Camcorder Jamming Devices Announced

Adam Carrington writes "I'm definitely not behind things like DRM, but Virginia-based Cinea has an idea that I do support... jamming camcorders in movie theaters. CNET has some interesting details on how they plan on going about it. They even throw an unrelated jab at Microsoft." This might be the technology that drives the stake in analog projection.

Re:Justice, At Last

[dildatron]

I know. Everybody and their dog has broadband and is downloading gigs and gigs of movies off IRC servs with DCC!

Hesus, most people don't even know what IRC is! Is there anywhere else to go for movies?

Higher quality piracy, right around the corner

[hillct]

I was never vary impressed whan viewing a movie which was taped from within a theater. Neither tha audio nor video quality was even close to satisfactory.

This will force a new era in piracy. We've already seen the beginning with the availability of the second LoTR movie on the net before it hits theaters. All this means is that pirates will have to accept a small reduction in their proffit margins since they'll now have to bribe productuin and editing staff for advance copies of films, which will inevitably be of higher quality than those tapes by audience members in theaters.

I'm not entirely clear on why NIST is handing out grants oor research in this field though. Seems to me the products resulting from this research will have applications in limited areas of the security industry (in addition to the initial target of the motion picture industry) but have no larger societal benefit so they shouldn't be handing out grants in thie area.

--CTH

Re:jam camcorders? blargh, start with mobile fones

[andrews]

Don't Jam, just put copper mesh in the walls and make the theater a big Faraday Cage. No jamming needed so your not violating FCC regs and the RF won't get in or out. A company I used to work for had one in a lab for RF testing, no pager or cell phone could receive a signal inside.

I've seen the same effect in older buildings that used a metal mesh for plaster lath. I had to put an 802.11 AP in every room of an old house because the RF couldn't get through the walls. Cell phones wouldn't work either. Same effect in buildings whose glass windows have a high metal content.

Some considerations

[Ektanoor]

A: It's silly to jam camcorders. 90% of piracy is made of near to genuine copies and not of "screen" copies. No matter the efforts, every "screen" copy is bad enough that even if you get your lovely blockbuster such way you wil probably avoid to look at it.

B: "screen" copies are not a product of modern piracy. They were here since videoplayer/recorders. The only difference Divx;) made was that the quality of a "screen" copy was a little better than the cassete. Anyway, people never loved "screens" and don't love them till now.

C: "screens" are usually a vector to move people to theaters. At least in the region where I live. There is a big difference seeing a good film on the monitor/TV and going to a good cinema to see it. However prices on a good cinema are not so cheap to risk going on every silly film. I remember that "The Matrix" was a box-record just because everyone has seen it before. At least, for the first week, the cinema here was stormed by a crowd of fans who knew that the Matrix has you...

So, what will be the consequences of jamming camcorders, I only guess. People go to cinema for quality. And people are different. I hope that this "jamming" will not affect some people I know about. People who are sensitive to light and frequencies with some deviation from the norm. Even most "normal" people are able to have some good deviations in their capacity to see things. I know this because I saw a lot of fantastic things while working with lots of monitors and people. So I wonder how this "jamming" would reflect on the quality of the shows.

My consumer camcorder has an anti-Cinea setting...

[dpbsmith]

My consumer camcorder has a variety of settings that affect the way it "sees" rapid motion. When transferring 8 mm films through one of those cheap reflector boxes, for example, the normal settings give a pulsating and unevenly bright image because of strobing. But if I use one of the "simulate slow shutter" settings, I can get very good results. The LONGEST of these settings does smear and blur motion, but one of the intermediate settings removes the flicker while adding very little motion blur.

And this is just a cheap consumer camcorder--and it's a feature that it has ALREADY.

I can easily believe that Cinea might be able to introduce short "tachistoscopic" artifacts that might screw up a camcorder on its normal settings, but if the camcorder's effective "simulated slow shutter speed" is 1/20 of a second or so, the artifacts will have to last 1/20th of a second or so to be visible to the camera--and at that speed, they'd be pretty visible to the naked eye.

I find it very hard to believe that the people who take videos off a movie screen don't know how to adjust their camcorders. Or that, if the Cinea scheme becomes popular, camcorder vendors will not respond with settings that are called by some other name but nudge, nudge, wink, wink designed to overcome the problem. Or that it can't be taken care of by some kind of digital processing afterward (analogous to using timebase correctors on analog VCR copy-protection schemes.)

In other words, it's a scam perpetrated on theatre owners.

Also, undoubtedly the "camcorder-jamming" artifacts are actually just as visible as, say, dirt specks flashing quickly by on individual frames of a dirty print. It may not make a lay audience walk out and demand their money back--they don't do that for dirty prints now. But people will be aware that the image quality isn't what it should be.

To a critical eye, DLP is currently SLIGHTLY inferior to traditional film projection in some regards (superior in others). Anything that tips that balance is going to be a problem. If the ordinary UNCRITICAL lay audience judges that "perfect" digital DLP actually isn't quite as good as 35mm and starts thinking of it as a cheap-and-cheesy alternative. I would think a cinema manager would be nuts to shell out a couple of hundred thousand for a DLP setup then add anything that would make the image quality worse.

Re:why does no one see other uses for this tech

[akhaksho]

Read the article. This isn't a "camera jammer". It's just a way to make the recording of a movie from a theater screen have artifacts that will make it unwatchable. It has no effect on camcorders in the real world.

Re:jam camcorders? blargh, start with mobile fones

[KelsoLundeen]

You're right.

And that's the point: why should I care about something that doesn't benefit me? I'd much rather support a cell phone *ban* that benefits me, the movie consumer, than a slow, technological paradigm shift that will (a) raise prices, (b) create new glitches, and (c) be cracked within weeks and will only benefit rich guys like Valenti wearing Italian suits.

Re:Justice, At Last

[IdleTime]

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