The egg had to come before the chicken right? Well either way, one of 'em came first and in the case of the latest Blu-ray feature,
Managed Copy, the Blu-ray Discs will come before the hardware. Less than five months since
AACS was finalized and the
details of Managed Copy were revealed and so far we've only
seen one demo and not a single product announcement. This doesn't surprise us, but AACS-LA is apparently surprised because although all Blu-ray Discs sold after December 4th have no choice but to allow at least one copy to be made, the requirement to label the packaging as such has been postponed until Spring of next year. We'd expect at least a few products that support Managed Copy to be announced at CES and although we highly doubt any stand-alone Blu-ray players will sport this feature anytime soon, we do have our hopes on PC software and expect a few movie jukebox devices like
Kaleidescape -- that we won't be able to afford -- will be announced at the big show in Vegas.
posted Nov 7th 2009 2:34AM
So pretty much the only hope of us seeing Managed Copy would be on the PS3 first. I can't imagine that Sony hasn't been working on this.
Managed copy would be pretty useless on the PS3 (as it is elsewhere) unless accompanied by transcoding ability. Even a 250Gb model would only store ~ 10 full size movies before it ran out of space. If it could transcode them down to 4Gb or less it might be more useful. Then again, it would likely take 3+ hours to do this, which would turn a lot of people off.
Maybe Sony would have a way to tie it to downloadable copies of movies, since I doubt the other options are practical.
Well, the Cell on the PS3 could likely handle transcoding, if its implemented.
Probably won't be tho.
Also, the PS3 can support external HDDs, and the internal HDD is expandable with regular netbook HDDs, so capacity is as 'limited' as you wanna have it be.
Of course the cell could handle transcoding but it's not a magic wand. It would still take hours to transcode the content from disk to HDD. Also, yes the PS3 does support external drives, but only FAT32. At the very least large files would have to be split into chunks.
IMO It would be such a niche feature it would scarcely be worth bothering to implement it. The only way out is if managed copy were tied to a download service, such that if you inserted the BD, that the PSN download service would permit you download the equivalent digital copy. Even that would be fraught with all sorts of technical and legal issues.
My post pertains to the use of managed copy on some discs I am releasing in 3 weeks. I have 3 Blu-ray discs coming out on December 1, all in the ambient art genre (the 7.1 DTS-HD MA makes ambient *really* ambient.
Anyway... I flagged each of the discs for managed copy, and the Manifest XML file is pointed to the default AACSLA server, but because I can't actually test the managed copy function on a BR deck, I don't know how well it will work. I'm relying on hardware manufacturers and software on computers to have a managed copy function. There is no "managed copy" link on my disc -- just the permissions set in the managed copy manifest xml.
It's my hope that it will work sort of in the way that iTunes DRM worked. The server will see that the disc is flagged to allow copies to be made. Does anybody have any information that they can share in this regard? I'm not sure if emails can be posted here, and I'm purposely avoiding a "plug," however, with my discs at the replicator, I'd gladly make a change if it helped to make this work more smoothly.
Thanks!
NuttyBars
To clarify my previous post, I am trying to allow people to copy without additional charge. I just think that some stuff, like mine, might actually be BETTER from a hard drive under certain circumstances.
If I'm not charging, does anybody know if the server will simply allow a copy to be made?