Automatic Scanning for Cameras in Theaters 352
An anonymous reader writes "A Florida firm claims to have found a solution for the movie industry to prevent bootlegging in theaters. Tom's Hardware carries a story about Trakstar, which demonstrated its 'PirateEye' technology in a Hollywood movie theater to journalists and movie industry representatives: The technology uses light impulses to detect video recording devices. A second component is an audio watermarking system."
This would be good on a backpack (Score:5, Interesting)
But really, the issue at hand is cameras in theaters. Is the bootleg market that big? I have seen some movies that were recorded with a camcorder and they were funnier to watch the action of recording than the movie. The market has to adjust to the viewing habits; it appears people may want to watch new movies using alternative methods (aka internet). Don't most movies nowadays make more money from DVD sales then the actual movie? I wonder if the movies were released simultaneously to theaters, DVD, video on demand, video of Internet, etc if this would be an issue?
Now lets bring the two views together from paragraph 1 and 2. Just as the public sector adapt to use changing technology, the movie industry needs to adapt to the situation.
For "inside jobs", too (Score:5, Interesting)
You can bet a company like this is angling to position itself to be EVERYWHERE, much like Macrovision - and then, one wonders if "offending" theaters will be punished by, say, having new releases withheld?
http://trakstar.net/solutions.htm [trakstar.net]
It'll be on the internet anyway: Check I2P BT (Score:3, Interesting)
Once the DVD's hit the shelves in any country, the stuff will be on the net anyway.
Sharing it could become easier and safer also: I2P [i2p.net] --- an anonymous onion-routing network --- now has a functional BitTorrent client that functions completely within I2P (tracker, peer-to-peer traffic, everything).
For those on I2P, get it here: http://duck.i2p/i2p-bt/files/i2p-bt-0.1.0.tgz (this URL only works when you're running I2P).
Re:Bootlegging (Score:3, Interesting)
They have done a lot of work to prevent abuse by screeners. As for movie theatre employees, there are a lot of the same issue with quality.
Re:Bootlegging (Score:3, Interesting)
The supposed problem is the supposed cash loss due to piracy, so naturally Hollywood will want theaters to pay for these devides (despite the fact that they could simply be turned off via a small bribe to the theater operator for a particular showing). And with the increased cost will come increased ticket prices. I wonder if movie execs do studies on just how much a movie go'er will pay for a movie. I haven't been in a theater in a few years, so I don't even know how much tickets are these days. Not to mention the price of a simple beverage...
10..9...8..7... (Score:4, Interesting)
This technology will be really easy to block.
Re:For "inside jobs", too (Score:3, Interesting)
Or they can grab the reel and pop it in a telecine machine.
As for watermarking..they do that with video now and we get past it. Doing it with audio is even easier to bypass. All you need is two recordings from seperate theaters to compare against. If you're just doing audio, one can be done with a simple tape recorder plugged into the hearing impaired headphone jack.
Re:Bootlegging (Score:5, Interesting)
That blurs the watermarking, can allow you to improve the image quality, remove problems like people standing up and getting in the way, etc.
Audio watermarking is also defeatable. Someone slide an engineer at this company a few k for the specs and you can just use Felton's approach.
This post is not meant to encourage anyone, I'm just trying to point out to the industry (in case they're listening) that an arms race is not a particularly wise course of action. To quote The Hunt For Red October, "this will get out of control."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Heh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bootlegging (Score:3, Interesting)
How I think it works. (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, I have not seen a single post that adequately states how this technology really works. Given the level of technical ability
My guess? CCD cameras almost always use an infrared filter. They have to or the color gets screwed up. This technology bathes the theater in infrared light and the camera simply picks up the reflection off of the filter. Take off the filter and you mess up the image. Keep it on, and your camera glows.
Why not "wash out" the cameras? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually, this is meant for inside jobs too (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, they would never recoup costs of $thousands for every screen in the world. Not unless they believe their own inflated damage estimates (I predict they don't). And it's an incredibly risky investment. I give it 2 weeks before somebody figures out you can defeat it by covering the camcorder's infrared autofocus light with a piece of masking tape, or installing a lens hood, or before they simply have to trash the whole system because it triggers the emergency response system every time somebody wearing coke-bottle glasses walks in.
Not that I care, I've never even seen a "screener."
Here's a thought (Score:2, Interesting)
ALso, I hope they aren't trying to trademark all the quoted phrases on ther web page.....
Re:Bootlegging (Score:3, Interesting)
This is totally retarded and the only problem is waste of money. The legitimate moviegoers will indirectly pay for this shit. Really stupid.
Personally I don't usually care about cam versions, but telesyncs (done with a tripod in an empty theatre) are good enough for films I don't particularly care about. A screener is ok for the rest, and if there is no screener, I can wait a few months for the retail DVD-rip. Of course, if the movie is good, I can just go to the theatre to see it.
Re:How the hell would this work. (Score:3, Interesting)
And it helps a lot that any camera lens they're worried about is always going to be pointed directly at the screen. That constrains the geometry and makes it simple to locate the source of the reflection.
I don't believe, not for a moment, that one can detect a pin-hole camera like this.
Agreed... But who has a pinhole video camera?
False Positives (Score:1, Interesting)
How it works, really (Score:5, Interesting)
You can buy a handheld SpyFinder [yahoo.com]. Here's a customer review [dafh.org] with a discussion of how it works. It uses two lasers, one on the optical axis and one slightly off it, run alternately at a few Hz. Things that have focusing optics followed by a flat reflective surface (which includes most cameras) will blink. Ordinary shiny things will not.
Re:Bootlegging (Score:3, Interesting)
The family of a friend of mine has a few good connections within the Hollywood industry and has access to DVD's of feature films with relative ease. Sadly, my friend has never permitted me to borrow one of these discs.
Sadly, it does make sense though. Why charge an employee of X to buy/see/etc one of X's products? It would be a nightmare to have the local theaters permit some in for free, so a limited distribution of DVD's make more sense.