wanted this particular analog hole to stay open. The only thing I watch is Netflix streaming videos throught my xbox360. And that is only because I feel like I am the one ripping off Hollywood. 11 bucks a month to watch unlimited and we canceled our expanded cable lineup, we don't rent or buy movies.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

TOO stupid, not TWO stupid.

Stop writing by how words sound, damnit! Each word has a meaning and replacing one with another just because they sound the same is just insane.

Re:Confused

[Kjella]

Yes. It was the idea that there's be a secure box connected over a secure cable to a secure playback device. It may be irrelevant but they still use CSS. They still prosecute companies that ship a DVD backup/converter program. It's still a DMCA/EUCD violation since there's "fair use" but no "fair circumvention". They can not stop you doing it, but they do everything to argue that it's wrong and that you're a criminal by doing it. When they introduce their next DRM format they will pretend nothing is taken away, because you were never supposed to be able to do it to begin with. Oh well...

Re:Confused

[Wansu]

  The movie industry doesn't seem to get it at all - and the big issue isn't Blu-Ray copying anyway - the future will be streaming video on the net instead.

Yep. This is just another nail in Blu-Ray's coffin.

Re:Confused

[RobertB-DC]

So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?

I'm actually confused here. Do people actually copy digital media this way any more? What does this prevent?

The only experience I've had with actual "piracy" is from my kids' friends, who don't know or care about "digital rights" or their "management". I'm very picky -- I obtained every movie and .mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid. My kids' friends... not so much.

There was one particularly memorable experience, when my daughter's friend brought over her DVD of the "Freaky Friday" remake... the weekend after it opened in theaters. Her mom got it at the local flea market.

It was an obvious bootleg, and darn near unwatchable (even if you liked the movie). It really did look like it was the result of a guy with a cheap digital camcorder set up in the back of a movie theater, with scratchy sound patched in. It wasn't HD quality... heck, it wasn't even VHS-on-the-car-dashboard quality. But the teens thought it was great.

That's the sort of "piracy" I'd like to see the maf-IAA focusing on, because it has actual consequences for real people. Those bootleg DVDs, their little brothers the bootleg CDs, their cousins the bootleg shoes, and their close friends the stolen goods, fund the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills.

Applying strongarm tactics there would be good for society... but probably wouldn't generate as much profit as shaking down college kids.

Re:Confused

[Anrego]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2002632&cid=35247890

But yeah.. I can't believe I did that, as well as "guy’s at the". Just a bad grammer day :(

Re:Confused

[bhcompy]

except for the increase in bandwidth caps, rising rates, etc. You're going to need a lot of nails for that coffin

Re:Confused

[Osgeld]

most consumers would never notice the quality drop, the same drooling nimwits trying to sell me on how much better a 1080P tv is while showing me 4:3 480i on comcast so everyone looks like they should be sloth in the goonies

Re:Confused

[maxume]

Consumers don't notice aspect ratio problems, or like them wrong. I doubt they will notice this.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

> The whole thing seems like putting a band-aid on a gangrenous leg.

Using the same analogy, it's much more like putting the band-aid on the NON gangrenous leg... Nobody copies via analog.

Re:Confused

[alvinrod]

Utterly pointless in more ways than one.

The people who want it for free won't care if it's not 1080p. Non-HD quality is good enough for a decently sized portion of the population. If it's a story-driven movie to begin with, enhanced visuals aren't going to make it any better.

The dedicated pirates aren't going to care either. They'll find another way to rip the 1080p stream or if nothing else exists they can point a 1080p camera at the screen and record it that way. Until humans have a digital jack implanted in their heads, there's always going to be a weakness once you have to present the media. Sophisticated recording hardware keeps getting cheaper making it even easier to produce a high quality 'pirated' version.

The only people who could benefit from this are the people who make and sell HDMI cables.

Re:Confused

[Beelzebud]

I'm not sure how you draw a comparison to pirating media, to drug running. Drug runners are supported by the drugs they run, not pirated DVDs....

Re:Confused

[king neckbeard]

To be a little bit more accurate, I would say it's treating a gangrenous leg by putting a band-aid on the other leg.

Re:Confused

[bluefoxlucid]

I'm very picky -- I obtained every movie and .mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid.

But you do understand that the economy does not and should not have an aneurysm because some people take things they shouldn't, right? Like, about 3% of Best Buy's products get stolen; but they don't escort every single person through the store with an armed guard, or put absolutely everything behind locked bullet proof glass. It's good that you don't steal; but you have to accept the trade-off between relying on the general honesty of people and having a functional society.

A society where we try to eliminate 100% of the wrongness-- I mean honestly TRY-- is a horrible society. We have to accept some loss; at a level we must take some serious steps to curb that loss, but below that we have to accept it as a price of living in a pleasant, civilized society with something we like to call "freedom." Those of us who are upstanding citizens are essential to maintaining this "freedom," and even those of us that aren't but only occasionally lean across the ethical barriers we normally respect are keeping the system healthy by not building our house over on that side or making regular visits.

Re:Confused

[h4rr4r]

Or just rip the bluray and reburn it without this nonsense. Problem solved.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Stooge. As soon as you equate copyright infringement with drug gangs, you show your true colors and that you're deluded or paid to talk crap.

Re:Confused

[poetmatt]

Only an idiot would actually buy a Bluray film. Get a 1080P tv and it'll probably do 1080P through a PC, which is higher quality, means you can download the movies and never have to pay for a Bluray player/device. Buy your cables on monoprice and you're done.

Re:Confused

[mrdoogee]

To further the pursuit of accuracy, I would say it is treating a gangrenous leg by hiring a polka band.

Re:Confused

[BuckaBooBob]

The only thing to do is go buy one of the first titles that does this and return it telling the store that its has aweful picture quality...

Retailers do not like returns and if they see a large influx they could stop bringing in titles that support this flag...

Re:Confused

[wolverine1999]

hardly.. since the bitrate for streaming video is nothing close to blu-ray's, at least at present.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

All you have to do is tell consumers that it's "the new thing" and they're more than willing to hop on board. After all, newer is better as far as most consumers are concerned.

Re:Confused

[Grishnakh]

The whole thing is utterly stupid. Copying HD in analog is lossy, and it's already pretty trivial to use a BD-ROM drive in your computer to rip BD discs natively, with no loss whatsoever. Why mess around with cables and converters and such when you can just buy a BD-ROM drive from Newegg.com for $90 and use some open-source software to rip Blu-Ray discs and upload them to BitTorrent?

Re:Confused

[Wicked Zen]

To further the pursuit of accuracy, I would say it is treating a gangrenous leg by hiring a polka band.

To be most correct, it would need to be a gang of green pirates aiding a polka band.

Re:Confused

[isama]

To further the pursuit of accuracy, I would say it is treating a gangrenous leg by hiring enya.

Re:Confused

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. I got a shiny new Blu-Ray player recently, and most of our movie-watching is with Netflix online viewing, or watching stuff I downloaded on BitTorrent and put on a USB drive. The Blu-Ray player is very easy to use and inexpensive (much cheaper than building a MythTV box), but we almost never put physical discs in it, and instead use the online and USB functions.

Just make sure to get a player that has built-in wi-fi, unless running a cat5e cable isn't a problem for you. Some sneakily advertise "Wi-Fi Ready" in bit letters, but it doesn't actually have wi-fi, you have to buy some stupid adapter that costs as much as the player itself.

Re:Confused

[FriendlyPrimate]

Yes....when calling someone stupid, you have to be extra careful and be grammatically correct. Otherwise, you come off looking like a moran.

Re:Confused

[nabsltd]

True...I'm sure that AnyDVD will disable this flag on copies.

I'm much more worried about Cinavia audio watermarking, since that will likely mark the end of playing copies on any BDA-compliant device, at least without jumping through some major hoops.

Re:Confused

[Mister Whirly]

They are both foolish unwinnable wars against intangible objects that cost a lot of money with little results?

War on Drugs
War on Copyright Infringement

Re:Confused

[afex]

i 100% agree with you but I do want to point out that the scene rips you (and I!) download are not bluray quality in terms of bitrate.

Is this noticeble? in my opinion (of having hundreds of x264's but only seeing a few BD's), no.

But it is one of my biggest pet peeves when people just want to talk resolution without talking bitrate, which is a huge issue if we are talking things like netflix HD. (which is ~3.5Mbit, no where NEAR what a usual scene rip is) Pop open the codec info window ('o' if you're using xbmc) and take a look at your bitrates while watching a high-complexity scene, its probably 10-15MBit.

grab the killsample (google it) and watch a 40MBit scene. (hope you've got an ION w/ VDPAU!)

Re:Confused

[h4rr4r]

So just rip to the PC and play with mplayer. No need to burn a disk and you can run HDMI to the TV from where ever the PC is. Another option is to just stream to a PS3 or Xbox or whatever.

Re:Confused

[calgar99]

Don't forget that he also not-so-unintentionally tried to make it sound like all pirated movies are of inferior quality.

Re:Confused

[paulsnx2]

Just as a note, piracy doesn't == payment.

In fact, I developed a rather significant bit of software that I, as an individual, had developed and deployed on a project in Texas, and poof! The rights went to the customer. I redeveloped and deployed the software in Ohio, and poof! The rights went to the customer. The third time, I developed the code and put it in an open sourced project. I then took a W2 job and deployed the OSS version of my tech in NY, PA, and CO for my previous employer. Now for the first time, I am carrying my tech (and all the opportunities to leverage the concepts and tech) along with me to my next job/project.

So no, just because people can access and use what you develop without payment to you DOES NOT mean you can't gain from allowing such access.

As for your claim that this kind of piracy funds "the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills," I have to figure you to be a troll. It is obvious to anyone with a brain and half a minute to think about it that pirated DVDs don't generate any significant funds (as they have to compete with piracy along with the studios) and wouldn't be done by the same people as those in the drug trade in any event. Drug dealers don't sell bootleg shoes either. You want to take money out of the black market, forget about copyright/trademark infringement; there isn't any money there. Instead legalize pot. There's money to be made by drug dealers selling pot illegally.

Our "legal" economy supports wars that have literally killed millions of innocents around the world. But it would be stupid to say we should bomb the movie studios because they also "fund" the same "legal" economy that supports war and other nasty social ills.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to write software if you don't want to. It is YOUR problem not the pirates. The government shouldn't be responsible for fighting piracy. In fact you shouldn't be able to do anything about it either. Those who don't want to pay shouldn't have to. It was your decision to sell something that could be easily copied. If you can't make money of it that is your problem. The thing is you can make money off writing code without being able to sell it to the masses. Subscription based services exist for instance. If you want the code first you got to get a subscription pretty much. Or if you want to at least have your opinion counted toward what the next feature(s) will be.

Re:Confused

[FatSean]

Won't work. They've already got that base covered. You will only be able to exchange the item for another identical item. No returns.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Only an idiot would actually buy a Bluray film. Get a 1080P tv and it'll probably do 1080P through a PC, which is higher quality, means you can download the movies and never have to pay for a Bluray player/device. Buy your cables on monoprice and you're done.

Only an idiot would think that only an idiot doesn't do things the same way they do.

Re:Confused

[peragrin]

actually they will notice then when the movie looks funny. Also most people have older sets, this will end up like region encoding. it will get set, all sorts of random problems will appear and studios will stop actually turning it on as it causes more problems than it solves.

Sure blue ray and DVD are region encoded, but a surprising number of them are set to region 0 as they discovered people like to give movies as gifts to friends in other countries.

I think it was Bush who gave Tony Blair a stack of America DVD's as a gift one year only to find out the region encoding prevented them from playing in the UK. The Studios caused a politician to look bad. that always gets things changed.

Re:Confused

[jtownatpunk.net]

No kidding. All this move does is show us that the "studio execs" don't understand the situation. But we already knew that. It took, what, a few months for point-n-click rippers to hit the streets after BR and HDDVD were introduced? It's like they have a house with 3 walls and they're all proud to announce that they're going to seal off the front door so nobody can steal their stuff. But nobody ever used the front door. They just went through the missing wall because that was faster and easier than bothering with opening a door. So go right ahead and install that new lock.

And, if people actually were copying movies that way, there's already another, better door waiting to be used. The HDCP master key is out. There are probably already HDMI copy boxes in the works. Assuming they're not already available. Though there really isn't much point since that'd still be way more work than just using existing click-n-rip software.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

From "My Fellow Americans":

"I have been playing the fool, but it was all a fakade"

Re:Confused

[SuricouRaven]

Not trivial. It's not something an enthusiast can knock out in their home workshop. But any one of the dodgy chinese electronics factories could do it with ease. I expect you'll be able to buy them imported, but it'll be grey market, as US or European distributors would fear legal action.

Re:Confused

[SuricouRaven]

Drug gangs exist to make money. Why would they need piracy to support them?

Re:Confused

[natehoy]

This also prevents someone from using a component-in TV to watch Blu-Ray in Blu-Ray quality. So if you have an "older" large-screen television that supports component-in and is perfectly capable of 1080, you'll need a new television set to continue watching 1080 resolution video.

I think the same will be true if you use Blu-Ray compliant playback software in your PC. If your connection to your monitor is analog, this flag will force the software to downconvert 1080p to 540p, or you'll need a new computer monitor that can handle HDMI.

Not that I care, I don't watch Blu-Ray, but my 24" computer monitor is perfectly capable of far higher resolutions than 1080 (hell, my LAPTOP has 1680x1050). But it only has an analog connector (uses the 24-pin DIN connector). My newer computer has an HDMI-out, but the monitor lacks HDMI-in. And that monitor's only about 3 years old.

Re:Confused

[RobertB-DC]

A society where we try to eliminate 100% of the wrongness-- I mean honestly TRY-- is a horrible society. We have to accept some loss; at a level we must take some serious steps to curb that loss, but below that we have to accept it as a price of living in a pleasant, civilized society with something we like to call "freedom." Those of us who are upstanding citizens are essential to maintaining this "freedom," and even those of us that aren't but only occasionally lean across the ethical barriers we normally respect are keeping the system healthy by not building our house over on that side or making regular visits.

Agreed. That's why I'd rather "the authorities" focus on the actual bad guys, selling counterfeit merchandise, than on a bunch of college students who will some day want to get paid themselves.

In reply to the increasing number of posts that claim I'm a tool for linking "piracy" with "drug running" -- you haven't *been* to an inner-city flea market, have you? But I can see his point... the maf-IAA will make that linkage without the caveat, and extort a few thousand bucks from some suburban kid with a lot of bandwidth.

Re:Confused

[poetmatt]

Why would you need to do VDPAU? Surely there are other ways? I'm not as knowledgeable on linux/unix codecs as I used to be.

Re:Confused

[purpledinoz]

This is the first step to close one of the analog holes. The next step is to close the last analog hole: the analog light signals between the screen and your eyes. All TVs will soon be fitted with an anti-piracy photon shield to prevent you from stealing the movie with your eyes. The problem is, millions of people have already pirated every single movie to date with their eyes. Remembering any part of a movie will soon be considered piracy. Therefore, everyone must pay a license for every movie they saw for the right to remember it. Any future movies are protected from those evil memory pirates with the new anti-piracy photon shield.

Re:Confused

[natehoy]

Good luck with that.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Help-Topics/In-Store-Return-Policy/pcmcat204400050028.c?id=pcmcat204400050028
"Opened computer software, movies, music and video games can be exchanged for the identical item but cannot be returned for a refund"

http://walmartstores.com/7658.aspx
"Prerecorded music, movies, and software products must be returned unopened."

http://www.borders.com/online/store/CustomerServiceView_returnspolicy
"Return new books, unopened CDs, DVDs, and electronics, including eReaders, in their original condition."

http://www.target.com/Refund-Policy-Returns-Refunds-Help/b?ie=UTF8&node=13685491
"Some items cannot be returned if opened and may only be exchangeable, including music, movies, video games, software and collectibles."

