Chinese pirates offering cheap AVCHD Blu-ray rips on disguised DVD-Rs
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 17th 2008 4:26AM
posted Nov 17th 2008 4:26AM
[Image courtesy of UberGizmo]
posted Nov 17th 2008 4:26AM
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Correction to the article: maybe these particular rips are encoded in 720 horizontal resolution, but AVCHD supports 1080 just fine, either i or P...
These aren't AVCHD discs. I've been living in Beijing for a couple of years and seen plenty of these. They are straight rips of the standard DVD release and repackaged to look like blu-ray discs, even for titles that aren't out on blu-ray yet. The going rate is more like $2.50 than $7 also.
I live in Malaysia and these recently started showing up at the local stores. They are in fact AVCHD discs at 720p. They generally go for RM20 to RM25 which is $5.50 to $7.00 at the current exchange rate.
Depending on the movie these discs are not bad at all. Not that I would ever by them...
It's not surprising this has happened. Original CDs, DVDs, games and other media are very expensive in places like Thailand, China, Hong Kong etc. especially in relation to people's salaries. Imagine if a disk cost $150 and you get the idea why piracy is so rife over there.
I doubt the pirates will bother doing legitimate blu ray copies for some time when the recordable media is expensive and things like ROM mark deter mass duplication. They'll just put HD content out on a DVD as AVCHD or BD-5 or BD-9. Or pretend its HD when it's just upscaled DVD. Or it will be an HD movie shot from the back of a cinema. Anything released before the appearance of a retail DVD / BD release is likely to be the latter.
Asian governments don't seem to care about piracy. They conduct raids of course but they're as effective as prohibition booze raids which is to say not at all. The only way piracy will diminish is when the original content owners realise they cannot charge western prices to people on 1/4 the salary. They have to make their content affordable which means lowering prices. Even if that means selling them in plastic sleeves with minimal features and a localized soundtrack to prevent copies leaking into other regions.
The ironic thing about this is that Hollywood would point at what's happening and say it's a success for their anti-piracy technologies, not a failure.
Blu-ray is "protected" by a variety of technologies. Some of these, such as BD+ and the encrypted part of AACS, are intended to prevent unauthorized players from having access to the material. Of course, this is all BS, both systems are cracked and it's improbable they'll have any long term affect preventing people from ripping the streams. But these are two of the weapons, anyway.
The other "protection" is provided by preventing authorized players from having access to unauthorized material. This is also provided by AACS, plus ROM Mark. AACS factors into this by its mere presence - you need to buy a key to get a disc encrypted by AACS, and an authorized Blu-ray player cannot play an unencrypted pressed Blu-ray disc. So there's a clear audit trail for every pressed Blu-ray disc back to the AACS LA. And ROM Mark is a key that's unique to each duplicator that needs to be pressed onto each disc that duplicator makes. Again this leaves an audit trail between every disc and the outfit that pressed it. ROM Mark prevents Blu-ray replicators from making bit-for-bit copies of legitimate Blu-ray discs.
Now, combined, these technologies make it more difficult for someone to produce knock-off versions of regular Blu-ray discs, as they did DVDs and CDs. Which is why you're seeing these lower resolution pirate versions. The 720p limitation has nothing to do with AVCHD, it has to do with the fact the movie has to fit on an inexpensive DVD5 or DVD9. Encoded at 1080p, with a single soundtrack, you probably can get a good transfer into a DVD9, but I'm going to suggest here that all of these discs are probably DVD5s, given DVD-Rs are dirt cheap compared to DVD-R DLs. 720p with H.264 or VC-1 encoding allows a reasonable, mostly artifact-free, encoding of around 2-3G per hour, which makes it perfect for 4.7Gb DVD-Rs.
To Hollywood, the fact that the pirates are unable to mass distribute their HD content without significant recompression is a win.
In the longer term, it's possible BD-R prices will come down to something reasonable which may counter all of the above. On the other hand, it's seriously questionable whether this will come within the next two years or so, after which Blu-ray's relevance as an HD distribution format may well have come and gone.
I think people underestimate the sheer scale and sophistication of the piracy industry in China and calling it an industy is more accurate than you could imagine. The discs being sold are not single or dual layer DVD-Rs. The discs come from proper DVD replication lines producing silver, pressed discs in single or dual layer varieties in huge volumes. The packaging is equally professionally done too with a quality inner sleeve and a printed and embossed cardboard outer sleeve. These discs are as good as the originals quite often.
The authorities are far from powerless to stamp this out. They choose not to since it is a large industry, employing a lot of people and contributes nicely to the government's tax coffers. They instead pay lip service to Hollywood and make a few token gestures to appear that they are cracking down on piracy. During he Beijing Olympics all of the stores selling these discs were shut down or had their shelves cleared of pirated material (meaning all for some stores) so that western journalists could not witness and report on the rampant piracy. 3 days after the paralympics over all the shops were back open for business as usual.
Oh great, the BDA will use this excuse to put even more DRM into Blu-Ray.