HD-DVD Wins Support of 4 Studios

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like HD-DVD has won the latest round in the Blu-ray/HD-DVD format war. Toshiba announced today that 4 major studios (Warner,Paramount,Universal, and New Line) have endorsed the HD-DVD format. Toshiba also said it will use AACS for content protection, which is basically just CSS with better crypto & no ability to recover from security failures."

Plus Minus

[fembots]

Since both HD-DVD and blu-ray are using the same blue lasers, will this 'war' eventually turn out to be HD/BR-DVD similar to the DVD+/-R standards.

Whyyyyyyyyy?!

[MooseMuffin]

It seemed like blu-ray was doing so well, and that maybe the winner would be clear cut and consumers wouldnt have to put up with this 2-format crap. Damn you competition, damn you!

More and more we see

[slycer9]

That instead of competition leading to advancements and improvements for the consumer, it's more often competition AGAINST fair USE for the consumer.

Not on your life.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The AACS Licensing Authority has proposed the use of subset-difference trees with AES encryption, which provides strong player revocation and key management, but does not include system renewability. Cryptography Research has proposed Self-Protecting Digital Content(TM), which provides system renewability and forensic marking, but does not include key management. A complete solution that includes strong key management and a well-designed security virtual machine is crucial; an incomplete approach provides little or no value because attackers will simply exploit the missing links."

Yeah, tell ya what, how about i *not* ever buy any of this and you ditch that idea. Sound good?

HD and BR both have entertainment value

[Fr05t]

or at least the monkey poo fight we will see in the next few years. Anyone know which one the porn industry is backing? I'll put my money on that format.

Re:Plus Minus

[gosand]

Since both HD-DVD and blu-ray are using the same blue lasers, will this 'war' eventually turn out to be HD/BR-DVD similar to the DVD+/-R standards.

Which is fine, provided that commercial equipment can play both formats. It is a bigger deal now because they are talking about releasing content on those formats. That was never an issue with DVD+/-R, where compatability was left to the consumer to figure out. If I am burning my own DVDs, I can stick to whatever format I find works best. If I am buying a DVD from the store, it had just better work.

Screen-Scraping to the next level

[davidwr]

I predict in 10 years you'll see 3rd-world pirates using fully-digital screen-scrapers to bypass otherwise-unbreakable encryption.

Scrape. Store. Burn. Sell on the street corners.

The studios will never "win," they'll only be able to manage their losses.

In the USA, it will be less of a problem as most middle-class people move to a subscription model, where they can watch what they want when they want to for a fixed monthly fee. This will take away most people's economic incentive to buy bootleg copies.

Sure, you'll still have some domestic piracy, but if the studios price things correctly, it will be drawfed by legitimate users.

WTF?

[sahonen]

From TFA:
Revocation can help contain some attacks by preventing future titles from playing on a pre-chosen set of players. For example, if studios learn that pirates have hacked a player with a specific serial number, revocation makes it possible to author future titles so they will never play on that player.

So just because you own a DVD player that was hacked, you won't be able to play future DVDs? That's a load of crap.

Very misleading

[JoeShmoe]

I rarely take the time to criticize a Slashdot editor, but this posting is terribly confusing.

Which is it?

Is the format using "CSS with stronger encryption" in other words...once some company makes a mistake and puts the key in the clear (like Xing did with the original CSS key) then it's game over, have a field day with HD content...

Or is it some kind of improved system that uses any of the principles in the cryptography.com article? The stuff in that article would scare the pants off anyone who believes in fair use rights and using any tactics necessary to secure them. Thankfully, it sounds like this articles is merely pointing out the dream and there doesn't exist such a magic bullet.

But judging by the replies to this articles, it already looks like people are bemoaning and wailing the lost of fair use rights thanks to this unbelievably draconiam new system.

My reading leads me to believe that we should all be very very quiet, wait for HD to reach a nice sizeable market penetration, then wait for the key to appear and bring about DeCSS round II.