Re:Confused

[afex]

you wouldn't need it, but without it you cannot take advantage of x264 acceleration. This is what allows my HTPC which only has a tiny Atom D330 (dual core, 1.6ghz) to decode even the 40MBit killasample, which even most high end CPU's have trouble with.

for what its worth, my HTPC is an ASrock ION330 which i nabbed for $300, and i love it to death. I hate to say it, but i love watching my friend's facial expressions when they attempt the killasample (or hell, any high bitrate movie) on their more powerful systems. It is simply a case of using very specific directed hardware to accomplish a task - what's hilarious is that the poor little atom cries when it has to handle some of the more intense XBMC skins, yet can play all my content flawlessly.

Re:Confused

[tepples]

That means it would be trivial to make a transceiver that takes in HDMI (complete with HDCP support) and outputs component video.

And far less trivial to avoid getting sued or to avoid shipments to customers in Slashdot's home country getting stopped at the border.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad my mod points expired, this is an obvious troll.

Re:Confused

[tepples]

I obtained every movie and .mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid.

How do you handle works that are long out of print? Case in point: Disney's Song of the South and the English version of Nintendo's Mother.

Re:Confused

[AvitarX]

I don't know.

I suspect there are not many blu ray players that are using component.

The early adapters most likely have replaced their non HDMI TV's, and the late adapters all got TVs that come with it.

Re:Confused

[element-o.p.]

Doesn't matter. Once consumers get hit by this they will freak out and the studios will find out how much of a bad idea this is.

No, they won't.

Consumers (or at least, consumers in the U.S., in my experience) have shown again and again that they will take whatever crap and whatever restrictions are shoved at them as long as they can continue to get their entertainment fix. "Showing the studios...how much of a bad idea this is" requires patience and discipline -- two virtues that one would be hard pressed to find in this country anymore.

(Sorry -- I'm in an uncharacteristically pessimistic mood today).

Re:Confused

[Purity Of Essence]

You must have quite a speech impediment if you think "two" is written the way it sounds,

Re:Confused

[EverlastingPhelps]

There's a slight difference. At least copyright infringement has a purported victim. Drug "crimes" involve willing participants on both sides and no victim.

Re:Confused

[SargentDU]

That Politician was Obama to the current PM of the UK, not Bush. Yes it did make us look bad.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

I only do tangible drugs.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really - my ginormous LCD TV doesn't like HDMI. It has an HDMI port, but it never seems to work properly. I'm not alone, nobody I know currently uses HDMI. Most of the people I know don't even have compatible sets (they are still on older tech, and use cable).

So the only nail you really need is the one that restricts people to HDMI. This is that nail.

Re:Confused

[maxume]

If by 'looks funny' you mean it leaves some of the screen blank, then sure, I agree that they will notice.

Re:Confused

[White Flame]

Actually, there are 6 "fair circumvention" exceptions laid out in the DMCA:

1. 1) Nonprofit library, archive and educational institution can break it for "try before buy" purposes.
2. 2) Reverse engineering to achieve interoperability with other programs, but you still can't share your findings
3. 3) Encryption research, "in order to identify flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies", which seems to go against other portions of the DMCA
4. 4) Protection of minors (this one's confusing, something to do with protecting the prevention of minors from accessing the internet)
5. 5) Personal privacy, to break into something when you know it's spying on you (which is pretty much everything nowadays)
6. 6) Security testing

Re:Confused

[White Flame]

(the preview functionality is so completely broken. There were no numbers on my 'li' tags when I previewed it)

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

So people who rip movies aren't honest paying customers?
Do you see how your brain is thinking?

Translation:
Stupid brainless consumers get fucked by corporations yet again.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

moron

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

whewsh!

Re:Confused

[LocalH]

PS3 is already BD-compliant. 360 is not, and I can't imagine it'll ever be, but that doesn't mean MS won't add Cinavia support in the future.

Re:Confused

[bill_mcgonigle]

you can just buy a BD-ROM drive from Newegg.com for $90 and use some open-source software to rip Blu-Ray discs

Oh, really? I'll switch to Blu-Ray now, this is what I've been waiting for.

I use Mplayer for DVD stuff - it looks like their Blu-Ray support isn't up to par yet; which project is the best?

Re:Confused

[Mister Whirly]

Then you sir, are missing out. Try some of the intangible ones sometime. As a matter of fact, I just sent you some by thinking about it. Enjoy!

Re:Confused

[Sloppy]

What does this prevent?

Sales. As the original media's reputation for not working right continues to increase, so does the attractiveness of the trouble-free mkv file.

Re:Confused

[Tharsman]

So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?

Guess they dont want people to... ehm.... DVR those rented BlueRays?

but the guy’s at the top are two stupid (or afraid of getting fired) to stop it.

Yes, both of them are stupid.

Re:Confused

[clodney]

How do you handle works that are long out of print? Case in point: Disney's Song of the South and the English version of Nintendo's Mother.

um, maybe accept the fact that what you want isn't available and move on? Just because you want it doesn't mean you are entitled to it.

Re:Confused

[sleepy_weasel]

Applying strongarm tactics there would be good for society... but probably wouldn't generate as much profit as shaking down college kids.

You probably worry about those poor corn farmers, because we aren't buying large tubs of popcorn at the movies when we d/l movies...

Re:Confused

[camperdave]

I don't make a profit off my movie collection. Does that make me a "non-profit library"?

Re:Confused

[h4rr4r]

Indeed it is, but it only checks discs for this watermark, not streams.

Re:Confused

[camperdave]

Entitled? The copyright creator/holder has NO SAY as to whether I am entitled to something or not. All they can say is who can make a copy.

Re:Confused

[EdIII]

I'm confused too. I thought only 100 people in the world were responsible for 75% of all piracy right?

They have to know that those 100 people, and the groups they represent, possess far more sophistication in their methods. It's not like the bad ol' pirates were actually using this analog "hole".

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the policy they want to enforce. In more enlightened jurisdictions, consumer protection law overrides company policies and forces them to give a refund for all defective merchandise.

Whether this applies to defective-by-design merchandise will probably depend on how clearly the box is labelled -- if it clearly states that the picture will be degraded if you use component video, then you will be out of luck, but if it gives the reasonable impression that it will work with your hardware then you will probably have a case, unless you live in a libertarian utopia where companies can fuck you over to their hearts' content.

Re:Confused

[dadelbunts]

Get a brain morans. GO USA!

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

This prevents you from using your completely legit Component cable connected to your TV and player to play your completely legally purchased BD disk.

For me this has one message: download the HD video and do not buy the disk.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the blu-ray folks get kickbacks from the TV manufacturers ???? would seem a more likely reason to close the analog hole might be selling new HDMI tvs rather than trying to pretend copying is impossible. just a thought

Re:Confused

[Pentium100]

So people who rip movies aren't honest paying customers?

They are. However, the corporations seem to not like people ripping the movies.

Re:Confused

[Miamicanes]

> It's not something an enthusiast can knock out in their home workshop

Depends. Start with a FPGA eval board (about $80-200 on eBay... search ebay for nexys2), and you can do some pretty damn impressive ad-hoc faux-ASIC work in your home workshop. The only limiting factor is the fact that FPGAs are cost-prohibitive for most non-prototyping use... but if you don't *totally* care about cost and you want to achieve something that would be commercially impossible to sell (for legal, rather than technical, reasons), FPGAs are a gift from ${deity}, because Hollywood can't do a damn thing to stop you. You can even use a high-end FPGA to outright clone things like microcontrollers. Fer god's sake, people have used relatively LOW-end FPGAs to clone the Amiga 500's custom chips down to the gate and register. I give it another year or to, max, until open-source HDCP-compliant (in the sense it will work, not in the sense of "authorized") hardware designs start hitting the net now that the key is known. HDCP would have been a bitch to crack by brute force, but now that the master key is known, the bare-metal hardware needed to circumvent it isn't all that major.

Re:Confused

[Pentium100]

might be selling new HDMI tvs

...or HDMI->component converters. I know that I'd rather buy a $100 converter than a more expensive TV.

Re:Confused

[Blue_Wombat]

I don't get the drug running reference. I always thought that drug sales supported drug running - or do you think that their social conscience means drug lords sell crack at a loss and rely on the proceeds from piracy to support the business? Watching a bootleg film != selling coke, why conflate the two?

Re:Confused

[turkeydance]

What a Maroon...Bugs Bunny

Re:Confused

[timeOday]

DVD ripping on linux still isn't reliable - what's the chance Blu-Ray will actually work?

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone I know does this, except he burns it to dvd's, the h264 files themselves. The blueray player plays them.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

moron? :)

Re:Confused

[causality]

Won't work. They've already got that base covered. You will only be able to exchange the item for another identical item. No returns.

I signed no such agreement, therefore I do not feel morally bound by their one-sided policy. I'd rather not have to do it, but if it is necessary, if reasoning with them should fail, I am within my rights to be as much of an unprofitable hassle for them as legally possible.

Therefore, if they want to play hardball, that's fine. Up the ante by increasing their hassle and therefore their expense. Be certain to make the purchase with a credit card. Call up your credit card company and dispute the charge, citing that you are dissatisfied with the merchandise and you were refused a refund. Force the matter to arbitration if necessary, taking up more of their time and money. Credit card chargebacks are a pain in the ass for retailers and they overwhelmingly favor the cardholder. The retailer knows this. At some point all of the personnel involved and time and hassle won't be worth the $15 dollars or so they charged for the movie, let alone the small portion of that which is a retailer's profit margin.

As usual, we tend to receive just as much bullshit as we're willing to put up with. If you act like docile sheep it makes you easy to walk all over. Make such asinine return policies as unprofitable as possible the moment they are inflicted on you. Corporations that will listen to little else will certainly listen to wasted profits.

Thankfully I have yet to have to actually do this, but I know that anyone who tries to screw me over is not going to do it easily. It will be more trouble than it is worth for them. Why anyone else would just lie down and take this shit is a mystery to me. It is no wonder corporations feel so free to shaft people because so many of them are willing to take it.

Re:Confused

[WCLPeter]

What does this prevent?

Samsung, Pioneer, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, LG, etc... all make Flat Panel TV's with HDMI ports, TVs they want to sell you because it contributes to increasing the value of their shareholders. If your Blu-Ray player continues to work on equipment that you already own then you're not buying a new TV with the HDMI ports and therefore not contributing your hard earned dollars to their shareholder's value.

The whole copying / piracy thing is just a smokescreen, its really about them getting you to buy new stuff you don't need on a timetable that suits them.

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

In reply to the increasing number of posts that claim I'm a tool for linking "piracy" with "drug running" -- you haven't *been* to an inner-city flea market, have you?

No, no. Please don't get that impression. You are definitely not a tool for linking piracy with drug trafficking. Please don't ever think it for a second.

You're a complete, utter fucking moronic imbecile for even thinking of linking piracy with drug trafficking. A tool is far smarter and more sophisticated. What you did there is just bullshit emotional rhetoric and now that you've been called on it you can't possibly backpeddle fast enough, you dumbass.

 

But I can see his point...

That's a nice cowardly way of saying "hey, I was 100% completely fucking wrong and shouldn't have said that, and only just now realize that now that I see it wasn't fooling anybody!" You're a big douchebag, you know that? Fuck you, go into politics or PR or someplace else where you can find like-minded people.

Re:Confused

[jvonk]

Those bootleg DVDs, their little brothers the bootleg CDs, their cousins the bootleg shoes, and their close friends the stolen goods, fund the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills.

"Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need..."

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

"Just a bad grammer day :("

It gets worse: not only did you misspell grammar, but your sig is missing an apostrophe and a hyphen...

Re:Confused

[TheRaven64]

only to find out the region encoding prevented them from playing in the UK

Well, if you bought a player from a US company, anyway. Most of us in the UK get them from Chinese companies, and then they can play any region (although sometimes via a debug mode that's 'accidentally' left in the shipping firmware, so you have to hit some - documented in the manual - combination of buttons on the remote to change regions).

Re:Confused

[Nyder]

So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?

I’m actually confused here. Do people actually copy digital media this way any more? What does this prevent?

This kind of sounds like something that has been in the works for a while and is now irrelevant (now that AACS has been dealt with), but the guy’s at the top are two stupid (or afraid of getting fired) to stop it.

Component is the 3 RCA prong connection, Red Blue Green that became popular a decade ago. It's an analog connection, not digital. This is why if that is detected, they lower the quality in case someone does happen to have a HDTV Capture Card, or lets say a DVR that does HDTV captures.

They want you to buy a new TV and/or Bluray player.

Better get the 3D version while your at it, so you'll be good for another 3 years before they change something else so you can buy more stuff.

Re:Confused

[TheRaven64]

No one (except a few geeks) cares about bitrate. People care about convenience and they care about visual quality. Currently, iPlayer's 720p streams are about 3Mb/s, and they look damn good - better than DVD quality. If they have something that I want to watch, I click play and a few seconds later it's playing.

BluRay has about ten times the disk bandwidth. In an SD or 720p screen, you won't tell the difference. On a 1080p screen, you will if you're looking carefully. On any screen, you'll notice that a rented BD takes a day or two to arrive by post, or requires a trip to the shops to acquire. The convenience is slightly different for purchased movies but, after noticing that I rarely watch a film more than once or twice, I haven't purchased many movies for a few years - 99% of the ones I watch are rented, although this may not be representative.

So, with ten times the bandwidth, BluRay gives slightly better visual quality, but a lot less convenience. My current home Internet connection is 10Mb/s, but it will probably be upgraded to 100Mb/s some time this year. At that rate, it's faster than the BD spec allows for video and audio data. It can also benefit from CODEC advances easily. BluRay disks can't easily switch to Dirac or some other CODEC that provides better quality at the cost of more CPU power, because it would require replacing all of the existing players (or putting two video streams on the disk, reducing the total available capacity). Streaming video can, and can easily have fallback for H.264, for older clients.

Currently, the big advantage that BluRay (and even DVD) has over streaming media is the audio. 5.1 channel DTS audio from a DVD noticeably beats the audio track on any streaming video that I've seen (not surprising - the DTS audio track uses more bandwidth than the combined video and audio streams on something like YouTube).

Re:Confused

[TheRaven64]

The theory with drugs is that people who are addicted to drugs then commit other crimes to be able to afford their habit. Apparently making it harder for people to admit to drug addiction and seek help improves this situation. At least, if you own prisons or supply equipment to police forces...

Re:Confused

[TheRaven64]

Why not? Copyright is an agreement between the content creator and society. Society agrees to grant the creator a time-limited monopoly to fund the original creation, and in return the creator agrees to publish and provide society with access to their creations (optionally charging for this access). If the creator chooses not to publish, why is society agreeing to enforce their monopoly? Society gains nothing from this, but still pays the cost of enforcement. Copyright should lapse as soon as the copyright owner ceases to make a bona fide attempt to publish.

Re:Confused

[TheRaven64]

Wow, who bought the legislature in your country? In the UK, you are free to demand a complete refund if the product is not suitable for the purpose for which sold, and there are some stiff legal penalties for shops that refuse to issue such a refund. If you buy a BluRay film, for the purpose of watching it on your HD TV, and it doesn't play back in HD, then it is not suitable for the purpose for which sold (make sure you ask someone in the shop first - but you can keep the question general, like 'Is this the HD version? I want to watch it on my HD TV, I don't want the SD version like on DVD.')

Re:Confused

[TheRaven64]

Are any of these disclaimers actually legal in your jurisdiction? Shops can print whatever they want, but they can't override consumer protection laws. If those actually are legal, then I'd recommend that you consider talking to your elected representatives about it.

Re:Confused

[Culture20]

You must have quite a speech impediment if you think "two" is written the way it sounds,

Yeah, Mr. Owl always taught us it's pronounced "ta-hoo"

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

BD = Blueray Disk
BD Disk = Blueray Disk Disk
FAIL!

Re:Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a complete, utter fucking moronic imbecile

And you're a dumb dumb, poopy, doo doo head. But you're an excellent debater. Mass debater, that is.

