Cherish your backups while you can...

[TugBoat]

'cause they may be a thing of the past shortly. It seems a few people are upset over the new protection schemes intended for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. I read a little, understood a little, and thought I had stumbled into some NSA Top Secret Encryption area when I began reading of the Encryption to be used on a standard movie. My God, it's just a movie, not nuclear physics. Whatever.

So, I guess I'll just wait and see what happens. DVDs, as they are, are fine with me...


http://writersblocklive.com/part-156
http://www.aacsla.com/specifications/specs091/AACS_Spec_Common_0.91.pdf

[Case]

And you can buy a new HDTV as well, as the analog loop is closed to HD content. The component video port gets the low res version.

[AntnyMD]

You know folks, you arent forced to buy protected content. Movies are not a necessity.

The other side of that coin, of course, is you all know good and well whatever copy protection scheme put on high definition DVDs will be broken within weeks of the first title's release.

[whitejremiah]

yep, to what i understand, dvdjon (the guy who broke dvd's CSS encryption originally) already has webspace set up and is highly intent on breaking the encryption used on the new movies.......i'm sure though, if it's as bad as they say it is, it wont sell...no one will buy the things if they can't copy em (either out of fair use, or otherwise....) if you wanna have a look at another format that flopped because of that, take a look at DVD-Audio....primary reason that failed, at least in my eyes, is because it couldnt be copied.......well that and the fact it wasnt very well advertised....

[willrob]

The total cost of the format (HDCP TV, Player, Recorder and Media) coupled with the cost of the movie itself will make this a High End consumer product for a quite a while. An initial list I saw recently of movie titles that are already in Blu-Ray wasn't all that spectacular, at least not to my tastes. Many movie collectors may balk at the idea of buying another version of their already extensive DVD collection. There are some purists who will want that HD quality; but for most people I think the DVD format is "good enough."

[macuser25]

An existing DVD player with upconverison capabilities and an HDMI connector to a new TV with HDMI looks pretty awesome. It will be a very long time before people will be convinced why they need to invest in new players, burners and movies - the BD/HD camps need to make it more inviting and not less inviting with draconian copy protection schemes.

[edDV]

You know folks, you arent forced to buy protected content. Movies are not a necessity.

The real problem comes as they (MPAA and both parties) try to apply this to over-the-air and cable HDTV. This must be resisted.

http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/?f=broadcastflag.html

[AntnyMD]

I think consumers can successfully resist copy protection on over-the-air signals, because the people own those airwaves. Cable-only content though is fair game for content protection. Currently the 5C protection on all the cable channels to which I subscribe are "copy once" so I can copy that content to an approved device (I have two: DVR from the cable company, and a JVC D-VHS recorder). We need more 5C aware devices, especially disc-based ones.

[willrob]

I think we can expect HDCP programming to not transfer to any recordable device, even if a HD blueray type stand alone recorder did come on the market. I'm not sure you can even step down to a DVD quality recording to disk. I think the whole HDCP effort is to keep the content out of the Chinese pirates hands. Unfortunately we also have to pay a price for the "Industry's" protection.

If this new 30-60 Gigabyte media were stratch proof and safe for kids to use as a frisbee, then we might not have to make back-ups. But since they never made DVDs that secure, I don't expect the new format to be any more durable.

[edDV]

The pirates won't be bothering with crappy low res 1920x1080 TV/cable broadcasts, they will rip the 4kx2k digital theater masters or 144 Mb/s HDCAM broadcast tapes. From their viewpoint why waste time with engineering when blackmail and bribery are far more efficient. The MPAA knows how easy and cheap it is to buy a Congressman. How much for a night tape operator?

[AntnyMD]

You have a point about the Chinese. They did an end-run around DVD with SVCD .. and if you check the DVD spec, it specifically excludes the final China-approved resolution of 480x480/576. Alright for China!