-JoeShmoe
.

This is how you create a vast pirate market

[SuperKendall]

By deciding to split the market asunder, the companies that cannot agree on one standard are instead creating a huge group of people that will just say "screw it", not buy either player, and download rips of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray DVD's that they can play on a computer hooked to the TV (becoming more common and certainly more comon in a year or two).

Who is going to buy either kind of player when there's such an open question as to which will succeed?

Re:HD and BR both have entertainment value

[WormholeFiend]

I don't think I want to see porn in high definition. Seeing all the blemishes, pimples, and imperfections will detract, not enhance, the experience.

I disagree.

The "home-made" segment of that industry has become very popular in the face of plastic-surgerized actresses and actors to make them look "more perfect".

Hopefully this is what will also result in cheaper massmarket HD camcorders, for, uh, home use. And stuff.

Pirates or users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, pirates will attack high-definition disc formats.

It should be noted that the DVD content scrambling system failed not under the attack of pirates but due to legal owners of encrypted media striving to play them on an open source operating system. I think there's a lesson to be learned from that.

DMCA vs "Conventional Copyright"

[Trillian_1138]

My favorite quote from the last link in the summary (on format security) would have to be the following:

"In the U.S., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorized circumvention. Outside the U.S., however, many jurisdictions only have conventional copyright laws that only protect creative works. Normal decryption keys do not include any obvious creative element."

Now, jumping to the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries") it is not clear that copyright must *only* be granted to works with "obvious creative element." But I liked the fact that the above comment on future security requirements acknowledged what seems to be much of Slashdot (and the tech community's) beef with copyrighting algorithms and computer software, but from the assumption that it's a GOOD thing, rather than a BAD thing.

Just an example of how you can agree on the issue while still having mutually exclusive views on the sollution.

-Trillian

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

These formats won't take off...

[vectrex]

There was a big leap between VHS and DVD that really added to the migration and the adoption of DVD by the consumer.

My guess is that HD-DVD and Blu-ray will go the way of Minidisc. They don't add anything remotely interresting for the average consumer. The average consumer is still buying Full-Screen edition of the movies. They won't put any money on those new formats any time soon.

Unless they pull the plug on the DVD format. Which won't happen anytime soon.

Where's the problem?

[HarveyBirdman]

would prevent me from making copies of my discs so that my 2 year old wouldn't trash the originals

By the time this format is the standard, your kid will be, like, twelve or something. :)

Dear Hollywood

[AnalogDiehard]

I have left the upgrade treadmill on the sidewalk. My VHS player was displaced only two years ago with a DVD/VHS player and I am not going to repeat my investment in media in order to perpetuate your business model.

HD DVD has no significant features that are of value to me. Instead of focusing on new technologies, perhaps you should divert your precious R&D resources to providing better content.

With love,
The Consumer

Re:WTF?

[Josuah]

If you read further, you would see that they declare this approach not acceptable for that very reason.

Re:ETA & MSRP?

[Lumpy]

it does not matter. the past few days here in the USA DVD player sales were through the roof.

those people are not going to simply cast aside their players and huge DVD collections for the new shiny thing that will force them to buy all their movies yet again.

Unless they wait 5 years so that the consumer doesn't get all pissy when they spend $129.95 on their 7th linited hyper digitally remastered editions of the star wars hexilogy with yoda bouncing first and then have to re-buy it again for the new format.

I do not see any HD DVD content catching on very fast. DVD-audio and sony's offering of higher def audio formats are failing horribly to attract buyers, and with most homes not even considering buying HD televisions soon It looks pretty dismal.

Yes, I own a HD tv, and if they demoed the cable TV signals and off the air signals to me instead of their perfect 1080i DVHS example material I would not have been suckered into it.