Re:Confused

[bill_mcgonigle]

It can occasionally be a pain, but with mencoder and DVD::Rip just about everything can be handled now. I've lost many fewer discs to the grimy hands of toddlers in recent years.

Re:Confused

[timeOday]

My experience is it works fine about 80% of the time. I still keep my hardware NTSC encoder (PVR 150) hooked up to the DVD player so I can get the analog output if I have to. The quality suffers a bit, but it's ok for copying DVD's to my ipod to watch on the treadmill, or for kids to watch.

Re:Confused

[cgenman]

Yes. Because the kind of consumers that would notice a 540 downsampling are the kind of consumers that connect their HDTV's to Blu-Ray players via analog cables.

Re:Confused

[bill_mcgonigle]

My experience is it works fine about 80% of the time.

Not sure which tool you're using, but if it's mencoder, try switching between the dvd:// and "-nocache dvdnav://" devices. Those get me 95% (dvdnav being a higher success rate, but with some bad masters dvd works better). DVD::Rip takes care of the rest, but sometimes I need to find out the title number with a real player. A few with lots of audio tracks need an -aid flag, -alang en isn't sufficient.

I am surprised there's not a great tool to try all the methods and find the right one heuristically.

Re:Confused

[nabsltd]

No, the PS3 checks for the Cinavia watermark any time, and triggers if the source is not protected. In other words, only Blu-Ray discs with AACS or DVDs with CSS are free from triggering the Cinavia protection.

Tests have been made where the audio is ripped to an MP3 and when that is streamed, the Cinavia protection kicks in.

Uncrackable this time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Guaranteed!*

*not a guarantee

Hollywood studios are clueless

[Chuckles08]

So I asked my iPhone "Mystic Mirror" if Hollywood studios are clueless about consumer choice... Answer: "Without a doubt" Classic.

The worse thing is

[jfp51]

... a good number people won't even notice...

Hello HDFury

[Sycraft-fu]

Seriously, if you've need to get HD component video, or VGA, from an HDMI or DVI source, the HDFury products are what you need. We got one at work because we needed to hook an AVCHD camera, which only had HDMI out, to a projector that only had VGA input. Worked perfectly. Fully supports HDCP. The one we got, the HDFury 2 is switchable between VGA and component mode.

So not only is this a dick move, it is 100% ineffective. You just go and buy an HDFury and you are back in business. I'm sure there will be others as this ramps up.

http://www.hdfury.com/

Re:Hello HDFury

[cultiv8]

So how long until Hollywood goes after HDFury?

Re:Hello HDFury

[IICV]

So not only is this a dick move, it is 100% ineffective. You just go and buy an HDFury and you are back in business. I'm sure there will be others as this ramps up.

Not any more, actually - after someone got first post with a link to their site, they seem to be down :)

Clearly that was a tricky plot by the MPAA!

Re:Hello HDFury

[Anonymous Coward]

My first DVD player did not work because my only TV at the time was a TV/VCR combo and (selected) DVDs would do that Macrovision fade in and out. So, I walked across the street and paid $20 for a Macrovision defeater.

These tactics will never work because there is simply too much demand to legally view content in situations like mine and in the parent's example. HDfury's website is suffering right now, which means they will probably be in good business in the near future.

Re:Hello HDFury

[Rossman]

Um, won't this just mean their next logical step will be to file suit against HDFury to close this "loophole"?

The fact that HDFury gets around this screams a lawsuit just waiting to be filed. Make no mistake, they will close every loophole they can, any way they can.

Re:Hello HDFury

[Hatta]

How does HDFury get around the DMCA? This is a circumvention device, right?

Re:Hello HDFury

[click2005]

Make no mistake, they will close every loophole they can, any way they can.

The only way they can is to buy new laws (like DMCA/ACTA) then sue them out of existence.
The other methods don't work. Linking this to copyright infringement to piracy to drug dealers/terrorism/whatever doesn't work.
All the FBI notices & stupid unskippable adverts dont work.

Re:Hello HDFury

[Svartalf]

Here's an idea... How about not trying to end-run around their crap...and not buying the stuff that they're shoveling?

Let them waste their efforts in what is effectively locking excrement into a safe that is then locked within a larger safe and then another yet larger safe after that.

Re:Hello HDFury

[sixsixtysix]

isn't it an interoperabilty device? they haven't disclosed their methods, so...

Re:Hello HDFury

[guyminuslife]

Doesn't the DMCA have some provision about subverting encryption (i.e., HDCP)?

Either HDFury has a license to use HDCP, or they can be sued out of existence at a whim, without changing any current laws.

Re:Hello HDFury

[Blue_Wombat]

The saturation bombing of FBI noticies and unskippable adverts certainly do work - they make the pirated product more user friendly and attractive than the legitimate product. Adding this is just a further step in this direction - I doubt the pirated product will include the ICT! If it gets to the point that I can't play legit product over the component inputs of my HD TV, it will probably be enough to erase my remaining scruples and cause me to start torrenting instead of purchasing.

Re:Hello HDFury

[nameer]

So, I did a little looking around on the web and my question is where do I buy an HDFury? As far as I can tell it is no more. Nobody seems to have any inventory.

Re:Hello HDFury

[AliasMarlowe]

So, I did a little looking around on the web and my question is where do I buy an HDFury? As far as I can tell it is no more. Nobody seems to have any inventory.

Well, you could try here if you're in Canada, or try here if you're in the UK, or try here if you're in Germany, or try here if you're in Australia, or try here if you're in South Africa.

These were all from a quick google search (it found many others also), and some of them claimed to have the items "in stock". However, the search results did not seem to have any sites in the US which are still selling them, so maybe you're SOL if that's where you live.

Re:Hello HDFury

[AliasMarlowe]

Replying to self after following some of the links. Just noticed that the Canuck stores have discontinued them also...

Re:Hello HDFury

[davecotter]

just order it directly from them. http://dme.ghost2.net/hdfury/buy-hdfury-now/

Re:Hello HDFury

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty hard to argue that the HDFury isn't 'for purposes of compatibility', innit?

Obscurity

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as they want our devices to eventually decode stuff in order to display it there will be piracy.

epic fail

[pasv]

The only person hurt here is the consumer, pirates will do what they do regardless and now the consumer has just that many fewer options to enjoy their product. Good job hollywood, you shoot yourself in the foot yet again

Blurry

[iangoldby]

Was I the only one who read the blueray tag as 'blurry'?

Re:Blurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you need glasses.

Re:Blurry

[bored]

My programmable remote doesn't have enough characters in the menu I use for the blury device. So its been blury ever since.

Less lines than SD in PAL

[jd3nn1s]

540p would be less lines than SD in PAL regions where SD is 576i. Actually 576i is called out as SD at the beginning of TFA. Would progressive scan really make up for this?

Re:Less lines than SD in PAL

[SuricouRaven]

As someone who writes video filters, I must remind you that the i stands for 'irritating.'

Re:Less lines than SD in PAL

[jd3nn1s]

Haha absolutely (and that is just from someone who tries to edit HD 1080i). From the viewer's perspective though I think most TVs today don't flicker at 50 or 60Hz

FUBAR

[Anonymous Coward]

This is fucked. Plain and simple. Hollywood: if you treat me and my friends like criminals by restricting MY legally-bought hardware, then I have no problem stealing your shit. Keep that in mind.

So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

the analog hole? That's always seemed to have been the one weak spot with the industry's hard on to stop all pirating. Ultimately I can see "don't-play-if-anything-analog-is-hooked-to-it".

Re:So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[b0bby]

The funny thing is, it's not going to stop pirates; if you look at pirated movies, what you'll see are first telesyncs & then later BD Rips. No one is bothering to mess with any analog holes.

Re:So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[SuricouRaven]

Weak spot, yes. The one weak spot, no. Blu-ray and HDCP have both been cracked wide open by now.

Re:So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[_0xd0ad]

Ultimately I can see "don't-play-if-anything-analog-is-hooked-to-it".

My eyes are still analog, so ultimately I can't see that...

Re:So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[internettoughguy]

No one is bothering to mess with any analog holes.

Yeah it's much easier to probe holes digitally anyway.

Re:So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The analog hole is when the TV turns the signal into visible light and sends it (over analog) into your eyes.
Short of wiring the TV directly into someone's brain and bypassing their eyes, you cannot plug the analog hole.

Re:So is the whole point of this to plug.....

[cgenman]

The problem is that the analog hole isn't the big hole that everything drains down. That's the "ripping from a computer" hole. And until they control the Hardware, Bios, Bootloaders, OS, and Software, and none of their lowest-bidder contractors screw anything up, they're not going to be able to plug that one.

The analog hole, in the grand scheme of things, is only a hole for those people whose view of technology is stuck in the 80's. They might as well be trying to call in horse-bound cavalry against virus writers.

Not what they say it is....

[mark-t]

They are doing this supposedly doing this to stop piracy.

I'd be willing to bet, however, that it's to force people to buy newer televisions with an HDMI input.

And of course it's only going to be effective at controlling unauthorized copying as long as AACS doesn't get cracked. Oh, wait....

Re:Not what they say it is....

[c0d3g33k]

The next step is probably obligatory DRM, so your collection of ripped movies won't play on your home entertainment system any longer. Only licensed stuff allowed.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[darjen]

I've had an older CRT HDTV for years, that doesn't have HDMI inputs. I'll be damned if I have buy a new TV just to get HDMI. Although it's only 1080i/720p it still works fine...

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have Cinavia to prevent you from playing Blu-ray rips. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia They can't refuse to play all non-DRMed content because home videos are non-DRMed.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. The "evil pirates" are mainly just an excuse to exert an ever-tighter grip on the market.

Sort of like the way marijuana was used in previous decades to shape US foreign policy. Bogeymen are great for when you want to trick people into going along with something they should be resisting.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[noidentity]

How does SD content look on it, particularly video games? I've always got the impression that HD CRTs basically are fixed-frequency computer monitors running at 1080p/i, so that if you feed it a lower resolution, it digitizes it, then upscales (and thus looks crappy, like on an LCD). I've been holding on to my SD CRT for playing video games, but keep seeing people getting rid of HD CRTs (for free, even).

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Attila Dimedici]

Of course what it really does is encourage me to delay buying a Blue-ray player even longer.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[lewiscr]

My HD (720p) CRT TV is fine. There's no upscaling, so it handles the old low-res stuff way better than an LCD. I'm holding on to it because it doesn't make my PS1 and Nintendo64 inputs look bad. That might depend on the CRT though.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Jaysyn]

Yeah right. That will last right up until grandma & grandpa can't watch home movies on their new HDTV.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[afex]

I know you guys didn't ask for a "maybe you should buy this..." solution, however this may interest you since you're concerned with upconverting.

If you get anything with a DCDi chip in it, it will handle the upconversion AWESOMELY. I have an onkyo receiver (HT-RC260) that does it, and the SD stuff i send it (SNES/N64) looks absolutely phenomenal. (well, as 'phenomenal' as it can...)

just tryin to help!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCDi

Re:Not what they say it is....

[dAzED1]

yeah, I still use tapes for my audio recording needs. Anyone who needs more than that is just fooling themselves.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't refuse to play all non-DRMed content because home videos are non-DRMed.

So clearly their solution will be to add DRM to home videos that allows the media companies to control how you use the content you create. Because only pirates would want to be able to control content. Wait, that would make the media companies pirates... Which they clearly are not, because pirates take things from you by force (or threat of severe consequences), believing that what you have should rightfully belong to them... Wait, which ones are the pirates again?

Re:Not what they say it is....

[SuricouRaven]

It's only been used on a few movies so far, so there hasn't been any real effort put into breaking it.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[noidentity]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to remember this for the future, since at some point none of the CRTs will work anymore.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Em Adespoton]

We already know from the PC world how easy it is to abuse certificates. My next home movie/ripped TV show/etc will be licensed by either some Chinese manufacturer, or maybe even someone like Sony, via an expired certificate that my player doesn't know has expired.

If they try the PS3 route with all hardware, they might stop this. Good luck getting buy-in from everyone in both the home entertainment and computing industries, though.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[darjen]

SD content looks pretty much the same as a regular TV imo. I'm not much of a gamer so I can't comment on that. I haven't really tried to sell my CRT but I can't imagine I would get too much for it if I did. I feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of it though, since I've had it for about 7-8 years now.

I do also have a flat panel 1080p monitor from benQ as well, which does have hdmi. But it's only 24" and my CRT is 30" so I still use the CRT for general purpose TV and movies.

Re:Not what they say it is....

[Anonymous Coward]

If it can reach my eyes, it can be pirated.

I don't understand

[slapout]

If you did a bit-for-bit copy of a Blu-ray disc, wouldn't the copy protection go along with it?

Re:I don't understand

[GrBear]

The question is why would you do a bit-for-bit copy? Use a program like AnyDVD HD and simply make a copy of the disc with the protection removed. Not only can you then put your originals away and only play the copy, you can put a copy on your media server as well (via handbreak)

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_ray#Advanced_Access_Content_System

"BD-ROM Mark is a small amount of cryptographic data that is stored separately from normal Blu-ray Disc data. Bit-by-bit copies that do not replicate the BD-ROM Mark have no known decoding method. A specially licensed piece of hardware is required to insert the ROM-mark into the media during replication."

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit-for-bit is harder than it seems. It assumes you have access to a reader that really represents the bits on the media.

The way this kind of copy protection works is to put something in between the player and the machine that reads the media. The thing in between intercepts calls from the player -- something like "send me the next block of video" -- and interprets it according to the protection scheme in a hidden way. It then delivers up the next block after transforming it in some way that makes sense to the reader.

The result is you don't get a raw byte-for-byte stream of the media straight to the player. You get an interpreted stream of bits transformed by the scheme, and the readers are created in such a way that requires the scheme to be in place before they'll do a read.

Of course, if you happen to lay your hands on something that *can* do a raw read... more power to you. Now all you have to do is get something that can do a raw bit-for-bit *write*, and you're in the piracy business.

Or you're an MPAA publisher. But I repeat myself.

Re:I don't understand

[TD-Linux]

Yes and no. The copy protection of a blu-ray disk depends on a special region of a disk which can't be burned by commercial blu-ray burners (in fact it's prerecorded with a serial number). So if you had special hardware, yes, a bit-by-bit copy including that region would work, but most people don't have access to that hardware.

Re:I don't understand

[SuricouRaven]

DVD worked the same way - consumer writers are incapable of writing a CSS key block, so even if you do a bit-for-bit read you can't write it back to another disc. Eventually it was broken in an easier manner: Someone figured out how to decrypt CSS, thus rendering the key block unneeded.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for *actual* commercial counterfeiters. Ooops (on MPAA, who are probably well aware of who they are "defending" against).

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_ray#Advanced_Access_Content_System

"BD-ROM Mark is a small amount of cryptographic data that is stored separately from normal Blu-ray Disc data. Bit-by-bit copies that do not replicate the BD-ROM Mark have no known decoding method. A specially licensed piece of hardware is required to insert the ROM-mark into the media during replication."

Or to answer the parent's question: Yes it would. But a normal burner will not make a true bit-by-bit copy, you'll have to pay a metric shit-ton of money for royalty and licensing fees to get an industrial blu-ray "press". And although I have no evidence to back it up, I have a feeling that such hardware also writes some kind of unique 'watermark' to ID the unit which burned it.

Keep in mind the purpose of this was not really to prevent copying, but to prevent counterfeiting. It won't stop you from ripping the audio/video stream using other tools, but it will prevent you from selling a disc in hardcopy which actually works in a legit player. It does have the side effect of making it difficult or impossible to make a backup copy or a disc image for use in a virtual drive without ripping it.

However, this goes a long way beyond Blu-ray and DVD. This is actually more about cable TV than anything else. I don't remember the exact breakdown, but the content flags go something similar to this:
1. Unlimited copy: Content can be output over any type of port, or recorded or copied internally or externally without restriction.
2. Limited copy: Content can be output over any type of port, but it can only be 'forwarded' once; the flag gets modified so the next unit in a 'chain' sees it as a type3. It can be saved to internal or removable storage.
3. Limited copy: (In both cases, no output to external or removable storage)
a) Integrated display devices (like a combo VCR/TV): The content will ONLY be output to display.
b) Non-integrated display: The content will be output via digital or analog outputs.

