DRM Cracks HD-DVD and BLuRay

[Zaphod]

People thought that about CDs and DVDs too at one point. If anything, if the HD formats stay compromised, it will help drive volume demand for high capacity hard drive storage.

 

[Arnold Beckenbauer]

The fundamental floor as far as AACS or any other protection is concerned is concerned is that there is no way to revoke decrypted copies, so assuming people are willing to find these holes (and they don't have to make them public) and release the decrypted copies, it's useless as a mechanism to stop illegal downloading.

Makers of AnyDVD have revealed, they are working on "AnyDVD HD". It's a commercial product and "nobody's gonna have to painfully search for title keys in the memory of some badly written player" (original quote).
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But what is the sense? HD DVD players are not allowed to play HD DVDs without AACS (for example: you make a HD DVD with your grandma's birthday party: you have to encrypt it by AACS, if you want to watch it on your HD DVD player). You could make a WMV-HD or DivX-HD/XviD-HD DVD-ROM (DVD9), but you need a fast cpu and a lot of time, because there is no equivalent transcoder like DVD2One.
The only users, who benefit by BackupHDDVD, are pc user without HDCP capable graphics card and/or monitor without HDCP (ok, PowerDVD 7.1/.2 allows to use VGA, but no go for DVI without HDCP).

 

[Zaphod]

But what is the sense? HD DVD players are not allowed to play HD DVDs without AACS (for example: you make a HD DVD with your grandma's birthday party: you have to encrypt it by AACS, if you want to watch it on your HD DVD player).

Well, they have already played burned Blu-Ray copies on (some) standalones. Apparently, how well they support the various disc formats and playback methods (and the restrictions inherit to them) is highly firmware dependent (at the moment).

Personally, although I know some (many?) will disagree, I believe that weak player implementation will do the system in. The alternative is that we all go out and grab a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four. On paper, mind you; not HD.

 

[pcchen]

You may be right on both counts. But I still found myself excited by the prospect that I could put movies I bought onto my server and watch them on the HTPC.

Actually that's why Microsoft insisted that managed copy to be mandatory.

 

[ERP]

Not many people are going to be downloading 30-50GB pirated movies from the net let alone hosting it.

Give it 5 or 10 years, people said the same thing about DVD's.
The shear size of DVD's saved them from the rampant copying of MP3's, and the larger HD-DVD and blu-ray discs might delay it further (although I don't think most pirates care enough about image quality).
I own a massive DVD collection (800+ discs), the only copying I do is to my own server for convenience, I want to do the same thing with any HD format. It may not be very practical from a space requirement today, but I'll still be watching the discs in 5+ years.
I'd also happilly adopt a lower quality download format that didn't have stupid DRM restrictions. Or a pay service with a large enough movie selection.

Right now I won't adopt either HD format because 5 years from now there is no guarantee I'll be able to play media I buy today.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I doubt many people would download a 4GB iffy quality 720 divx encoded movie.
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How are you going to play these 720p divx movies anyway? Through your PC? You sure aren't going to be playing them in your DVD player or HD player.

Millions people just do this, download 700MB divx and play them on their PC. or alternatively on their $40 DVD player with divx support. I can well imagine that a lot of people will still do that but go once in a while for a 720p xvid (which should look better than a DVD, so how is that iffy quality?) and either play it on their PC, or burn on a DVD-4 and play in a DVD player with HD divx support (doesn't that kind of player already exist?)

I'm not advocating piracy but I don't care either and it will happen anyway. now I'm wondering.. could xvid on DVD become a successful commercial HD format? Imagine non MPAA HD content, at $10 rather than $30 or $40, and without DRM. Imagine porn, even.

 

[Inane_Dork]

My brother pointed me to a blog that links to entire movies YouTube. Besides the legality of that, I was blown away that anyone would be interested in a super crappy version of any of these movies.

 

[Skrying]

My brother pointed me to a blog that links to entire movies YouTube. Besides the legality of that, I was blown away that anyone would be interested in a super crappy version of any of these movies.

I've talked to a lot of business people who use these when on trips. Sure the quality is crappy but there's nothing like watching Family Guy while at the airport and not having to store them on your laptop or hit the hard drive constantly.

 

[Capeta]

Give it 5 or 10 years, people said the same thing about DVD's.
The shear size of DVD's saved them from the rampant copying of MP3's, and the larger HD-DVD and blu-ray discs might delay it further (although I don't think most pirates care enough about image quality).
I own a massive DVD collection (800+ discs), the only copying I do is to my own server for convenience, I want to do the same thing with any HD format. It may not be very practical from a space requirement today, but I'll still be watching the discs in 5+ years.
I'd also happilly adopt a lower quality download format that didn't have stupid DRM restrictions. Or a pay service with a large enough movie selection.

Right now I won't adopt either HD format because 5 years from now there is no guarantee I'll be able to play media I buy today.

Personally I'd rather have two 400 DVD jukeboxes (800 DVDs total) - that's about 5.6 TBs of storage if I were to store them on HDDs without re-encoding. For me it makes no sense to re-encode them and store them on HDDs unless I wanted to stream the movies to multiple rooms. In my house I have the living room and the bedroom which are the only two rooms that need movies. I'm sure there will be similar jukeboxes for the HD formats in the next few years.