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The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent

Journal written by Ergasiophobia (971409) and posted by kdawson on Tue Jan 16, 2007 01:55 PM
from the nailing-jello-to-a-tree dept.
Media Movies Entertainment
Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article: "The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."
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  • Sky (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2007, @01:57PM (#17632778)
    Burn the land and boil the sea
    You can't take the sky from me

  • Link? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2007, @01:58PM (#17632792)
    No direct link to the torrent? What kind of submission is that?

  • The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Boap (559344) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @01:58PM (#17632798)
    At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space.

    • Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by solevita (967690) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:03PM (#17632874)
      Not really - Hard drive space is still cheaper per GB than HD-DVD is. If you want to store big movies, it's cheaper to do so by downloading them than it is to buy them on disk.

      In other words, if you can't afford to keep 100 HD-DVD movies on your computer, you really can't afford to keep then on HD-DVD.

    • Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by garcia (6573) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:04PM (#17632910) Homepage
      Until the burners become affordable. The limiting factor is really the bandwidth, not the storage space.

    • Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chang (2714) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:04PM (#17632912)
      I'm sure we'll never have a solution for limited drive size ;-)

    • Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jonnythan (79727) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:05PM (#17632916) Homepage
      If you buy 100 HD DVDs you will have spent upwards of $2000.

      With 500GB of storage costing $150 or less, 2TB of storage space will set you back $600.
    • > At 20GB this alone will limit pirates as having even 100 of these movies will take up about 2TB of space.

      I'm sure people made the same observation when DVDs first became available a decade ago. 4.7 or 9GB over dialup or even early cable modems stored onto hard drives barely able to hold a single disc was not a threat to DVD sales either. But bandwidth and storage keep on improving while a media standard like DVD or HD-DVD remains constant for years. The reality is that if an HD movie is fixed at ~20GB the cost to move/store that will soon drop to managable costs.

      With the copy restrictions removed it is an absolute certainly that they WILL be copied. For now just to prove it is possible, to stick it to the man and to prove 313t3 5k177z but eventually it will be as commonplace as Divx;) CD-R copies are now.

    • For now. Maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist (166417) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:18PM (#17633200)
      Think back about 5, or even 10, years. Could you have imagined downloading 3-4 Gigs just for a movie? Or a game?

      When the CD came into existance, it was not thought that copy protection could ever be necessary, people did hardly have the space on their HD to store those 650 Megs on. Today, a CD is not even a deterrent to downloading it, storing is even less a problem.

      Give it a year, and you will probably not even think twice about transfering 20 Gigs just to check out the movie (and deleting it immediately afterwards when you notice that it is indeed copyrighted material, of course).

      • Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Total_Wimp (564548) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:50PM (#17633836)
        I'm sure it'll fit onto a 700meg cd just like all the others - it'll look much the same on a 15inch laptop display. Like mp3s, it's more important to have a fair few to choose from, rather than filling your 300 gig hard drive with 15 highly polished turds.

        This is not meant to be rude. I don't feel I have any right to dictate taste or quality. That said, it's guys like you that keep me off of file sharing networks.

        If you want to compress a perfectly good HD rip down to CD size and watch it, go for it, it's your business. But when I see that stuff being offered to me as if it's some kind of precious gift, I'm flabbergasted. Why would someone give me Budweiser under the label "Chimay" and claim "it's just as good"? Why would I seek such things out?

        Besides the bad music that's rampant on file sharing networks, there have traditionally been quite a lot of bad rips. Often, there's no way to tell except to download and listen, then wonder whether the artist really wasn't as good as you thought, or whether someone didn't know how to work their ripper. Have you ever seen someone download a 128KBPS file from iTunes, then make a CD, import it at 192KBPS and tell you, with sincerity, and even honesty, that they "ripped it at 192KBPS"? Those are the files you're downloading.

        I know Budweiser has it's place. I've been known to down more than a little bit. Sometimes that's all you want or need. I'm more than happy to watch a certain amount of TV or movies on the ol' 13" TV upstairs. But when I'm looking for high quality, why would I want to download something labeled "HD-DVD" that's less than DVD quality? It's idiotic.