What they are trying to do is force a change to the behavior of type 3(b) and type 2 copy limitations. They want to change it so that only a type 1 (unlimited) copyright will be output over any analog output port. Notice this would mean that if your TV has no HDMI or DVI connectors, you will not be able to view any content of types 2 or 3.

Why? Well, what is immediately obvious as a flaw in the above scheme is that if you output a type 2 or 3 to analog via component, you keep the same picture quality but you lose the digital copyright flags. So even a type 3 can be circumvented by simply outputting over component, or even using a set of HDMI to Component and Component to HDMI converters. They want to stop this, and while they fell short of mandating all displays simply STOP using analog entirely, it looks like they might get the same end result by going this route.

Since HDMI and all that is copyrighted and protected, etc. Any devices sold which bypass this could very easily become DMCA violations instead of a simple format converter which they are right now.

Good luck with that

[c0d3g33k]

Until they fix the "give me a good reason to buy it" hole, their vision of a world of perfect DRM won't be quite as wonderfully lucrative as they imagine it to be. To date, I've neither purchased nor pirated any Blu-Ray media. This measure doesn't change that situation one bit. Won't pirate it, won't buy it. Hope that fortune you spent on DRM was worth it.

Re:Good luck with that

[fishbowl]

>To date, I've neither purchased nor pirated any Blu-Ray media.

I've never even seen one. Is it a popular format for something?

Re:Good luck with that

[GodfatherofSoul]

The summary blows "give me a reason to buy" out of the water. When all new media (heck maybe even live TV) have these hidden flags toggled on, you'll have your good reason shoved down your throat.

Re:Good luck with that

[Insightfill]

The summary blows "give me a reason to buy" out of the water. When all new media (heck maybe even live TV) have these hidden flags toggled on, you'll have your good reason shoved down your throat.

I've got no mod points, so I'm responding that you're right on target.

Re:Good luck with that

[CelticWhisper]

That only holds true as long as we're interested in "consuming" the "content" in the first place.

Re:Good luck with that

[Beorytis]

I think you & Godfather missed c0...'s point: If the content being produced is of no interest, the delivery method doesn't matter.

Re:Good luck with that

[Attila Dimedici]

The summary blows "give me a reason to buy" out of the water. When all new media (heck maybe even live TV) have these hidden flags toggled on, you'll have your good reason shoved down your throat.

Not really, I haven't bought any new media in quite some time. This sort of thing is why. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I know anyone who owns a Blue-ray player

Re:Good luck with that

[c0d3g33k]

You damn well know they do, or they wouldn't be going on and on and on and on about piracy. They desperately want that $40, cumulatively, from everyone.

Re:Good luck with that

[c0d3g33k]

Not quite. The content being produced may be of interest, but the delivery method is crucially important. High definition content is pretty nice, but it's not worth the chains that come with the delivery method. Providing more chains does not make it more appealing. Less chains might make it a better value.

Re:Good luck with that

[purpledinoz]

The best way to deal with DRM is to stop feeding the beast. I stopped feeding the beast over 10 year ago.

Re:Good luck with that

[citylivin]

Well speak for yourself. If you have a tv or projector running at 720p or 1080p, you should be downloading 720p or higher content for that. Its very easy to tell a dvdrip from a 720p source on a large screen like a projector. I hope you are not arguing there is no quality difference. If so, i would ask you to try and download the 720p and the SD version of a programme like BBC horizon and compare them. I would argue that this makes a good reason to "acquire" higher resolution content.

I have also done some bluray ripping for work (which is trivial with dvdfab). That program bypasses all the drm on the dics that I have tried, and even though i cannot actually VIEW the bluray disc (as in play it directly), i can rip it first and then play it fine in media player classic. So DRM is of course easy to get by.

Re:Good luck with that

[517714]

How much does one suffer from having to view media at 480P or 540P? I don't see this as a very forceful shove for many people, and HDCP and ICT do not stop the content altogether - they only degrade the resolution. If you are watching on cable or streaming, the content is frequently compressed to this level anyway to reduce bandwidth, I can see a huge difference in some programs between OTA and cable.

Re:Good luck with that

[BlackSnake112]

You have a BR drive but no software to play the BR disk? I thought most BR drive came with some BR player software. They software may suck, but it at least plays the disks.

Re:Good luck with that

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I have the ability to play blu-ray but only as an unintended consequence of buying a PS3 to play games. I have no interest in all this HD video wars stuff as DVD quality video is fine for me and I don't see a good reason to buy a HDTV. I am constantly reading about how you have to update your players every few months because they keep updating the copyright protection. All the while I can stream most new movies in HD over my netflix subscription when I want to without having to pay for their overpriced blu-rays. I didn't think $20 was a reasonable price to pay for a DVD and I don't think its a reasonable price to pay for a Blu-Ray either. If I do ever get a HDTV I'll just upgrade my netflix and pay a couple dollars extra per month to get blu-rays.

Re:Good luck with that

[zippthorne]

Thanks for weighing in, area man who doesn't do [popular thing]. Although, I cannot help but wonder why this discussion holds any interest at all for you...

not really new, just use SDI

[LikwidCirkel]

I work with HD video tech (embedded software) and I believe this has been around right from the start with Blu-Ray and HDMI. It's rare to see the vendor set the copy-protection bit though. There is literally a bit to set in the register of HDMI transmitter chips for "enable copy protection". It's rare to see a Blu-Ray that uses it though. I guess all that this is saying is that it's going to become a lot more common. Regardless, one can purchase kits or pre-modified Blu-Ray players in the $2000 range, that provide SDI outputs. SDI is the pro-video standard for those who don't know, and is by definition unencrypted and unaltered digital video. These Blu-ray players are legal in Canada and most of Europe I believe. I have one on my desk at work right now. All you need is some pro gear to capture the SDI stream. They work with 1080p24, but I haven't yet tried with a Blu-ray disk that actually sets the copy protection bit. I suspect they might still work because they're unofficial mods, and the copy-protection bit is in the physical HDMI driver chip, which the SDI output doesn't rely on.

Sony used screwing over the legitimate consumer!

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's not very effective!

How do they plan for this to work

[AtomicDevice]

How is this going to make me *less* likely to pirate?

My choices are:
By a blu-ray - do I have the right player? Will it down-convert to less-than-advertized quality? will it cost way too much? who knows (except for costing too much, that I know is a yes)?

Or:
Pirate it for free at a good quality, I don't have to leave my house and new releases are ready to watch in an hour tops. Also I now have just a regular old video file that I can do anything with that I want.

Why studios haven't caught onto this is a mystery to me. Seems like piracy would be dead in the water if ALL movies were offered as unprotected files for a low cost at high speed. If anyone could download any movie ever made at 1meg/s for 1 or 2 bucks with no DRM BS why even bother playing the bittorrent roulette? would some people still do it? probably. Would most law abiding citizens happliy pay rental-prices-or-less to just buy the movie they want? probably. Could they stop wasting their time and money on anti-customer schemes and start worrying about making movies? probably.

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Because once AtomicDevice actually starts paying for his movies (who whoulda thought that, right?), we'll get better ones with more special effects.

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[stonewallred]

You have made sense in relation to what movie producers should do.

Please report to the nearest self-termination booth and auto-terminate.

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[panda cakes]

You know that $0.99 iPhone games still get pirated at ridiculous rate, rite? http://247wallst.com/2010/01/13/apple-app-store-has-lost-450-million-to-piracy/

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why studios haven't caught onto this is a mystery to me." There is a difference between your lack of understanding of the market forces and a reasonable argument based on dollars and cents. The movie industry probably has calculated that it's more profitable to make a clear distinction between "Piracy = bad" and charge you a ridiculous fee to buy a DVD than it would be to offer cheap downloads. If you don't think so, maybe you should try starting a movie company. Good luck... it's a shit business...

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[Kpt Kill]

Netflix is getting there. There is no incentive to even copy the movies when I can just stream at a moment's notice, or just have the disk in a day or two. Why the studios are playing games with not allowing Netflix's entire library to be streaming or making Netflix wait 30 days after releases is beyond me. Costs are less for all parties, easier for me to stream means easier for me to watch and pay (via subscription) royalties, Netflix doesn't have to mail me anything... Win Win.

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[udoschuermann]

Are you crazy? Offer high quality digital movies to the masses at ridiculously low prices? Heresy, heresy, I say! It would put the pirates out of business and leave the lawyers unemployed!!

Re:How do they plan for this to work

[cgenman]

Your choices are:

Buy a disk. You're out at Target picking up kitty litter, and there happens to be a disk there. It will probably work. $20.

Or:
Pirate it. You go home, search this pirate bay thingie, find something, download it, it turns out to be the movie in Chinese, with Thai subtitles. You download another one. It works. Success!

Or:
Stream on Hulu or Netflix. It will work, immediately. $20 a month for as many A-minus movies as you'd like to see.

Re:HD via compent looks terrible anyways...

[click2005]

It does? Maybe you need better cables. There doesn't seem to be any real difference to me unless you
freeze-frame and compare artefacts and if you're doing that then you're missing the point of watching it.

While I'll admit HD might look a little nicer the difference between HD and SD matters very little to me.
If its a good film the picture quality wont matter that much. The first time I watched The Matrix was a
a pirated VCD where the quality was so bad that you couldn't even see most of the action and effects.
The picture quality didn't matter as the film itself was engrossing. Since then I've since bought it three
times.

High minded types will simply ascend...

[jedidiah]

High minded types merely "ascend" and avoid the limitations of the physical body... er, media.

Yeah. Talk about yet another reason to RIP or just plain pirate.

This will be the biggest burden to the most clueless users out there, once again proving that DRM only punishes the paying customer.

Re:High minded types will simply ascend...

[judeancodersfront]

You mean another lame rationalization for cheapskate pirates who pirate to avoid paying and are looking to feel justified to eliminate any residual guilt. I don't think what they are doing will stop piracy but I see nothing high minded about using their actions to justify piracy.

But then again

[mozumder]

Video is largely 960 x 540 anyways because of both 4:2:2 downconversion and Bayer pattern sensors.

Re:But then again

[nabsltd]

I don't think much of that applies to movies scanned at 4K and resized to 1920x1080.

Even if the original scanner lost half the resolution in both directions, it would still have more resolution than the final product. You might be right about the color losses, but AVC and VC-1 on Blu-Ray seem to do a good job without losing much quality...MPEG-2 is a different beast.

Why don't they get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people this hurts are folks like my parents, not the pirates. This is why technology is confusing to most casual consumers. My first exposure to the joys of HDMI copy protection was when I finally broke down and bought a Blu-Ray player for my computer. A few hundred bucks later I tried to play my first Blu-Ray only to get a message "Your monitor does not support playback". Me: "WTF, my monitor works fine? It's even DVI? What's it talking about?" It didn't have the magic HDMI "copy protection" firmware. I wasn't trying to copy a Blu-Ray I was just trying to watch my dang movie! So I had to shell out even more for a new monitor. Artificial restrictions are asinine.

What a scam...

Re:Why don't they get it?

[h4rr4r]

You should have ripped the disk then played it. Why play their game?

Blur-ray

[LordKronos]

Well, if they actually do start forcing low res output, the old joke name of blur-ray will actually finally be appropriate.

There will always be an analog loop

[Anonymous Coward]

The interesting aspect of copy protection is there will always be an "analog loop" because in order for humans to perceive the visual and sound content of movies and music the images must travel through space via physical light waves and the sound must travel physically through the air. I imagine there are studio execs who would like to insert HDCP chips into our brains with an HDMI connector on the back of our heads (properly a proprietary connector for each studio house) but all these encryption schemes do is limit how the average consumer can connect devices and consume HD content. They don't prevent pirate shops from ripping and copying. They prevent your Mom, Dad and sister from copying their blue ray disc to a open platform display device of some sort whereby they can enjoy the movie on their own time somewhere else.

I dunno, I think it is legal

[Sycraft-fu]

It's been around a long time and you can get them in some mainstream stores. Guess we'll see, but I don't think they can do anything.

Re:I dunno, I think it is legal

[cforciea]

That's cute. You think legality has anything to do with whether Hollywood goes after them.

The only people they're stopping...

[Assmasher]

...are legitimate users of video content, sometimes even when it isn't hi def...

My setup is a total pain in the a** because of HDCP.

I wanted to do something really simple this summer - show my cable box feed on the TV in our home gym (a glorified name for room with treadmill in it), so I looked at my options:

(1)Get another Cable box for that TV - no, I'm not interested in paying another $15/month just so I can watch TV in a room for an hour every other day.
(2)Run yet another HDMI cable to the TV - this was not really an option since it would be 35 feet from the cable box with various openings between the box and the destination TV - ergo, expensive, mess, and requiring HDMI amplifies and extremely long cable runs.
(3)Go wireless and get an Air Synch HD (or something similar) - up front cost is not cheap, but no new cables, no new box, only turn it on when I want, et cetera.

So, I get my new wireless HDMI system in, yay! Looks cool, setup seems simple - so I try it out. Cool, XBox 360 play over it just fine, BluRay player works over it just fine, cable box? Oh, whoops, green screen on cable. Never seen that before.

So, long story short, it turns out there's this little feature of HDCP that is only just now starting to bite people in the a** called "downstream devices." Apparently, a source device using HDCP can restrict the number OF HDCP CAPABLE DEVICES that can be chained together to get to your TV or projector. Note that it is a restriction on LEGITIMATE HDCP licensed devices ffs. Most HDCP capable devices have a somewhat large number of possible downstream devices (there's no requirement in the standard - the bastards) but some of them just one or two. This means that if you connect your source device, such as my Motorola DVR, to a receiver (which counts as an HDCP device in this chain) and your projector connects to the receiver you've maxed out the number of devices.

Along comes some poor schmuck (me in this scenario) and puts a wireless HDMI transmitter between my TV and my receiver - *bang* the cable box says "you're trying to pirate my HDCP encrypted signal, I will show you a green screen."

Do they really think they're preventing movie piracy when someone can simply use some soldering tools and an programmable gate array and components available over the internet and strip HDCP? Hell, you can buy HDFury and setup a good recording system.

The only people they're actually screwing are people like me who sit around for 15 seconds waiting for all their HDCP devices to decide to get along and show video and/or audio.

(BTW, I simply connected the cable box to the receiver with component cables and optical audio - but I guess that solution will be on its way to the trash can as soon as Motorola can get around to it, eh?)

</RANT>

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with your sentiments, and hate the DRM mess. The locks on my house merely keep the honest people out, skilled thieves can get in and pillage to their hearts content. I never hear people telling me I shouldn't have locks?

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case you are a criminal for jimmying your window open to get in the door or having a locksmith open the lock for you, and Door Lock Associate Alliance think that even spare keys should be illegal since it cuts into the keymaker's profits.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[jonsmirl]

I got burnt by this same flaw. Cursed Verizon out over they flawed Motorola STBs. They have promised a fix by the end of the year. Don't you love it when you plug in your brand new HDTV and the only thing it will show is an HDCP handshake failed message?

Their work around is to use component out from the STB and feed it to the receiver. Then let the receiver convert the component back to HDMI. Of course I was less than pleased with them for forcing me to buy a new $500 receiver to make my HDTV work. Now I take my digital FIOS signal, convert it to analog component, send it into the receiver which redigitizes it back to HDMI, which sends it over the HDMI repeater to the TV.

When are we getting All-Vid so that I can get rid of these awful STB boxes? Ethernet to a wall hung HDTV and my life would be so simple.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[h4rr4r]

The locks on your house do not protect it from you. DRM does protect your media from you.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[mike260]

In your analogy, there's a mile-long queue of skilled thieves outside your door and they're busting open your locks every 5 seconds with zero effort and no repercussions. I think that in this situation, yes, people *would* tell you to stop forking out for new locks.

