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Hmmmm...this is interesting. The next generation players will need to be hooked up to the internet in order for you to play movies.

If that player is "hacked" to play any other disc, hollywood can render that player useless.

Read it for yourself.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/ptech/09/0 ... index.html

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.

"A hacked player is any player that is doing something it's not supposed to do," Setos said, adding the jury was still out if regional coding would be maintained or scrapped.

The controversial regional code prevents DVD disks that have been bought in one continent to play on devices elsewhere.

WTF

Figarou wrote:Hmmmm...this is interesting. The next generation players will need to be hooked up to the internet in order for you to play movies.

If that player is "hacked" to play any other disc, hollywood can render that player useless

I don't think they thought their brilliant plan all the way through. If they can be altered to ignore region coding, I'm sure they can be altrered to stop them from reporting back.

Bah. I'm not sure they'll be able to follow through with that.



First of all, it's stupid business-wise. People are not going to want to have to hook their DVD players up to the Internet just to be able to play movies. Furthermore, it completely excludes people who have no access to the Internet.

It's also really bad for their image. People don't like to be told they're untrustworthy. Personally, I'd refuse to buy from any company that tried to market such a product.

Secondly, it's standing on very shaky legal ground. They are essentially taking the law into their own hands, and the only way (that I know of) that they can legally get away with that is if the consumer agrees to a contract granting permission for the company to disable the device in the case where the terms of the contract are broken (such as through tampering with the device).

Terms of Agreement such as these cannot be hidden inside the box so that a hapless consumer buys the product and then finds himself obligated to follow an unexpected set of rules before he is permitted to use what he has bought. The courts have not, to my knowledge, ever upheld such gotcha' contracts. No, the terms of the contract have to be clearly displayed on the exterior of the box so that they can be reviewed prior to any purchase. They usually state that you are agreeing to the terms by opening the box and using the product. Even so, shrink-wrap licenses such as these have had only limited success in court.

On a different note, ignoring contracts, it also prevents all sorts of legal tinkering, which is unacceptable. It also forces you to go only to accredited repair shops, which is, I think, illegal (or should be).

Finally, it's not going to be a significant deterrant of piracy. It might stop the small-fry, but it's not going to stop any of the ones who are doing significant damage (as far as piracy goes). It won't take long at all before dozens of people find ways to circumvent these protections (they view it as a challenge) and post them on the Internet (it earns them respect). Anyone who's at all serious about piracy would have no difficulty bypassing these protections.

It's illegal to bypass these protections due to the DMCA, but it's almost impossible to enforce on a person-by-person basis (and the DMCA is greviously flawed anyway). Someone who's engaged in rampant piracy couldn't care less.



I think it's a very bad move on the part of these Blu-ray companies. It undermines the demand for their product and probably won't be effective anyway.

There's a webpage out there somewhere that describes human stupidity. It says there are four categories of behavior: Intelligent, Helpless, Bandit, and Stupid. An Intelligent person acts to benefit both himself and others. A Helpless person acts to benefit others to the detriment of himself. A Bandit benefits himself to the detriment of others. But the Stupid one is a detriment to himself and others alike.

I think this one falls somewhere between Bandit and Stupid.

-- Vilkacis

Well, that's one anti-piracy method available to Blu-Ray, but there's 3 methods the movie manufacturer's can choose to use and they can choose not to use one. HD-DVD on the other hand, appears to be using this method of copyprotection exclusivly, and I imagine they'll get into trouble.

As somebody earlier said, this doesn't really make good buisness sense. There's a LOT of households in the US that do not have internet connections and those on Dial-up would have an exceptionally difficult time setting this up due to a lack of second phone-line. So it's an inconvenience to some and makes playback downright impossible for others.

For Blu-Ray, I don't imagine the problem will be widespread due in large part to the fact that it's optional. Many manufacturers have already tried instituting similer copyright protection methods with disasterous results, and I don't imagine that the manufacturers whom haven't learned thier lesson will have it any easier.

HD-DVD though, well it could be the deathnail for them. They're already suffering from hardware delays, poor PC support, and have failed to get thier format into a next-gen videogame console. Forcing all users to hook upto the internet for every movie cannot possibly help matters for them any.

woah talk about heavy security.

Shadow Wulf wrote:woah talk about heavy security.

Not really. Especially since the person wanting to bypass it will have physical access to the machine. Like they say in computer security: "If an attacker has physical access to your machine, it's not yours any more."

I can see it now, laboring for hours above the machine just getting a movie to work. Sounds like fun.

yeah your right, its not like any spyware stuff.

who knows whats going to happen with the next gen DVD players.

I don't think it'll replace regular DVD very quickly. Not everyone has a HDTV.

Yeah, HDTV adoption isn't as fast as they thought it would be. Probably because a lot of people seen no reason to replace their old TV.

Lupin wrote:Yeah, HDTV adoption isn't as fast as they thought it would be. Probably because a lot of people seen no reason to replace their old TV.

the high prices is whats driving them away.

Figarou wrote:the high prices is whats driving them away.

That too.

Oh, these formats definitly arn't gonna "replace," DVD anytime TOO soon. 3 years from now though, we may see the transition begin in earnest.

