http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/ Engadget Comments for MPAA dangles early HD VOD releases, in exchange for closing that pesky analog hole http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
All they can do with copy protection is delay piracy of digital content with encryption and watermark content to aid with forensic investigation when it is pirated. Anyone with $5000 could circumvent digital protection quite handily by capturing HDMI content after stripping out the HDCP, capturing the stream and re-encoding it.

It is clear from reading the BD+ whitepaper that their first assumption was the scheme would cracked so their focus is not on making an uncrackable scheme, but rather one that can be renewed post-crack from one movie release to the next where each disc has a different scheme. This is why anyone thinking AnyDVD will ever play every disc is seriously deluded - over time the devs will find it harder and harder to extract the volume key to the point that it will be rendered essentially useless.

Ironically, DRM is more of a problem for digital content. The direct download market is going to remain tiny while dozens of VOD vendors all encrypt their content to proprietary players and devices via various schemes. If ever there was an industry wide DRM with appropriate safeguards to ensure device transfer rights if a store went down, then it might take off. Or if they did away with DRM entirely and used passive techniques like watermarking it might take off. But while it is stays the rats nest of competing fiefdoms, and proprietary formats that it is at the moment, they will be struggling to make any headway. I wonder how interested they are in ownership anyway - rental looks far more attractive because issues like ownership, device support, key escrow etc are more or less irrelevant.]]>May 16th 2008 8:59AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
But in the longer term, the only way Blu-ray can become popular is for players to be cheap enough to be aimed at the mass market, and that's only going to happen with a vibrant, diverse, collection of player manufacturers. And suddenly we're looking at a situation where Hollywood's paranoia will make the current issue with Blu-ray, the fact you can't buy a player that is guaranteed to access all of the extras on a Blu-ray disc, look like a minor hitch. For every encumbered disc, there will be dozens of players completely unable to play the main feature. And with Hollywood putting pressure on retailers to refuse to take returns, it's improbable, to me, that most consumers will stick with the format, especially with online services becoming increasingly viable in the near future.

Ironically, that means that if Hollywood doesn't embrace "early VoD", then they'll be suffering way more than they would from anything caused by piracy.

The other option, of course, is for the studios and Blu-ray forum to admit BD+ is a massive screw up, and work on fixing Blu-ray. I'm having problems seeing it take off unless there are inexpensive players and every Blu-ray disc works identically on every player - as HD DVD, DVD and VHS worked before. BD+ and the current crop of pre-Profile 2.0 players work against that, and if Blu-ray's backers don't fix both, they're as dead as HD DVD.

And for what it's worth, publications like Engadget should stop declaring Blu-ray the "victor" of the HD war, and refer to HD DVD as "a loser". The war isn't over yet, it's just claimed one casualty.]]>May 16th 2008 10:57AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
And the Blu-Ray folks really ought to be enforcing interoperability. Their current hand's-off attitude will eventually leave Sony the only player in blu-ray. But maybe that's been the idea all along.]]>May 16th 2008 12:09PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
I think HD DVD was doomed for a number of things it fundamentally screwed up on. AACS wasn't much stronger than CSS and it was vulnerable to a class break as indeed happened. Doom9 had it cracked in no time, thanks in no part to sloppy volume key encryption and playback software. BD+ is crackable on a per disk basis but it isn't vulnerable to a class break - every new disk, or even batches of disks can use a different scheme to protect the key and AACS is relegated to key management. Secondly region free encoding is a consumer pleaser but some studios hate it.

From reading the whitepaper it seems the implementors of BD+ had their heads screwed on. They are realistic in accepting that every scheme is breakable given a determined adversary so instead their scheme relies on being renewable. Every disk, indeed even batches of disks could use a different scheme and it takes enormous effort to break every single disk.

This is why its nuts to think BD+ is cracked. It isn't. It would be more realistic to say BD+ on disk X is cracked, but with 40, 50, 60, 100 disks appearing month after month, the effort to crack them all will be overwhelming. AnyDVD is going to have to cherry pick what movies to work on because there is no chance it will work on all of them. ]]>May 16th 2008 12:47PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
And that's why it's screwed up. What we have here is the DVD equivalent of 1980s home computer game protection schemes, where games would poll memory locations and run carefully timed loops in order to determine whether they were running on an unmodified Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum, and fail if the machine was modified in any way. The systems didn't work then - oh sure, they made it slightly harder for people to make copies of games, providing some level of complexity that delayed cracked versions, but it didn't work in terms of false positives. Simple motherboard improvements caused swathes of games to stop working.

BD+ lives in a far worse environment. How, exactly, is a BD+ runtime supposed to deal with potentially thousands of variations on a theme in terms of Blu-ray players? The answer, of course, is that it will not. For every BD+ runtime that detects a "real" compromised player, it'll knock out a dozen legitimate ones.

BD+ is flawed. Saying "Yeah, well AACS is bad because it doesn't protect Blu-ray or HD DVD discs strongly enough" doesn't really cut it because it doesn't address the damage BD+ does to the Blu-ray platform. The damage it causes is enough to compromise Blu-ray's ability to be a viable format for the future.

The choice really is "more piracy" or virtually no hard copy sales whatsoever. With BD+, the result is the latter. Indeed, with BD+, it may not be a choice whatsoever: if there are no legitimate routes (and without Blu-ray being viable, there aren't), then piracy may end up being the only winner.
]]>May 16th 2008 1:51PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/What are you talking about? Yes, BD+ isn't doing customers any good. But it hasn't been a problem so far. It isn't slowing sales or anything like that.

Why are you making up stuff to try to make your point? You have a good point, don't undermine it by giving out false info.]]>May 16th 2008 8:54PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
I do not think the future will be entirely goof-free but in general I think it will go fine. A few issues with a few early players can be chalked up to teething troubles. We'll see how the protection fairs in the long term.]]>May 17th 2008 3:45AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
Aren't Hollywood done yet using laws to prop up dead business models? SO far they've opposed: television, pay television, cable, VCRs, CDRW, DVRs, and now the internet. At each step of the way they have cited fears of ripoff, yet they have made more money that ever before off each successive technology that expanded their business. Once they got their head out of, um, the sand.

Now they are going to use laws to strict their business rather than do as before and let their business expand.

What fools.]]>May 16th 2008 12:01PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
My first TV with HDCP took 3 seconds to sync up, my 2nd one and current one take well under 0.5 seconds. With a channel change taking a long time on MPEG4/H.264 tuners anyway (due to having to wait for keyframes), HDCP isn't a huge deal on this.

I hate HDCP, precludes a lot of useful things like external upconverters and switching amps with on-screen overlay graphics. And it's a complete waste of money ($1 per connector to Intel). But it doesn't make channel changes prohibitively slow.]]>May 16th 2008 8:57PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
The real analog hole is this one : if I can see it, I can copy it. If I wanted to copy the contents of my Blu-ray discs, I would always be able to put my HD camcorder on a tripod in front of my screen.

When will they stop being so damn stupid ? Is utter dumbness part of their business plan ?]]>May 16th 2008 12:24PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/May 16th 2008 12:50PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/May 16th 2008 8:53PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/May 19th 2008 12:52AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/
They're just trying to turn us all into renters.

I want to buy my stuff, I want to play it any time I want and I want to be able to resell it if I want.]]>May 16th 2008 8:52PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/May 16th 2008 9:56PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/16/mpaa-dangles-early-hd-vod-releases-in-exchange-for-closing-that/May 19th 2008 12:51AM