They might also question your policy of strip-searching invited guests before letting them into your house.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to use headphones when on the treadmill and to avoid disturbing others. My TV turns off the RCA audio outputs if an HDMI input is selected (like nobody can open the case and attach to the speakers, if they are bent on making a copy). A hearing impaired person needs to hit them with the ADA.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[ScientiaPotentiaEst]

Forgive me, but perhaps the problem here is not so much the extortionist crap the media distributors, etc. are foisting on people. Perhaps the problem is more that rather than tell them to go to hell, you'd accept it by paying an additional $500 (not to mention the effort you seem to have expended). Is it really that important to watch TV?

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[green1]

I work for a company that provides TV service by means of digital set top boxes. The boxes output up to 720p/1080i resolution and have both component and HDMI outputs.
Our standard for installation is to only use HDMI as an absolute last resort. Component is capable of exactly the same quality, and we never have issues of handshaking/device limits/etc.

We've been bitten too many times by odd compatibility issues with HDMI, weird audio bugs, etc. but we've never had anyone complain that component wouldn't let them view their content. (unfortunately some new TVs don't have component anymore...)

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[keytoe]

This basically sums up the frustration of the modern law abiding A/V nerd. I can't count the number of times I've wanted to do something with equipment I own using media I paid for and been thwarted because 'I might be a pirate'.

MythTV? Tried that. Loved it until I was forced into the digital world by the cable company. Everything needed to be re-engineered and there were complicated cards that may or may not work and may or may not be supported by the cable co. I could've wrestled through it, upgrading hardware and spending hours (again) getting things working - until the next time the cable company forced a change. Because I might be a pirate.

New HD Television? I plan my purchases and already owned a receiver with two digital audio channels. Since all my video sources were HDMI, the obvious solution here is to run everything to the TV and run a single audio out from the TV to the receiver. Fewer remotes, fewer wires, better Wife Acceptance Factor. Nope. The TV down samples everything that comes out the digital audio out jack to 2 channel stereo*. Instead I have to run all my sources to my receiver that only has 2 digital inputs. Or upgrade the receiver. Because I might be a pirate

BluRay Player? It came as a bundle when I purchased my TV and was effectively free. Cool, I'll check that out. This has been the absolute worst playback device I've ever seen. Boot times are extreme. Menus are sluggish. Firmware updates are a necessity if you want to play any recent releases. Because I might be a pirate.

At every turn where you're blocked from doing something, the only solution is to upgrade your entire chain of hardware - and you still likely won't be able to do what you want. In the meantime, the pirates don't have to worry about any of this shit. It's pretty plain to me that the industry doesn't actually care about piracy, but instead is trying to drive purchases of new hardware and media.

* Incidentally, what's the point of a digital audio out if the only thing that ever comes out of it is 2 channel stereo?

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

Along comes some poor schmuck (me in this scenario) and puts a wireless HDMI transmitter between my TV and my receiver - *bang* the cable box says "you're trying to pirate my HDCP encrypted signal, I will show you a green screen."

Do they really think they're preventing movie piracy when someone can simply use some soldering tools and an programmable gate array and components available over the internet and strip HDCP? Hell, you can buy HDFury and setup a good recording system.

You're totally missing the point of the limitation on downstream devices. The idea isn't to prevent piracy. The idea is to force people that are slightly less technical than you to pay an extra $15/month. For setting a byte to 2 instead of 255, $15/month from even just a thousand people is a very good deal...

(And yeah, I think this is evil.)

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get an HDMI extender over cat5e/cat6 for about $20 on either ebay or meritline.

Seems to work pretty well.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Assmasher]

I feel your pain amigo... LOL.

* Incidentally, what's the point of a digital audio out if the only thing that ever comes out of it is 2 channel stereo?

Monster Cables says it's faster...

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[ShakaUVM]

>>The locks on your house do not protect it from you. DRM does protect your media from you.

You must never have locked yourself out of your house or car...

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

These restrictions seem to be the only stimulus in the cultivation of creative innovation coming out of Corporate America.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Anonymous Coward]

* Incidentally, what's the point of a digital audio out if the only thing that ever comes out of it is 2 channel stereo?

For a hifi nerd, keeping the audio in a digital format for the entire signal path allows one to use a high-quality DAC instead of the disgustingly cheap one included with a TV, cable box, blu-ray player, etc. Also, I've never seen a TV that didn't spit out 5.1 audio from its digital audio output, but I've only ever installed a system that way maybe 10 times, and in each case it was strictly to take advantage of the ATSC tuner, not route other audio signals to a receiver lacking inputs.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[karnal]

Man, there's one in every thread about tv. Usually more than one. YES, some people like to watch TV. Some people like to unwind with a series at the end of the day. Some people have children and they like to have a movie-theater like experience with them, maybe with popcorn and such.

Other people don't. I suspect you're in that boat.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[cgenman]

Every legitimate customer stopped from viewing your content is a potential future pirate thwarted from being the source of an outbreak.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[adolf]

Are you sure that you weren't just having one of the weird issues which HDCP and HDMI sometimes include?

I've got some nice, cheap Monoprice HDMI cables, with ferrite beads on them, here which only worked with some source devices: PS3 was generally OK. Xbox 360 was OK. Motorola STB was no-go. Uverse STB was temperamental. Sony Blu-Ray machine was no-go. Some of the failure modes would include strange color shifts (IIRC, green or sometimes purpose), or bad resolution selection, or just a black screen.

Frankly, I blamed the components: I blamed the TV, I blamed the STBs: I blamed everything but the cables, since the cables worked Just Fine(tm) with other gear. I then hooked stuff up with component video and moved on with life.

Sometime later I noticed if I used even cheaper (freebie) HDMI cables, things -always- worked fine. And that they didn't have any ferrites on them.

So, I cut the vinyl covering off of the ferrites on the Monoprice cables, and used a hammer to crush and eliminate the ferrite. They work fine now, no matter what gear is on each end.

It's not always a conspiracy. In my case, it was simply the fact that the ferrites were adding too much series inductance, and that removing this inductance from the circuit made things happy.

I know that it's fashionable to blame HDCP for everything (just as it used to be fashionable to blame "the computer" whenever anything went wrong with an early American car with electronic fuel injection), but geez dude: If you want your shit to work, you're going to have to put a little more effort into it than waving your hands around and shouting.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[adolf]

like to use headphones when on the treadmill and to avoid disturbing others. My TV turns off the RCA audio outputs if an HDMI input is selected (like nobody can open the case and attach to the speakers, if they are bent on making a copy). A hearing impaired person needs to hit them with the ADA.

A guess:

You have your TV set to use the digital audio output (TOSLINK, most likely).

Stop doing that, and your stereo RCA outputs will work just fine.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[adolf]

Incidentally, what's the point of a digital audio out if the only thing that ever comes out of it is 2 channel stereo?

The point: My (rather nice) home theater system is still stereo, you insensitive clod. DVD recorders may only accept stereo PCM. The TOSLINK input on my Minidisc recorder only supports stereo PCM. Etc, so on, so forth...

That said, here's why it works that way:

Your TV is stereo, right? Two speakers, a stereo amplifier built into it somewhere, etc. So, it requests a stereo mix over HDMI from whatever source you're using, since that's the simplest approach. It's cheaper/easier/better this way for any typical installation (which, mind you, still does not include a separate audio system).

When you plug something into the digital output and turn off the TV's speakers, the same thing still happens: The TV still requests a stereo mix.

Why? Because it's cheaper/easier (and sometimes better) this way: To do it in any other fashion would require a new menu on the TV to select which audio formats you might be happy with, which takes work to put together along with more testing and troubleshooting and... And the inclusion of such a menu would give additional opportunities for the layperson to come up with configurations which only work sometimes, or when doing some things (which is far harder for layfolk to troubleshoot than a problem which breaks everything).

And for most clued folks with modern (or not so modern) home theater gear, it doesn't matter how this all works anyway, because they (like me) don't let their TVs handle any audio, ever. The video system does video, the audio system does audio.

*shrug*

That said, the reviews for this fairly inexpensive device seem to indicate that it will solve your problem.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Assmasher]

Nope, the cable box told me I was pirating, almost literally - "your HDCP has been comprimised" et cetera. The worst part is that the cable people seem to know absolutely nothing about this problem; however, I think it will be something they run into more and more in the future.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[adolf]

I'm confused.

Are you saying that you did try doing things differently, that you did not try to do things differently, or that you're still just thinking with your fists?

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Assmasher]

What part of this are you missing? I didn't get some random

weird issues which HDCP and HDMI sometimes include [sic]

, I got a very specific error message from the Motorola Cable box that I researched for possible causes and discovered was related to the number of HDCP devices that are connected 'downstream.' I'm not quite sure how you missed that.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[adolf]

I've seen similar message from my Uverse box when I had that service. It was cabling-related. Sorry that I failed to mention it among the complete array of other issues that I listed which were also caused by cabling issues.

Meanwhile: Which part of basic fucking troubleshooting don't you get?

Go work out in your home gym without your fancy-pants TV. I could, frankly, give a shit less. (I did give a shit. But then, you showed me that you're impossible to help. I suspect you probably trade your cars in when they run out of gas, too, because you can't be bothered to learn how to work the filler door.)

Fuck you, buddy - I was trying to help. Now I hope your house burns down, so that when you rebuild you can actually install some structured cabling and quit bothering everyone with your paranoid bullshit (Oh noes! The HDCP cops won't let me use wireless!!@@!).

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[Assmasher]

I don't need your help, I didn't ask anyone for help, and I certainly wouldn't entertain help from someone like yourself.

I know exactly what the issue is and I've debugged the problem perfectly well. Just because I didn't explain every single thing I did doesn't mean I didn't do anything. You seem to think you're on some help AVS forum where someone posted a 'help me' query. You're not. You're on slashdot where someone made a post complaining about some of the implementations of HDCP by the industry, someone who knows what they're doing.

'Fancy-pants' tv? What are you, 12? LOL.

I bet an inordinately large number of your interactions with people online end this way - while your real space interactions are simple awkward and silently fill you with misdirected rage...

Have a nice day :)

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[toddestan]

The silly thing about stereo TOSLINKs is that as far as I can tell there are zero stereo receivers on the market that have digital inputs. That's right. None. All the stereo receivers are strictly analog-only. Then you have these TVs now that don't include an analog output for sound (except maybe a headphone jack), just the TOSLINK. So you're stuck with buying a surround receiver just to listen to stereo sources on your 2-speaker set up, or adding in some kind of converter to the mix. *bangs head on table*

So far I haven't had to deal with this, as I kept my 5.1 receiver back when I decided a few years back that surround sound is more trouble than its worth, but it's starting to act up and I've been rather disappointed in the selection of possible replacements.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[keytoe]

Also, I've never seen a TV that didn't spit out 5.1 audio from its digital audio output

Oh, it'll spit out 5.1 - for anything that came in on a channel other than HDMI. But if it came in encrypted over an HDMI connection, it forcibly down samples to 2 channel stereo. My DVD player worked fine in 5.1, the BluRay was 2 channel.

You'll find this is common.

Re:The only people they're stopping...

[adolf]

Yep. It is silly. Though, in times past (before DACs were worth a shit in common residential gear), I've been known to use an external DAC with stereo sources. (These widgets are rather rare on today's new equipment market, since "everyone" has a surround receiver that can accept S/PDIF.)

Meanwhile, some of these "simple" stereo receivers are digital inside. Common home stereo is dead at the moment -- at least in sales -- but modern car stereos fit squarely into this space, too: Everything's done digitally internally because it's cheaper, better and simpler, but all of the IO is analog just because it's cheaper. (For example: I want to use Bluetooth to try to get better sound out of my Droid while traveling, since that's likely the best output mode it has. But the Bluetooth adapters for my Pioneer head(s) all have analog outputs to match the head's analog inputs. Meanwhile the head itself is digital internally. Extraneous analog stages, FTW.)

The live sound sector is worse: There's a shit-ton of gear these days, from mixers to crossovers to amplifiers which are digital inside at one stage or another, but the interconnects are analog. Extra AD/DA stages are always silly.

My TV does have an analog output for audio, which I guess I do use for the singular OTA ATSC channel that I get.

My main gripe right now is that I might like to add surround to my already good stereo, which I've built with separates over the last 15 or 20 years. I'd like to find a decently-priced receiver which has a full array of pre-amp outputs so that it plays nice with the gear I've already got. This would soften the upgrade cost while allowing me to keep the existing (and wonderful) amplifiers that I already have, and allow me the option to upgrade the center/surround/side/whatever channels later. AFAICT, such a feature doesn't exist outside of spending Real Money for a receiver with more bells, whistles and amplifiers than I care to buy.

Add the current moving-target nature of HDMI, and the fact that such a receiver really wants to live right in the middle of the video path these days, and the result is that whatever I'd buy today will turn into a timebomb tomorrow. So I guess I'm stuck with a good stereo for now until things settle out, or I commit myself to "renting" receivers from Ebay.

Eh, whatever

[countertrolling]

At my age,I doubt my eyes are hi-def anyway.. I'm perfectly happy watching a 5 inch black & white

Re:Eh, whatever

[JustNiz]

wow. can you even still buy those?

Re:Eh, whatever

[green1]

no, but unlike modern equipment, the one bought 30 years ago still works just fine!

Re:Eh, whatever

[BlackSnake112]

+5 true

If the older TV was taken care of. Kept dust free, not feed PP&J sandwiches by the little ones, it should last for years. Why my 5 year old LCD dies and the 15 year old CRT is still going strong is bugging me. I also have my grandfather's portable radio from 1971. The paper speaker still works (sounds crappy but for the beach it is OK). Had to replace the antenna, radio shack still had one that fit. My friends replace their radios ever 1-2 years. I still have the same old one. People ask what does solid state mean? Often the older stuff is build better then today's stuff. Sort of sad.

Re:Eh, whatever

[zippthorne]

Y'know, I've often wondered what a B&W LCD/LED screen would look like. Without the need for color filters, Presumably the resolution could be 3x as much in one dimension. Or a similar-complexity device produced with the resolution improvement distributed over both dimensions.

I bet that it would look pretty sharp.

Re:Eh, whatever

[countertrolling]

Wouldn't make a difference. Just display a gray scale picture. A B&W CRT is a different animal. There are no pixels or color dots to fix the resolution. Only the frequency response of the coil and phosphor.

Re:HD via compent looks terrible anyways...

[jedidiah]

No it doesn't. Component cables are fine.

If we did a blind "taste test" you would probably flunk it.

Did anyone else read it as:

[jbeaupre]

"This ensure that high-def video is available only through the copy-protected HDMI outputs or from Bittorrent"?

Damn dyslexia...

How does this stop pirating?

[Schwhat]

Last time I heard most of the stuff being pirated are the movies currently in the theaters. So chances of it being a good version that it's HD quality rather than a CAM version is...? Pirates don't care as long as there is a decent viewable version of the movie. If it's just released on DVD/Blu-ray for rentals, I'm sure a large majority will agree to the statement above.

No it doesn't, your cables are bad

[name_already_taken]

Seriously.

I have a 108 inch picture on the wall, provided by a DLP projector. Up until a few months ago, it was connected via component video. Any HDMI sources were converted to component before the receiver which we use to select sources, by HDFury IIs. There's a 50 foot component cable running to the projector; there is now a 50 foot HDMI cable doing the same job.

Before Christmas I got a new receiver which switches HDMI and converts any analog video inputs to HDMI (quite well, actually; video from my old Gamecube looks fantastic). Other than a couple of old game systems, the signal path from source to projector is all digital now.

It made only a very slight difference in the picture quality. This is at 1080P, over more than 50 feet of cable.

The secret? I bought good cables. Not Monster Cable, good, heavy-gauge cables.

My only problem with the switch to HDMI has been that the long cable to the projector is so heavy that the HDMI connectors won't physically hold the cable in place unless they're anchored in place with velcro straps around the cable. It's not a very good connector design from a physical standpoint.