        I have some advice for you. If you want to make low-quality, overly-compressed movies for the "I don't care" viewer, save some money and buy it on DVD instead of HD-DVD. Then when you rip it, clearly label the source, source compression if relevant, output format and output compression for everything you rip. That way I'll know to avoid your work.

        Thanks,

        TW
  • I have a great idea. Just don't sell the product, or release it for distribution of any kind. I guarantee there won't be any piracy, but you'll have a hard time making money!

    Everyone complained about piracy when tape decks came out, but everyone knows in retrospect that the bootleg tapes, even the good quality ones (which could easily be as good as the one you bought) were actually helping bands get noticed. This is all about just controlling the supply line so that only studio-backed projects can get money. They want the ability to sh*t can a movie by not distributing it, and vice versa, to make money from only the ones they are investing in.

    • Re:Best copy protection? just don't sell anything (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CastrTroy (595695) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:11PM (#17633056) Homepage
      I think that the only real solution is to not allow the movies to be played on a computer. Only on dedicated set top boxes. I realize that the cat is out of the bag now, but I think this is the only way to prevent these movies from being copied by the average Joe. Look at the GameCube and it's proprietary discs. While it's possible to get pirated games, it's just too much trouble for the average joe to bother. As it stands right now, I don't think too many people would buy into a technology that wouldn't play on your computer, since we already have DVD, and that plays fine on the computer. There was a lot less piracy going on when you had to dub the tape, instead of just clicking on a link. There is a big difference in terms of how much stuff you can pirate when you are putting music on tapes versus putting them on a hard disk. And the quality of the copy was pretty inferior.

      • Re:Best copy protection? just don't sell anything (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tkrotchko (124118) * on Tuesday January 16 2007, @03:41PM (#17634906) Homepage
        "I think that the only real solution is to not allow the movies to be played on a computer. Only on dedicated set top boxes."

        It is my opinion that unless a new medium works on the PC, it will never become all that important.

        Think about all the laptop computers that are sold with DVD drives in many cases to allow travelers to watch movies as they travel. If those people can't do that, then they'll just stick with DVD's.

        So the market for the new-fangled-DVD-replacement will be limited to people with large TV's who just want to watch in their living rooms and never watch it anywhere else, despite the fact that we have desktop & laptop computers, slingboxes, Video iPods, Zunes, etc etc.

        I mean, if that's the market, god bless them, but I want to see someone with that pitch before the board of directors.

        Maybe it would be cheaper to just do something where people have to go to a large room and watch it with a bunch of strangers. They'd pay like $8-10, and buy popcorn, and hope the people next to them will shut up and let them watch in peace. Hey! I may patent this idea. I'll call it "Moving Pictures in a Dark Theater" or something snappy like that.

  • 3...2...1... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jordan Catalano (915885) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:00PM (#17632826) Homepage
    alt.binaries.hddvd?

  • Moo (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chacham (981) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:02PM (#17632856) Homepage Journal
    The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent

    News at 11:00.
    On Bit Torrent at 11:05.

  • Oy! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Aladrin (926209) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:03PM (#17632880)
    "It's so big they'll never have enough storage space!"
    "It's so big they'll never have enough bandwidth!"
    "It's so big they'll never have enough ... !" -- Fill in whatever.

    These are no serious impediments. Pirates routinely download 5GB (and 9GB) DVDs all the time and they don't have problem with that. Their ISPs don't suddenly cap them. They don't suddenly find their quality of life has depreciated because they can't download enough porn.

    It doesn't happen like that.

    ISPs increase bandwidth. Hard drives get bigger. Writable media gets larger. Compression gets more advanced.

    It's no big deal.

  • Serenity in high-def for FREE??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:04PM (#17632892)
    I'll be in my bunk...