I should note that by then, I fully expect HDTV's to be a heck of a lot cheaper. ;)

WolvenOne wrote:Oh, these formats definitly arn't gonna "replace," DVD anytime TOO soon. 3 years from now though, we may see the transition begin in earnest.

I should note that by then, I fully expect HDTV's to be a heck of a lot cheaper. ;)

It better be cheaper. I like to get a large screen LCD HDTV.

Figarou wrote:It better be cheaper. I like to get a large screen LCD HDTV.

Oh they will be. The price always drops the longer something is on the market. Just look at DVD players.

Remember DIVX? Not the codec, but what it was named after. Circuit City tried it as a marketing scheme, a way of "renting" movies and "owning" them at the same time. You bought a player, and then bought the discs, dirt cheap, but then had to "rent" rights to watch the disc after its first viewing.

The device had to be connected to a server, and connection problems were common, making the discs unwatchable.

The format tanked. It joined a long list of other dead formats. What's odd about DIVX as a failed format was that it wasn't something by Sony, the master of dead formats, including the legendary Betamax.

Scott Gardener wrote:The format tanked. It joined a long list of other dead formats. What's odd about DIVX as a failed format was that it wasn't something by Sony, the master of dead formats, including the legendary Betamax.

While Betamax failed, the professional version, Betacam, actually became an industry standard among TV stations.

Scott Gardener wrote:The format tanked. It joined a long list of other dead formats. What's odd about DIVX as a failed format was that it wasn't something by Sony, the master of dead formats, including the legendary Betamax.

I know one thing about Betamax. It was more popular in south America compared to VHS.

Its the same way for Minidisc. Its popular in Europe and Japan, But not here.


HD-DVD and Blu-ray won't kill regular DVD right off. DVD players are really cheap now and there is a lot of bargains to be found on DVD.

That, and there's a point of diminishing returns. Sure, an even higher resolution format with even more than five or six channels of sound might be interesting to me, but if the tradeoff is dealing with built-in crippling features that makes its honest usage problematic at best and its transfer to a laptop hard drive or copying to the next format in fifteen years impossible, then forget it. DVD is already good enough.

Well, here is an interesting twist. The major studios are planning on backing both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Paramount was 1st to do that. Now Warner plans on doing the same thing

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ ... _tc024.htm



I see some good in this and some bad.

Good that both sides can get films in thier format. (HD-DVD/Blu-Ray)

Bad that there could be four, maybe six versions of the film all at once.

For example.. A widescreen HD-DVD, Full screen HD-DVD, Widescreen Blu-Ray, full screen BluRay, and a collector's edition in both HD-DVD and BluRay.


Now, I'm hoping HD-DVD and Blu-ray only supports widescreen.


Oh...I hope they don't do exclusives for one format. Not everyone is going to like that!! If I bought a HD-DVD player then find out later on a cool movie is only on Blu-Ray, I'd be upset because I have to go out and buy another player. Unless Pioneer decides to make a player that can play both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Figarou wrote:Now, I'm hoping HD-DVD and Blu-ray only supports widescreen.

Oh...I hope they don't do exclusives for one format. Not everyone is going to like that!! If I bought a HD-DVD player then find out later on a cool movie is only on Blu-Ray, I'd be upset because I have to go out and buy another player. Unless Pioneer decides to make a player that can play both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

With HD-DVD and Blu-ray, I don't see any reason why there would be a need to release seperate "full screen" versions anymore. If you are still using a standard (non widescreen, non digital) tv, then just having the player "crop" a portion of the wide-version to the screen would be good enough. (as even that portion of the full, wide-screen, HD image would still be of a higher resoluton than an old Tube could display anyway.)
(I think some current DVD players and movies do this allready, but with the steady advances in hardware technology, there would really no longer be any excuse not to make this a "standard" feature in all film releases and players.)

As for format exclusives...you know that it will happen. It's unavoidable.
However, I would also count on multi-format players definately becoming available fairly soon. ($ for a heftier price tag, of course $)

Figarou wrote:Well, here is an interesting twist. The major studios are planning on backing both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Paramount was 1st to do that. Now Warner plans on doing the same thing

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ ... _tc024.htm

Oh great. I wish they would stop fence-sitting and pick a format. I really don't want two drives in my computer like what happened when CD buners and DVD players became popular

Lupin wrote:Oh great. I wish they would stop fence-sitting and pick a format. I really don't want two drives in my computer like what happened when CD buners and DVD players became popular

I think my brothers single Drive is compatable with DVD-R / CD-R/ CD+R and CD-RW for both reading AND writing. ...though I'm not sure. I'll have to ask him.

Vuldari wrote:

Lupin wrote:Oh great. I wish they would stop fence-sitting and pick a format. I really don't want two drives in my computer like what happened when CD buners and DVD players became popular

I think my brothers single Drive is compatable with DVD-R / CD-R/ CD+R and CD-RW for both reading AND writing. ...though I'm not sure. I'll have to ask him.

I have a drive that takes DVD+R DL / DVD+R / DVD+RW/ DVD-R / DVD-RW / CD-R / and CD-RW.

It reads and writes.