Re:No it doesn't, your cables are bad

[nabsltd]

My only problem with the switch to HDMI has been that the long cable to the projector is so heavy that the HDMI connectors won't physically hold the cable in place unless they're anchored in place with velcro straps around the cable. It's not a very good connector design from a physical standpoint.

You need to suspend the cable from the ceiling a few feet before it connects to the projector. Then, the only weight on the connector is that few feet of cable.

Re:No it doesn't, your cables are bad

[Jesse_vd]

It took the HDMI inputs on my Toshiba DLP TV breaking till i bought every style of these port savers they make, just in case!

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10419
(if you're weary of the site, i've made thousands of dollars in orders from them and not one bad experience. dirt-cheap, high quality stuff)

The 90 degree ones are my preference but sometimes you need the flexible style

Re:No it doesn't, your cables are bad

[BlackSnake112]

My only problem with the switch to HDMI has been that the long cable to the projector is so heavy that the HDMI connectors won't physically hold the cable in place unless they're anchored in place with velcro straps around the cable. It's not a very good connector design from a physical standpoint.

I think that is one of the reasons why display port is there. It actually locks into the connection. Displayport also can go to resolutions higher then 1080. At least is does in the testing I have done. Is all the DRM crap there with displayport? I would think so, I haven't tested anything with DRM to tell. All the movies used were ripped to files.

HDCP is mess

[jonsmirl]

My HDCP protected Verizon FIOS STB still can't manage to make a HDMI connection to my new Samsung TV. After dozens of calls and emails Verizon admits it is a flaw in the STB and it will be fixed before the end of this year. Meanwhile I was forced to buy an amp with component to HDMI conversion. So I take the digital signal going into the STB, convert it to analog component, send it to the receiver and convert it back to HDMI. All of this wasted time and money just to make HDCP work on a signal I am paying for. You got to love it when you plug in your brand new HDTV and the only thing it will show you is a screen saying HDCP handshake failed.

Bring on All-Vid and let me run Ethernet to the TV.

Re:HDCP is mess

[ledow]

Stop buying faulty shit and paying for subscriptions / devices that don't work because of admitted flaws and "bodge-job" hardware.

Simple really. You're paying for something you can't use.

Re:HDCP is mess

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Seriously. Fuck HDMI and all it stands for. You'll pry my analog component cables from my cold, dead hands.

Re:HDCP is mess

[adolf]

I know it sounds like a dumb idea, but:

Try a different cable.

I sometimes have the same sorts of issues on my Samsung when using cables that have ferrite beads on them. I have had no issues, ever, with cables (no matter how cheap/free) that have no ferrites attached.

I have taken the step of removing the ferrites from my (otherwise lovely and cheap) Monoprice cables using a knife (to cut the vinyl cover) and a hammer (to shatter the ferrite itself), which made things go from "works, usually, but not at all with some devices" to "works always," using the same cable. Other, non-Monoprice cables with ferrites also behaved similarly.

I have read similar reports both here on Slashdot and elsewhere about this issue.

Re:HDCP is mess

[zippthorne]

Bring on All-Vid and let me run Ethernet to the TV.

Which brings up another question: Post-digital transition, we've all got sets with perfectly acceptable h.264 video decoders. Especially, pretty much every set capable of rendering Blu-Ray content in all it's glory has a built-in processor that performs adequately well to the set's capabilities.

Why therefore, should we expect to buy blu-ray players with the decoders built-in there as well? We're buying the same freakin' piece of equipment twice, for what?

The problem with HDMI is that there's really no reason why we should need to transmit an uncompressed signal to a television from another device. About the only place where that's relevant would be computer monitors, where the lag to compress and then decompress the signal would be noticeable and detract from user experience. Monitors which conspicuously do NOT typically include video processors, lowering the price.

Re:HD via component looks terrible anyways...

[Ossifer]

Hear, hear! I did a quick taste test and found component cable transmission just gives that fuzzy analog feel (for good reason). HDMI is so crisp...

Crap salad

[korgitser]

How about actually making a good movie for a change? I probably would buy it and probably wouldn't bother to upload it anywhere. Take this to an economy of scale and voila: 3) profit. But no, I am supposed to buy crap movies and suffer antipiracy crap on the side. How did this ever turn into a business model?

Let's face it, all of this dvd->hd->3d stuff is there to hide the fact that the movies suck. 3d was already there in the 50s and nobody cared. Pre-digital cinema was already more hd than any resolution we come up with now. How come the indies are able to actually make good movies but hollywood can't? It is because the hollywood administration guarantees that any good movie idea born there is born dead. Take that to your ict flag.

Bait and switch

[jbarr]

Conceptually, I don't have a problem with their proposal...but only on new equipment. To impose this kind of restriction or format change on existing equipment amounts to nothing more than a bait and switch: Sell a product to a consumer (who does not have nor need to have the specific technical understanding of Blu-ray technology--it's just cool HD) and then later enable and impose new features that restrict what the consumer paid for.

I guess this is really nothing new, just different equipment.

Re:Bait and switch

[Sabriel]

Re your sig - actually about 7000 of you now. :)

This move will encourage piracy

[blind biker]

Obviously. If you cause a worse viewing experience for the paying customers, that paying customer might just as well turn to pirated copies, which may have the same or better quality, and are free.

wall to wall and treetop tall

[Thud457]

yeah, but I paid good money for this big screen, and I'm damn well going to use every pixel! If you've got black bars on your TV, you're getting ripped off!

Re:wall to wall and treetop tall

[grub]

If you're going to stretch out 4:3 to 16:9 or 16:10, you need MonsterCable Gold Plated, Unicorn Blood Doped HDMI cables for the ultimate in undistorted distortion.

Analog hole unstoppable

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if future HD video cameras are forced to recognize embedded "do not copy" signals film never will be.

Even if they don't have an all-electronic solution commercial-grade copiers can capture each frame to high-resolution or large-format film then scan it back in. It may delay new releases by a few days. Of course, any good commercial pirating organization will have an all-digital solution and will have the pirate version out within hours of commercial release, if not days or weeks before.

obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

I was expecting this story to be about analog component video being dead due to HDMI. Why bother with 4 cables for video, and another 2+ for audio? Personally my entertainment system is computer based, so this sort of protection scheme is woefully obsolete. They need to focus on how to get people to buy digital delivery. Seems to be working well for netflix.

Re:Sony used screwing over the legitimate consumer

[king neckbeard]

MOVIE STUDIO used DRM!
It doesn't affect PIRATE!
MOVIE STUDIO was hit with recoil!

Dear Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Burn in h*ll. I don't even watch your useless s*it anymore. The web and video games are more than enough entertainment for me, so eat s*it and die.

Wikipedia needs help

[davidwr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDfury

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.

        * It might contain spam. Tagged since September 2009.
        * Very few or no other articles link to it. Please help introduce links to this page from other articles related to it. Tagged since June 2010.

Is it really that hard to understand?

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Any move you make against piracy only ensures it's continuation.

Re:Is it really that hard to understand?

[judeancodersfront]

So the best strategy against piracy is to do nothing? If Sony went with that plan their PS3 would have been heavily pirated from the start.

The best anti-piracy plan is one that is effective. Doing nothing benefits pirates the most. It's a complex issue that is not solved with a hands off approach.

Only one-quarter quality!

[makubesu]

So you mean it looks exactly the same as HD? Which looks exactly the same as DVD quality?

Copy Protected HDCP devices...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which pirates have emulators to connect, claiming to be xyz TV, and record full hi-def signal..

Tech which only pirates (or wealth individuals) can afford....

So this only hurts (yet again) the general consumer.

This is why I boycott blowchunks-ray and HC-DVD (hurling chunks)....

The only next gen video format I will buy will have NO encryption. Until then, not buying.

Napster all over again

[MJMullinII]

Which will do nothing but drive people to buy "crackers" to allow HDMI to broadcast without encryption (some of which have already been mentioned).

Hollyweird can bite me

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't own a blue ray player

What is this, pseudo-mathematics?

[Anonymous Coward]

it downconverts the video's 1080p (1920 by 1080) native resolution to 960 by 540 (540p): better than DVD quality but only about one-quarter of full HD quality

1920/2 = 960
1080/2 = 540

It's not "about one quarter", it's EXACTLY one quarter!

I bought into blu-ray

[FatSean]

The audio is so much better than DVD, and picture is much nicer even on my old 720p set.

But I bought the $99 player. And all my disks are used.

I only sold out a little!

Re:I bought into blu-ray

[TheGratefulNet]

audio is NOT better.

prove to us that your system is even capable of dvd level resolutions in audio. tell me your system is even CD capable, truly and actually. google 16 bit audio at 44.1k and see the dynamic range.

then really verify YOUR system is that quiet. its power supply, analog chain, dac chip, the whole thing. your system is probably well under 90db in real world terms. not even up to dvd level, even WITH lossy audio.

as someone who designs and builds audio gear, I promise you your system is not even up to cd standards and you think you need better than dvd/cd?

BD is a con and you fell for it.

Re:I bought into blu-ray

[Buelldozer]

BD is a "con"? Got anything else that makes an action movie look good on a 55" television?

No? I didn't think so.

Re:I bought into blu-ray

[FatSean]

DVD audio is compressed, Blu-Ray audio is not. There you go. With the same Polk Audio speakers in a 5.1 configuration and an Onkyo receiver/amplifier, I played Fifth Element on DVD and on Blu-Ray using the same Blu-Ray player. I own it in both formats. Blu-Ray sounded much clearer and dynamic. I did the same with the theatrical release of LotR movies.

Are you seriously telling me you can't tell the difference between compressed and CD audio? Might want to get your ears checked!

Re:I bought into blu-ray

[FatSean]

Sorry, Blu-Ray audio codecs have loss-less compression. And TheGratefulNet sounds like a crusty old man who doesn't like the new-fangled gear. Keep watching your DVDs with compression artifacts in the audio and video!

wow

[Charliemopps]

I'm sure glad I pirate all my movies and this wont affect me. I feel sorry for all you suckers that buy them legitimately.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I don't like watching fuzzy movies in stereo. I can afford real movies. I feel sorry for you cheap suckers.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

In most cases a pirated copy of a movie is superior, in all respects, to the released version.
No ads
No menu
Higher quality picture
Higher quality sound
ability to play it on any device you want
ability to re-encode it up or down, to any size or format you'd like
No region lock
Subs for any language you want
With the right software, links to IMDB, ratings, reviews, cross reference actors, directors, trivia, etc...
No trip to the store
No waiting for the movie to be released in your country when it was released in Japan 6 months ago
and now... No limit on component video

Re:wow

[Trogre]

I agree with most of your points, but:

Higher quality picture? Seriously? What, then, is the pirated version ripped from? The original film print?

Ditto for sound.

Re:wow

[Hatta]

Higher quality picture? Seriously? What, then, is the pirated version ripped from? The original film print?

If you're using component cables you will soon get a higher quality picture from a pirated BluRay than an actual BluRay. That's the entire point of this /. article.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you. If I try to be a legitimate customer, I get ripped off. I'm sick of paying money to these con men for crippled garbage, and I'm not going to do it any more.

Re:wow

[Gaygirlie]

Higher quality picture?

I think he meant same quality. A 4GiB H.264 file with proper compression options is nigh indistinguishable from a BluRay. Audio is also usually offered in real AC3 streams with no difference in regards to the original source.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

that means you don't need to worry about that pesky 1080p resolution ;)
Well, not unless the movie is already in the bargain bin...

I use netflix... simpler.

Re:wow

[EvilIdler]

Whole Blu-Ray discs, minus the DRM, are available Out There. Far easier than trying to get some setups with HDCP to agree.

Re:wow

[judeancodersfront]

I really like how this comment was modded up. Slashdot supports copyright infringement unless it involves GPL software. In the latter case this place becomes an angry mom demanding lawsuits and law enforcement.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

They are trying hard to make sure no one buys them.
USB3 came just in time to rip them.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple: Free is good.
Free copies of movies is good.
Free copies of software is good (with code). <-- GPL is here
Software without free copies of source code is bad. <-- Pirated GPL is here

Re:wow

[Draek]

That's because there are some Slashdotters that support copyright infringement, which are mostly worried about the RIAA et al and so spend their time and modpoints in such discussions, not caring much for Linux, programming or such, and there are other Slashdotters that strongly favor Free Software, its ideals and objectives, which are generally against copyright infringement(*) but also against the way the RIAA et al go about fighting it and so prefer to just read rather than actively participate in RIAA-related discussions.

(*) It's not just about protecting the GPL, btw: regardless of what you may believe about its "wonderful" interface, hardly anybody will pay $699 for Photoshop when The GIMP and Paint.NET are free.

Re:wow

[Trogre]

Good point. Thanks.

Re:wow

[dwpro]

Acknowledging the irony of the situation does not equate to supporting copyright infringement. Why make that blanket assertion on all of Slashdot?

Re:wow

[Chowderbags]

People like the idea of Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but no one likes the idea of King John stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

This sort of thing makes me smile.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I recall correctly, this feature was part of the original HDMI specification.
Those of us who actually do research before buying products warned everyone not to buy into HDMI because this would eventually happen. Now I have to laugh. Muhahahahaha I told you this would eventually happen.

Sincerely, someone who will never pay the movie industry another dime.

thank god.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Component video sucked.

We're living in the 21st century. Why are we still fretting about analog inputs and outputs?

Re:thank god.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it has the word "anal" in it?

Re:thank god.

[debest]

Why are we still fretting about analog inputs and outputs?

Because there are early adopters out there that bought very high end TVs before HDMI was rolled out. I've seen people with perfectly good quality rear-projection screens (purchased in the late '90s) that can handle HD (1080i), but only has component inputs.

There is no "capability" reason why a set like this couldn't show Blu-ray content at near-highest settings. However, turning off component HD output from a Blu-ray player effectively handcuffs it.

Re:thank god.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

and...?

Analog inputs still suck.

Early adopters are schmucks.

Re:thank god.

[Draek]

Because they Just Work(tm).

To be fair, so would digital IO were it designed rationally instead of being utterly crippled with DRM due to the MAFIAA's paranoia.

Re:thank god.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Except they don't. Try figuring out which red goes into which socket sometime. it sucks. Or try figuring out why there's color bleedover. Is it interference? Is it a problem with the DVD player?

Digital IO DRM is so harmless and so pointless it's not even worth batting an eye at.

Re:thank god.

[Legion303]

"Try figuring out which red goes into which socket sometime. it sucks."

Only if you're a complete fucking idiot who doesn't understand that the red audio plug is always right next to the white one.

But if you just jam random cables into the first socket you see, I guess that could be a problem.

Re:thank god.

[Draek]

Try figuring out which red goes into which socket sometime. it sucks.

Not really, you just need to read either the instructions on the manual, or the labels on the devices themselves. It's not *completely* intuitive, granted, but it ain't too bad and certainly not even close to the nightmares of digital IO's DRM.

Digital IO DRM is so harmless and so pointless it's not even worth batting an eye at.

Huh. Guess you should've told that to this guy, then.

Re:thank god.

[zippthorne]

and...?

Analog inputs still suck.

Early adopters are schmucks.

Well, I suppose they are, in a way, if they expect to hold on to their early-adopted equipment long past the time to be early adopters for the next thing....

I thought the whole point of being an early adopter was that you know you're going to have to upgrade again shortly, but you don't care because you want it now.

Re:thank god.

[Hognoxious]

Analog inputs still suck.

Got digital eyeballs, have you?

oh, you still buy media?

[jollyreaper]

Piracy means never having to worry about this shit. I'm not being flippant here -- you make your product more convenient to steal than purchase, what do you think's going to happen?

component HD is an oxymoron.

[JustNiz]

I see several posts here saying HDFury is the solution and a lot of apparently misguided posters that think component is as high quality as digital.

HDFury only has RGB output so by its nature causes a loss in picture quality. Fiar enough if its the only solution because you're dealing with a cable box or something, but If your only issue is with blu-ray, then simply rip the disc to a PC.