  • Definitive Proof-of-Concept (Score:4, Informative)

    by mandelbr0t (1015855) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:05PM (#17632928) Journal
    I was skeptical when I saw the first article about HDDVDBackup, but there's definitely a posted title key on the Doom9 forum to correspond with this release. I guess the other 2 keys they posted should be released soon as well. The only way to truly implement volume encryption that can't be beaten is to avoid the software player altogether, as the title key needs to be in memory, if only briefly. The posts on the Doom9 forum claim that this is the way that title keys are extracted, and I'm inclined to believe them.

    Good job beating the DRM MAFIAA again! Information truly was meant to be free :)

    mandelbr0t

  • Yo. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by neimon (713907) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:06PM (#17632956)
    Not cool. Joss needs the money so he can make more cool stuff. Go buy the DVD.

    'nuff said.

  • Apparently... (Score:5, Funny)

    by F.Prefect (98101) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:17PM (#17633186) Homepage
    ...you really can't stop the signal. :-)
  • They have gone to enormous trouble to find your little friend... and found her they have. Do you all know what it is you're carrying?

  • Priceless... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Greyfox (87712) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @03:56PM (#17635272) Homepage Journal
    Product design for HD-DVD player: $8 million.
    DRM Engineering team: $1.2 million.
    Marketing for release of first movie: $3 million

    Having some wiseass kid from Sweden post a torrent of your movie the day before the commercial release: Priceless.

    • There already are software BluRay players (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve (949321) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:22PM (#17633298)
      Better get used to watching Serenity over and over because you're not likely to see any more movies released with PowerDVD keys. That takes care of software players for HDDVD and there will definitely be no software players for Blu-Ray.

      There already are BluRay software players. Both PowerDVD and WinDVD have versions that support BluRay. Guess that's what happens when you talk off the top of your head with no facts or research to back things up.

    • Re:The first and last movie (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pla (258480) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:24PM (#17633324) Journal
      That takes care of software players for HDDVD and there will definitely be no software players for Blu-Ray.

      Naive view, at best.

      Though a strange turn on our normal bashing, think about this from Microsoft's POV... They sold their souls to the MPAA by including DRM from the kernel on up. If the MPAA then backstabs Microsoft by not letting Windows machines play HD content...

      I think it would run something like, "In response to overwhelming consumer outcry, we've decided to strip all DRM (except WGA, of course) from Vista. We sincerely apologize to our users, and hope you'll forgive us for erronously trusting the content industry."

      Microsoft doesn't give a damn about us, but it doesn't care about Hollywood, either. It only plays nicely with the MPAA so long as the MPAA provides the ball.

    • Re:We win [not] (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScentCone (795499) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @02:39PM (#17633614)
      Case closed. Give it up, MPAA, your days are numbered. Just like Windows, soon you won't be needed anymore.

      Ah, because "Serenity" (since that's the movie in quesiton) would have been just as good if made collaboratively by a bunch of volunteers with little or no budget and no expectation of making enough money to pay back good acting, writing, animation, and other talent? Who do you think the MPAA is, anyway? It's a trade association populated by the companies that moviemakers, actors, writers, tech people and all the rest choose to work for. People compete to work for these companies, and to make projects that will be well received and which will reward the risks taken.

      You may have no use for the trade association these creative people support, but you'd better also have no use for films as good as Serenity. No money, no Serenity. You don't "win" anything by ripping off the very people that you're hoping will scrape together the money, talent, and time to make another movie you'll like.
    • Actually, fair use [wikipedia.org] is not Constitutionally guaranteed. It comes from the common law, and the first codification of it was in the Copyright Act of 1976. Additionally, it's an affirmative defense, not a right. I only point this out because, if Slashdotters want it to be a right instead of a defense against criminal or civil penalties, they should lobby for it instead of assuming it is already a right.

      I'd really like to see you get modded down because you're spreading falsehoods, not being insightful.

    • Re:What's the news? (Score:4, Informative)

      by SScorpio (595836) on Tuesday January 16 2007, @03:11PM (#17634254)
      The rip on Pirate Bay is off an HDTV signal. This copy is directly off an HD-DVD and likely includes the interactive menus and all of the other content off the disk packaged in a single file.

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