Burning HDMI Question

[fearsomepirate]

I was gonna post this in the console forum, but it's really not a console question. As I understand it, HDMI is this supersecret transfer thing that allows the transfer of an encoded digital signal (HDCP) instead of some crappy ol' analog signal that can be ripped straight off your component cables. Also, HDMI is necessary for 1080p, because component cables don't have the bandwidth...or something. OK, so here's the query:

I simply do not understand why HDCP-encoded movies won't even display in 720p but instead downscale to 540p. I've heard the industry rationale is that this prevents pirates from ripping high-definition movies, so that you'll have to pay actual money for the DVD (I mean...uh...BDR or HDDVD or whatever) instead of downloading it off [probably shouldn't say where, but you know]. But this makes no sense to me. 99.999999% of pirated video out there is compressed beyond what's already on our boring ol' 480p DVDs. Let me just hop on [you-know-where] and have a look-see...yep, these DVD rips are no bigger than a few hundred megs, which means they're heavily compressed. What are these studios smoking? Where are all these pirates who would be uploading 15+ GB files if they had the chance?

So is there some other rationale for 540p only, or is it really that stupid?

 

[Tahir2]

OK some of the things you have said are not entirely correct but the gist of the post is what is important.

What you dont see and the studios do see is the increase in bandwidth available to the average user - we have gone from 56k to 512Mbit in one leap and now some people have 8Mbit connections and beyond. This is only going to get faster and the large telcos etc and already putting infrastructure in place to make way for this HD revolution.

As to why not go down to just 720P - 720P is a HD resolution as it is classified and even then can offer significant improvements over standard 480/576i material out there.

Also 720P is the HD resolution that has the greatest popularity so most folks would be extremely happy to have double the detail on their pirated movies over DVD's.

 

[kyleb]

Also not that no current HD format movies are flaged to downcovert over analog.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Well, that's kind of beside the point. The point is that people are already more than happy to download vast quantities of pirated movies that are significantly crappier quality than what's on shelves. I don't think it matters in the slightest to them why the quality is worse--whether HDCP or bandwidth, people apparently don't care if looks and sounds (relatively) like junk if it's free. Are all these people downloading low-bitrate movies instead of buying DVDs really going to say "WTF? These MPEGs are only in 540p? F*** this noise, I'm going to buy a stack of BDRs tomorrow!" I don't think so.

 

[Moloch]

I was gonna post this in the console forum, but it's really not a console question. As I understand it, HDMI is this supersecret transfer thing that allows the transfer of an encoded digital signal (HDCP) instead of some crappy ol' analog signal that can be ripped straight off your component cables. Also, HDMI is necessary for 1080p, because component cables don't have the bandwidth...or something. OK, so here's the query:

I simply do not understand why HDCP-encoded movies won't even display in 720p but instead downscale to 540p. I've heard the industry rationale is that this prevents pirates from ripping high-definition movies, so that you'll have to pay actual money for the DVD (I mean...uh...BDR or HDDVD or whatever) instead of downloading it off [probably shouldn't say where, but you know]. But this makes no sense to me. 99.999999% of pirated video out there is compressed beyond what's already on our boring ol' 480p DVDs. Let me just hop on [you-know-where] and have a look-see...yep, these DVD rips are no bigger than a few hundred megs, which means they're heavily compressed. What are these studios smoking? Where are all these pirates who would be uploading 15+ GB files if they had the chance?

So is there some other rationale for 540p only, or is it really that stupid?

Show me a dvd rip that is only a few hundred meg by an "official" release group.
Standard size is 700MB for a movie up to 1 hour an 35~ minutes, the resulting quality usally is almost indistinguishable from the dvd, thanks to advances in mpeg4 compression.
When divx first came out, I agree the the quality doesn't very good, very blocky, but now it's quite good.
You can also get dvds that are only missing the extras and DC if there, so you get the full res (albeit recompressed in some cases) and 5.1 sound, btw a lot of dvd rips have 5.1 sound aswell.
There is even an hdtv group on usenet where most posts are full mpeg2 transport streams
The size for a movie is in the 20GB realm.
It is quite obvious you have no idea what you are talking about.
The quality of stuff on your limewire and whatever other P2P crap is not representative of what's out there.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Show me a dvd rip that is only a few hundred meg by an "official" release group.

I didn't realize there was a licensing process to be an "official" DVD rip. OK, so I didn't know there were usenet groups for exchanging full quality rips. Big deal. If I don't, then how many people do you think do out of all the people who download movies? All I know is that all through college and grad school, I saw lots of people watching clearly lower-quality rips of DVDs, and I've seen jillions of them floating around the networks where the typical Internet user can find them. Somehow, I doubt a handful of supergeek enthusiasts who spend all day on Usenet looking for great deals on quad SLI boards are representative of the typical file sharer. "What's out there" is precisely that: what's out there. And there are lots of low-quality rips out there, and there are lots of people happy to download them. In my experience, what guys like you have is not representative of what's out there.