Anyone geeky enough to reading Slashdot should already know better than to be allowing their blu-ray output to pass through any (lossy) analog stage.

Re:component HD is an oxymoron.

[JonySuede]

your TV is RGB so the theoretical colorspace issue is moot. with a good set of cable and a quality player and tv, it is impossible to distinguish between the two without resorting to image analysis software.

Re:component HD is an oxymoron.

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, but the DIGITAL media is the one throwing away the analog reality with compression in dynamic range, compression in bit rate, and compression in color space. Ever notice that TV looks NOTHING at all like analog reality out your window?

Re:component HD is an oxymoron.

[JustNiz]

My personal experience is that the image is never quite as sharp or stable with RGB compared to digital. personally I don't really care about perfect colour accuracy much, but I hate even slight fuzzies or that slight wavering at the edges you get with analog.
Yes I have good cables, yes I see it on a range of different sources and monitors, even in stores, etc etc. so its not just my particular setup.

Re:HD via compent looks terrible anyways...

[calgar99]

I doubt you ever watched analog HD and still decided to post this nugget.

Good

[Evro]

This seems fine. I mean, if people are willing to watch pirated copies of a movie shot with a camcorder in a theater, then restricting them to "above-DVD-quality" isn't much of a punishment. Seems like a huge waste of time. The people who have $5000 home theater setups - the people who care about HD quality - are not the people downloading a 700 MB rip of Avatar.

2-pass vs. quantizer

[tepples]

as long as you use a 2-pass encode to make sure the bits end up where they are needed.

Is there a noticeable benefit to using 2-pass encoding with a target bitrate over using 1-pass encoding with a target quantizer or "quality"? If so, how?

Re:2-pass vs. quantizer

[Guspaz]

No, they both do the same thing. The problem is that you have no control over filesize with quality-based encoding, so if you're trying to hit some specific target, or even if you just generally want to be in some certain range, then quality-based encoding may not be the best idea. Even getting within a certain range might take a few tries with quality-based settings, and at that point it would have been faster to do a two-pass encode.

Re:2-pass vs. quantizer

[Jay L]

On a similar note... as a consumer, what I usually want is to transcode video into some imaginary 90th-percentile compression rate, where 90% of the bits are identical to the uncompressed version. I have no idea what file size that corresponds to, nor what "quality level", nor how many FFT buckets that implies, etc... I just want to look at the size/quality tradeoff curve, point at a spot reasonably close to the right side, and say "match this quality". How can I do that? I envision some sort of multi-pass encoder that attempts a transcode and then iteratively compares its output to the original. That's all we're doing by hand anyway, isn't it?

Re:2-pass vs. quantizer

[nabsltd]

Yes, it's a huge difference, and the other commenter is wrong about "doing the same thing".

A single pass can only adjust the bitrate based on what it has already seen, and has to make assumptions about what will come later. In general, single pass encodes won't change the bitrate by very much from frame to frame. Some frames need the equivalent of 40-50Mbps, but if the 50 or so frames before averaged only 10Mbps, most encoders won't jump up to more than about 20Mbps for the next frame.

Imagine a movie that spends the first 90 minutes being basically talking heads..in other words, not much movement and easy to compress...and then spends the last 10 minutes with full-on action sequences with lots of motion and hard-to-compress images (smoke, fireworks/sparks, etc.). A one-pass encode at an average of 10Mbps will run those first 90 minutes at very close to 10Mbps, using up 90% of the total bits available to the encode. A two-pass encode might average only 5Mbps for the first 90 minutes, leaving 55% of the total bit budget for the remaining 10 minutes, which could be encoded at an average rate of 55Mbps (if Blu-Ray wasn't limited to about 35Mbps max average rate).

A two-pass encode really isn't about limiting filesize...it's about allocating the bits to the right frames within whatever size gets used.

Re:2-pass vs. quantizer

[nabsltd]

Google for "PSNR" and "SSIM". The x264 encoder can run both of these computations while encoding with only a small performance penalty, and there are standalone programs that can be run to do the comparison as well.

But, a good starting point is quality factor. For XVID or other standard MPEG-4, an unrestricted two-pass with Qf of 0.20 is going to result in output that is almost identical to the source. For H.264/AVC, you can drop down to 0.15 and achieve the same thing.

Re:2-pass vs. quantizer

[tepples]

A one-pass encode at an average of 10Mbps

When I encode slide shows, home movies, playthroughs, and parodies that I upload to YouTube, I don't use the "average bit rate" setting; instead, I use the "target quantizer" setting. Quantizer roughly controls the amount of noise introduced into the signal after block transforms. With more correlation between frames, P- and B-frames at the same quantizer level will have smaller differences and thus take fewer bits assuming the same level of noise. So your example of 90 minutes of talking heads followed by 10 minutes of shit blowing up would produce fewer bits per frame for the 90 minutes than for the ten minutes, with an overall shape of the bitrate over time similar to that of a 2-pass encode. I've watched enough bytes per frame graphs in VirtualDub's encoder status window for this to be abundantly clear.

Re:2-pass vs. quantizer

[nabsltd]

Run a two-pass and single pass on something like Wrath of Khan or Alien (or even Aliens)...the white noise in the viewscreens causes massive jumps in bitrate on a two-pass.

You can verify the results using bitrate viewer, and I think you'll see that an average quantizer won't change the bitrate as much from frame to frame, and you'll still suffer from the problem of the first 90 minutes moving towards the quantizer you picked on average, even if a larger quantizer would have done just as well. This results in a larger filesize than you really need for the same quality. The "constant ratefactor" mode of x264 is a better method for best quality in the smallest filesize on a one-pass encode.

There's a reason that "average quantizer" (or "constant ratefactor" for x264) isn't an option in a two-pass encode. Two-pass attempts to maximize quality on every frame while remaining within a certain filesize (average bitrate and total filesize are just two different ways of saying the same thing, given the same input frames), while an average quantizer attempts to keep each frame at the same bits/pixel/complexity (where "complexity" is a vaguely defined term), while constant ratefactor tries to make each frame look equally good/bad regardless of the bits required. Check out this good writeup on how x264 does it.

This not to say that one-pass doesn't have its uses...I use it for all my TV show recordings, since those aren't for archive.

Re:HD via compent looks terrible anyways...

[JonySuede]

not with coaxial component cable. Buy a set of good cable (hint: not monster)

Furries in HD

[tepples]

You'll really shudder when you see what Fantastic Mr. Murdoch did.

Re:Furries in HD

[fractoid]

Yeah and I bet he totally freaked out when he saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Looney Tunes, let alone Winnie the Pooh.

ICT is old news

[0x15e]

Wasn't there a big hubbub about the ICT several years ago when HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were first coming out? How is this news?

Yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick it in your analog hole.

No problems, just opportunities

[Locke2005]

Doesn't this just create a market for modified BluRay players that ignore the flag?

Isn't it moot anyway...

[Heretic2]

Isn't this moot anyway since the HDCP signing key was published?

JustSayNoToDiscs

[Anonymous Coward]

Blu ray or Blue Ray or Blu-Ray is SOOOOO 2009.

Seriously, it's all about streaming, downloading, hard drives. Screw those scratchy discs.

NTSC is fine for me -- I just want the story.

[unil_1005]

Must be something wrong with me here.

Satellite caps

[tepples]

the future will be streaming video on the net instead.

A 2-layer Blu-ray Disc holds 50 GB. Satellite Internet often caps each subscriber to roughly one-tenth of that per month.

Then the movie industry can try to get paid per view instead.

There's a reason why satellite television doesn't have true video on demand.

Neat!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good news for me, as it is yet another disincentive to spending money on hdtv and bluray. Screw them. I will go watch the couple of worthwhile films per year at someone else's house.

Re:HD via component looks terrible anyways...

[jdgeorge]

Agreed. A perfect video complement for any real audiophile's vinyl record componentry

I might be sad if this actually affected me

[Yaddoshi]

But seeing as how I can't discern any significant difference between 1080p on bluray vs. standard DVD quality on my HD television, I couldn't give a rats arse about this. I still only buy DVD, and even though my PS3 has a bluray player, I have no interested in buying or renting bluray discs.

Dear Hollywood, if you want me to adopt your anti-piracy gimmicks, make it worth having. The only new entertainment technology I'll be interested in adopting will be true 3D animated holograms.

Re:I might be sad if this actually affected me

[H0p313ss]

But seeing as how I can't discern any significant difference between 1080p on bluray vs. standard DVD quality on my HD television, I couldn't give a rats arse about this. I still only buy DVD, and even though my PS3 has a bluray player, I have no interested in buying or renting bluray discs.

Dear Hollywood, if you want me to adopt your anti-piracy gimmicks, make it worth having. The only new entertainment technology I'll be interested in adopting will be true 3D animated holograms.

I generally agree, with one exception. There are certain directors and cinematographers whose work I like to see in all their blu-ray HD glory, but these are the ones I really don't mind paying extra for and will hopefully still be watching for years. For example, Inception is very much worth watching in true HD.

No analog hole for video games

[tepples]

or if nothing else exists they can point a 1080p camera at the screen and record it that way.

Camcording may work for motion pictures, but I haven't found anything like the analog hole for copying video games other than perhaps the GNU method of writing an original workalike program.

Prevents nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the people pirating the crappy moves they have been releasing are viewing them digitally through a media server anyway.

This is barely news.

[517714]

They would not have put ICT into the Blu-Ray spec unless they intended to use it. HDCP was approved by the FCC in August 2004, (it was part of the DVI spec in 1999) anybody paying attention would not have bought a device without HDMI (or DVI) since then. ICT is not new, here is a discussion on the same issue five years ago http://www.myce.com/news/Most-major-studios-back-off-ICT-downscaling-on-next-gen-DVDs-11677/. At the time no Blu-Ray media had the flag turned on although some HD-DVD media did. The article speculates that the ICT flag would be turned on "several years later" ..."to get those with incompliant TVs to think of buying a new set ... " Several years has arrived, and it is no surprise to many of us.

Re:This is barely news.

[digitalaudiorock]

Agreed...since when is this new? This was my understanding years ago when I first started looking into Bru-Ray via component (because my TV has only one DVI input, currently being used for my MythTV frontend)...that the producers could opt to output low-res to non-HDCP outputs. That's why I never bought one. In fact it pissed me off enough that I vowed that no Blu-Ray player will ever darken my doorstep even if I have 10 HDMI inputs...fuck them and the whole fucking standard.

Lockout chip on video game consoles

[tepples]

They can't refuse to play all non-DRMed content because home videos are non-DRMed.

Homemade video games are non-DRMed. Video game consoles can't play them for exactly this reason.

DCP LLC

[tepples]

What happens when DCP LLC revokes HDFury's HDCP key and this revocation is encoded on each new Blu-ray Disc?

Re:DCP LLC

[grantek]

The HDCP master key is now publicly-known, so you can generate a new one.

Re:DCP LLC

[Anonymous Coward]

Then we all start asking for refunds..... :-/

Re:DCP LLC

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't revoke HDFury's HDCP key, because each HDCP device has a unique key. They'd have to somehow obtain the KSVs (public keys) of every HDFury ever sold, and include such a massive list inside each disc (the standard probably doesn't even support such massive revocation lists).

HDCP revocation is meant to revoke rogue devices using a single cloned stolen/compromised key, not an entire line of legitimate devices.

Re:DCP LLC

[Anonymous Coward]

They found the HDCP master key, remember? If the HDFury guys did their job correctly, it'll just find another key that isn't revoked automatically. The cypto is completely broken.

Re:DCP LLC

[tepples]

Please see my reply to grantek's comment.

Re:DCP LLC

[NotQuiteInsane]

HDFury use the leaked HDCP master key table to generate a new key.

Or they stuff the entire MKT into ROM, and make the thing generate a new key if the authentication fails.

What's that I hear? Could it be a game of Whak-a-Mole merrily chirruping away in the background? I think it is!

A moran?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fark cliches? In my Slashdot? It's more likely than you think.

Re:A moran?

[Anonymous Coward]

not really a fark cliche, moran, not since at least lucy moran in the twin peaks. not sure drew was even born then, or you.

Home movies and homebrew games

[tepples]

The kids could play homemade video games on a Commodore 64 computer. They couldn't do so on their new Nintendo Entertainment System due to the CIC lockout chip.

Re:Home movies and homebrew games

[Jaysyn]

Kids don't purchase expensive electronics.

Re:Home movies and homebrew games

[tepples]

Kids don't purchase expensive electronics.

Kids' parents purchase expensive electronics as gifts for kids.

Re:Home movies and homebrew games

[Jaysyn]

Which has fuck all to do with grandparents home movies.

Re:Home movies and homebrew games

[tepples]

I apologize for not making it clearer earlier that I was using video games as an example of how hardware makers can introduce an imprimatur and home users will just accept the restrictions. It happened to the most widespread devices for playing video games decades ago, and though it has not yet spread to the most widespread devices for playing movies, it could.

Re:Home movies and homebrew games

[Jaysyn]

Fair enough, but at the same time you were comparing a general purpose computer with a single purpose video game console.

Re:Home movies and homebrew games

[tepples]

at the same time you were comparing a general purpose computer with a single purpose video game console.

As I understand it, before the rise of the NES to popularity, people were more likely to play games on general-purpose computers such as the Commodore 64. This continued through the 1990s as SDTV sizes grew faster than computer monitor sizes. I imagine that the MPAA would love to obsolete general-purpose computers in favor of single-purpose appliances locked to play MPAA studios' works (and not home movies) just as the major video game console makers have.

PS3 plays Blu-ray

[tepples]

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I know anyone who owns a Blue-ray player

Then you must not know a lot of gamers. Every PLAYSTATION 3 console can play BD videos.

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[Attila Dimedici]

I am unaware of anyone I know who owns a PS3. I am sure there are some, but I do not know who they are.

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a great deal of gamers. Precisely one owns a PS3, he was an early adopter and to this day feels it was a waste of money. The only people I know to own a standalone blu-ray player are my parents, and they're the type who will stretch their video to fill the screen when the aspect ratio doesn't match.

The PS3 has NO GAEMS (I can't think of a single exclusive title I wish I could play, the only games it has I'd want are also available on PC and/or 360), costs more than I would want to pay even if it DID have a solid library - and the games themselves are usually more expensive too!

This isn't a case of "get a job, kid" either...after rent, bills, food, and other expenses I only make a few hundred a month more than I spend, and I'd like to actually be able to save for retirement, especially with the odds of social security still being here in 35 years looking increasingly dim.

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[tepples]

The PS3 has NO GAEMS (I can't think of a single exclusive title I wish I could play, the only games it has I'd want are also available on PC and/or 360)

LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2 are first-party titles. Metal Gear Solid 4 can't be ported to 360 because it'd span several discs, and the player would have to swap too often. The developers reportedly had a hard time even fitting it on one 50 GB dual-layer BD-ROM.

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got White Knight Chronicles and 3D Dot Game Heroes as my only PS3 games. My PS3 actually gets more use as a PS/PS2 than it does as either a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player.

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[adolf]

I own two PS3s.

So: You're now aware of at least this much. And you know who I am (adolf, #21054).

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[Attila Dimedici]

Actually, I don't know who you are. I know nothing about you except for your slashdot login name and number. With that information, I could probably learn significantly more about you, but I don't really care. All that your post has done is make me aware of someone who owns a PS3, but I was already aware that some people who post on slashdot own them.

Re:PS3 plays Blu-ray

[adolf]

Oh.

I guess, as hinted at before by someone else, that you live in a small world.

I do, too. I've only got a half-dozen folks around me that I consider close enough to be "friends."

Two of them have PS3s, and both use them to watch Blu-Ray movies.

*shrug*

Control over file size is overrated

[tepples]

The problem is that you have no control over filesize with quality-based encoding

If you aren't trying to hit a warez scene standard, fit the encode on an optical disc, or stream the encode over a WAN connection, do you really need a lot of control over file size? If an action movie takes more Mbps than a romantic comedy for the same subjective quality, and this means it takes more space on your NAS server, let it.

Re:Control over file size is overrated

[Guspaz]

I'm not advocating for one over the other, only stating that sometimes you need to hit a target filesize or bitrate, and you've listed some of the reasons why you might. Fitting your video on an optical disc is one such reason. For example, the videos coming out of my camera are pretty high bitrate (almost twenty megabit). If I need to fit a video on a mini DVD, for example, that's going to need a target filesize.

I want to follow the law, but now I cant

[orphiuchus]

This HDCP stuff just keeps getting worse. Now I cant watch movies on my projector because its only HD input is component?

Well guess what. I'm still fucking going to watch them. The only difference now is if I want to pay you for them I have to buy a bluray, rip the video off of it in pieces and watch my movie 1/3 at a time or some such bullshit. Or I could download it in HD for free.

Great move film industry, you just made it a bad decision for me to buy things from you.

Incentives to download even more

[Anonymous Coward]

Pirated content does not suffer from the ICT flag ;-)

4:2:0 actually

[Sycraft-fu]

4:2:2 is only used for high end professional stuff. Blu-ray, and AVCHD, are 4:2:0.

There are better ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll just pirate them. Easy-peasy, free, faster, and now better quality. The benefits just keep stacking up.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

So, my choices are to watch high def movies are:
1) Go buy a new TV that supports HDMI and HDCP, even though my current set works fine. Buy Blu Ray disks. No analog hole, but I honestly don't notice any problem with my current analog system.
2) Buy an HDMI to analog converter. Buy Blu Ray disks. This opens the analog hole they were trying to close.
3) Buy Blu Ray disks, rip them, and then play them (I used to have to do this with DVDs since my old TV didn't have component outputs, so I had to use route through the VCR after disabling Macrovision). I wind up with a full def, distributable, digital copy on my computer, but I still view it though the analog hole.
4) Just torrent the movies. I have a distributable, digital, full def copy.

Since my current TV is already widescreen, large enough, and fully functional (like 99% of the population, I don't particularly desire 3D capbility), I don't see the need to spend a couple grand for a new, comparable plasma TV, so I'll skip 1. 2-4 seem like they're all violating DCMA, so if I'm going to be called a criminal anyway, I might at well pick option 4 since it's the lowest cost, least effort, and least technically demanding. Coincidentally, it generates the least revenue for the morons who conceived of this plan.

Has anyone used this yet?

[Garth Smith]

Has anything been released that will not allow 1080p playback through component cables? If (when?) it's actually happening it would be nice to have a concrete example I can use to show the effects DRM has on citizens.

Lawsuits and customs action

[tepples]

The HDCP master key is now publicly-known, so you can generate a new one.

Please allow me to rephrase: What happens when DCP LLC and the major publishers of non-free motion pictures sue the makers of HDFury and/or have ICE seize shipments at the border?

Re:Lawsuits and customs action

[grantek]

Please allow me to rephrase: What happens when DCP LLC and the major publishers of non-free motion pictures sue the makers of HDFury and/or have ICE seize shipments at the border?

HDFury goes down, and a million chinese knockoffs rise up. If the *AAs are effective at controlling imports of those, then everyone gets to watch US media except those in the US. Maybe that's enough for them to say they've won, but by doing that they'd just be continuing down a financial spiral to oblivion.

Copyresponsibility

[tepples]

Why do American legislators grant privileges without responsibilities? How does allowing a copyright owner to act like a dog in the manger "promote the progress of science and useful arts"?

Re:Copyresponsibility

[BoberFett]

Agree 100%. If a copyright holder chooses to make something intentionally unavailable, they should lose the copyright. Copyright, as it's ardent defenders love to remind us, is necessary to "promote the progress" of these works. If the work isn't being promoted, then why let the person maintain copyright?

Yes, it will encourage piracy

[Vexorian]

You have to wonder, maybe the copyright cartel likes piracy? It would be the best explanation for all the pushes and pushes for making piracy easier while making using the legal thing harder.. I for one, think piracy benefits these guys, it gives them the best excuse for their movies/music/games not selling as well as their stock holders think they should.

Re:Yes, it will encourage piracy

[zippthorne]

So.. you're saying they'd rather have an excuse than money?

No BluRay here due to stupid DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Studios,

I buy things that work the way I want. I spend lots of money on those things. "Movies" simply are not that important in my life to bother with. I bought DVDs 2 months ago for a complete TV show from 1996.

I will **never** buy a BluRay disk as long as there is DRM that isn't trivial to crack so I can place the content on my home media NAS. I promise that I **never** share those files outside my home.

Instead of assuming that your customers are stealing, why not tag each with a name and personal information so if it gets out, you know exactly who to hunt down, but leave the DRM out? Oh, and charging a fair price is important too. $4 for DVDs, $8 for HD with no DRM. It costs you $0.50 to physically make a disc. We know this.

Oh - online streaming that I can't watch on my PC (Linux) is worthless too.

Customers use to matter.

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not pro-DRM or anti-DRM, but I just can't bring myself to care.

I really think what's going on in Wisconsin and what is ongoing in Egypt should teach us something about what we get upset about.

Pirate away if you want, or legally buy something that will be obsolete in ten years.

Or find something meaningful to do with your life and in a better world things like this won't be an issue.

for most people that'll be good enough

[roc97007]

I have a hard time believing that all the great unwashed masses that thought VHS over a composite cable was fine, who buy a 52 inch HDTV and connect the set top box via the RF port, who have their DVD player connected via composite or s-video, or are watching ATSC broadcasts over a converter to their tube TV, are going to be at all put out by this. It's still better than 480P, and I would venture to guess that the great majority of tv watchers aren't even seeing 480P.

...so switching to component video at 520p is still quite the improvement over what most people have. And for less than 50", there's not a lot of visible difference between that and 1080p.

So, like what? They're making a change that only geeks will care about? Are geeks that much of a market?

Re:for most people that'll be good enough

[judeancodersfront]

I go to bars all the time where the HDTV was left on an SD sports channel. Very few seem to care about the difference between upscaled DVD and Bluray. DVD hit a sweet spot with tech/price. So yea I doubt most mom and pop movie watchers will notice.

Re:for most people that'll be good enough

[adolf]

I have a hard time believing that all the great unwashed masses that thought VHS over a composite cable was fine

VHS over a composite cable is fine: VHS is recorded as composite video on the tape. There is nothing to be gained by transmitting the resultant signal in any other way.

SVHS, meanwhile, does keep the Y/C signals separate on the tape. Avoiding composite video with SVHS is always a good idea whenever quality is a concern.

Re:for most people that'll be good enough

[roc97007]

> VHS over a composite cable is fine

As an early adopter of Laserdisc, I think I can say that VHS over any kind of cable was never "fine". But you prove my point: That for many people, 200+ lines interlaced has been "fine" for many years, still is for most of them, and under that expectation, 540 non-interlaced is an embarrassment of riches. (Not to mention the lack of time base errors and much improved color accuracy.)

Point is, when you subtract geeks and the people easily swayed by marketing out of the equation, the great unwashed masses can't really tell (or don't care about) the difference between 540P (or even 480P) and 1080P except the latter probably costs more. Especially on TVs less than 50 inches. I can't tell you how many installations I've seen where consumers have plugged their HD capable set top box to their HD capable tv over NTSC channel 3 and have been perfectly satisfied with the results. Mother in law's excuse was that she already had an antenna cable and the HDMI cable cost extra.

And so, a few geeks and genuine videophiles will complain, but the great majority of viewers won't even notice. Which begs the question, what exactly are the studios trying to accomplish? All they're doing is setting up a situation where Fred and Ethyl are even more likely to say "Well, we got one 'a' them-there Blue Ray players and got some Blue Ray disks, and we don't see no difference from our old DVDs."

Combat piracy? Are you kidding? This is the industry where in-theater camcorder captures are "good enough". Where compressing a movie onto a VCD is "good enough". So, somehow 540P is suddenly not going to be good enough?

I'm at a loss as to what this move is supposed to accomplish.

Piracy would only end if movies were free

[judeancodersfront]

Even charging $1 for unprotected movies would not kill piracy as seen by pirated $1 Android games.

This silly HDMI plan won't reduce piracy but I don't also believe most pirates are motivated by anything other than avoiding payment.

Re:Piracy would only end if movies were free

[Draek]

As the GPL shows, no, not even then. Give them away for free but requiring them to share it in turn with others, and people will casually "forget" about all this sharing thing. Give them away for free but only require a small mention, and people will try to claim it as their own work. Give them away, no strings attached and somebody, invariably, will try to attach some strings of his own without anyone else's permission.

People are just funny that way.

Another FPGA board

[bored]

The DE1 is pretty nice too.

With the bonus you can run ZET on it.

Amusing

[Major Variola (ret)]

I'm working on 1080p 60, 1080i 60, video compression to h264 for a medical app. Using dm6467t-evm. We use component in, component out. Superimpose med data on h264/mp4 output. Hollyweird can do as they please, but don't fsck with our vid standards or vidcam output. I have a CRT at home.

Let's vote with our wallets

[Vyse of Arcadia]

From here on, I will do my research on future movie purchases and not buy any movies with this "feature." The supporters of this technology aren't getting a cent from me.

You've obviously never hooked up

[Anonymous Coward]

A DVD player to your parents' old SD TV set. Woo-hoo, go S-video!

No choice ...

[Zemran]

... now I "HAVE TO" get pirated disks if I want them to work on my set up.... Great shot in the foot by Hollywould.

It is hard enough to convince people in the majority of the world that they should buy the real thing. In a lot of countries (i.e. former Soviet union) it is quite hard to get the real thing, so now they want to make it harder to use the real disks and then they will wonder why even more people buy pirate disks...

They're hoping

[rsborg]

...that for every one of you there's 100 other folks who just buy the latest stuff.
Today that may be true, but tomorrow less so, and every day afterwards.
I have yet to buy a BRDVD player nor any discs and don't pirate either.

One hole is always open...

[WDancer]

No matter what, the picture still has to display something on the screen. No matter how good encryption gets, it will always be possible as long as you have to display something on screen. You can tap the signals coming from the LCD driver in the TV and recreate the image every time from the signals that tell it what pixel goes where and what color.

Not getting one

[Anonymous Coward]

I was contemplating getting a blurry (hmm... iOS autocorrection apparently has a sense of humor) player, this has now convinced me to not get one, since I could not use my projector any more.

You may need it, but you won't get it

[fnj]

Dude; you are behind the times. HDFuryII got pulled; it is no longer sold in the US and Canada, the company has joined the HDCP group, and their new products will only work with non-HDCP sources.

Enjoy your corrupt government in collusion with corrupt big business.

Re:You may need it, but you won't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, where the heck is the source for those statements? Looks like you can buy it to me.

Re:You may need it, but you won't get it

[davecotter]

false. i ordered one, direct from them. and it works just fine. and it still strips the HDCP.

Re:You may need it, but you won't get it

[davecotter]

false. i ordered one from them, got it, and it works perfectly. and it strips HDCP.

Re:You may need it, but you won't get it

[davecotter]

that is not true. you can order direct from them. they work. they are still available.

Shooting a lot of people in the foot.

[hebertrich]

Specially us integrators of av equipment.In large installations there are lots of problems with HDMI.One being the distance at which these signals can be transmitted.With component we take straight coax and bring the signal fair distances without loss of quality.Try that with a hdmi . needs boosters and if something is not to the taste of the player , it gets being hell quick.Nice to protect content , but this is being done at the expense of not being able to manipulate the signal and do what needs be done with it for our clients.
Problems with HDMI laptops to screen are numerous.I hope that format dies. It's nothing but trouble with pro a/v in offices , schools universities and government.There's nothing good about hdmi. Nothing but rights glorified dvi-d + sound + drm format anyways.
HDMI is a pos and should be abandoned.Not the component output.

There, fixed that for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

This ensures that high-def video is available only through the copy-protected HDMI outputs.

This ensures that high-def video is available only through the copy-protected HDMI outputs and on the internet where some of the people will decide to go if paying for content doesn't get them what they want.

aspect ratio.

[leuk_he]

But i really like those black bars in 3d, 240hz with a dynamic rang of 1:100.000 with 7.1 HD master audio.

cause hdcp is really secure...

[pakar]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/claimed-hdcp-master-key-leak-could-be-fatal-to-drm-scheme.ars

the DRM schemes are not for protecting content, it's for making high-level management think they are protecting content.

Less than PAL

[NearO]

540p is less vertical resolution than PAL, which is 576p.

Turning The Clock Forward

[jseale]

There are some devices for which component video is the only connection method (think smaller TVs, early model HD camcorders) and this thing is gonna' make those seem somewhat archaic. You think Hollywood really wants that on its record? I think not!

It's our own fault

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do US citizens allow money to control politics and write the laws? The reason we have insane, draconian IP policy is because Big Media writes the laws. Congress and the President take their money and then when it's time to write the laws, they let them do it, with only minor changes made by Congress before the laws are enacted.

Why do US citizens allow Big Media advertisements to control their vote? The reason for the horrible state of our laws is because the laws are written by the rich. And the reason the laws are written by the rich is because the average Joe in the US votes for whoever the rich tell him to vote for. A candidate can promise to end lobbyist control, promise more jobs and lower taxes and higher benefits a million times, fail to follow through a million times, and yet every election a majority of the voters in the US just fall for that line over and over. Are the people in the US really that stupid? Well, I guess I have to admit that most of the people I know really are. And that's why this stuff happens.

Re:It's our own fault

[neminem]

In this particular case, we allow it because when things get too draconian, those of us who care just torrent them instead. I like to think of it as a particularly convenient form of passive resistance (I *do* spend money on media. Just not media that's DRM'd to kingdom come, and where the creators of the media get crap-all in return.)

I'm not arguing that we as a country tend to be kind of major pushovers, but in this case, the alternatives are just obvious.

Compliance vs. robustness

[tepples]

each HDCP device has a unique key. They'd have to somehow obtain the KSVs (public keys) of every HDFury ever sold

I was under the impression that the HDCP device keys of a single licensee were in some way related, much as AACS has a key tree. So if I understand you correctly, does a manufacturer of a million devices of the same make and model request a million keys directly from DCP LLC?

HDCP revocation is meant to revoke rogue devices using a single cloned stolen/compromised key, not an entire line of legitimate devices.

A system that focuses on individual cloned devices, not a line of devices that are discovered to have broken the contract, appears intended to enforce robustness, not compliance.

Skip Blu-ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Just Skip Blu Ray.

But they're Monster Cable analog cables!

[LostMyBeaver]

Let's face it, when faced with the choice of what provides better picture quality. It's obvious that the clear winner is the more expensive Monster component cables as opposed to the inexpensive no-name HDMI and SPDIF cables. What you clearly don't understand is the value of the transport. Just put it to the test. I bought a 20 meter Monster Category 6 Ethernet cable and my Internet connection has been faster and more reliable than the crappy old fiber I was using.

You should know that HDMI and fiber kill the quality of your signal because when you lose bits on the line, you get static and drop outs. Top quality multi-layer, gold coated, stranded braided copper with primary and secondary ground planes on both the inner and outer connector are they only practical way of guaranteeing that music and films are seen an heard they way the pros do it.

If you insist on using HDMI cables, don't count on anything less than Monster. It's by far much better than all the competition. It's worth mounting your screen a few extra centimeters from the wall to compensate for the inflexible turning radius of the thicker cable since you'll have far less static and your colors will be much clearer.

So you're telling me...

[sys_mast]

...If I purchase my movie from a store, I can't watch it in HD on my custom component video setup. But if I download it from the internet and burn it to disk, violating copyright, and getting the product for FREE, then I can watch it in HD?

Really...I mean really!? How does anyone think this is a good idea?

I (the consumer) just want to purchase a good, and do what I want with it after I get home from the store. I might want to watch it on one device or another, maybe I want to move it to a mobile device(not on the disk anymore) Why am I being punished for paying for the product?