I'm just glad I only spent $5500.00 on mine, I'm betting the guy that spent $13K+ on his HD plasma is insanely pissed at the quality of programming available in the real world right now.

the cable company compresses the hell out of the signal to the point that everything looks wierd with the background almost completely still most of the time and artifacts around the actors.

Re:Proprietary codecs in a standard are nothing ne

[crow]

As to AC3, can't you just pipe the raw stream out a digital port from your computer to your sound system? If you have a surround sound system, they've already paid for a patent license to decode the AC3, so your computer can let it do the work and avoid the patent issue.

Love how they talk about encryption...

[NitroWolf]

I just love how they talk about encryption, and how they are going to prevent pirates, blah blah blah.

When are people going to realize that in things like this, encryption/obfuscation/etc... will only keep honest people honest. The pirates and people who have extra time will break ANYTHING they can put on a disc.

Why is this?

The answer is so simple, which is why it flabbergasts me that people put so much time and effort into copy protection.

The decrypted content is IN THE HANDS OF THE END USER. Right there, that simple fact is why every possible method of copy protection will fail. If the end user has the decrypted content, it is possible to (obviously) retrieve that content by the end user (I know that's circular). Because of this, you can NOT protect a DVD or whatever from being copied, no matter what.

It's appalling the kind of money and time that goes into trying to keep content from the user, when in the end, it's doomed to fail and it's obvious to anyone with half a brain.

Re:Very misleading

[JoeShmoe]

The key was never brute forced. When Xing wrote their player software, they failed to encrypte the CSS decryption key that was licensed to them. It's common knowledge that the key is Xing's key, but because that key can decrypt any CSS content, it doesn't matter. To change CSS would break all the other keys, not just Xing's. There's no way to put code on a DVD to detect and exclude this key from being used. Even to this day I'm almost positive that any program that decrypts DVDs has in it somewhere that original binary string that was extracted from the Xing player. After all, why reinvent the wheel? Why brute force a new DVD key...which isn't impossible but still very difficult...when there is no advantage? Since DVDs can't tell who is decyrpting them, and nobody is going to change CSS, the Xing key is here to stay.

-JoeShmoe
.

format wars will hurt media outlets

[davidwr]

I chose not to buy a DVD burner until +/- burners became widely available. I passed up the fire sales on +only or -only drives, it just wasn't worth the risk.

Why? I didn't want to be caught with a losing proposition.

I'll buy a high-capacity DVD player only if it can play all common formats.

Message to the Media Moguls who probably aren't listening:
Either agree on a common format or make darn sure you sell affordable multi-format drives. Otherwise you aren't going to get my money. Remember, once I buy the hardware, I'll keep coming back for software. Until then, you won't see it.

Well, this sucks..

[pair-a-noyd]

If the studios are for it then that means it's Doubleplus good for us. Right?
You can be sure that this will be a user-hostile situation. M.I. type discs, "Mr. Phelps, this disc will self destruct in 5 seconds." after watching something.

They do NOT want to allow us to keep anything.
They want recordings to operate like PPV, pay each time you watch it, even if you've recorded or BOUGHT it.

No matter how loud people bitch and squeal, they'll force this on people, one way or another.
I've got a number of old TV's. Several of them are in great condition, nothing wrong with them at all, but they won't receive HD programming. So if I want HD programming (which I don't) I would have to either buy all new TV's or some sort of set-top tuners. But, no worries, they'll make me do it anyway, I've got one more year [pbs.org] of use out of my old legacy TV's and rabbit ears.
All the local stations have begun dual-casting in HD and analog and are hawking the new technology in PSA's, urging everyone to hurry and buy a new TV set before they turn off the old.

I like the analog way. When there is a signal problem with digital, the picture breaks up and almost completely fails and the sound is either mangled beyond understanding or is muted completely. In the old analog world (that I still live in) the signal can be weak but the picture and sound is still viewable and understandable. I can turn my old TV on, turn the rabbit ears around and get the local news. It looks like crap but it's more than good enough to get the weather report. If it were digital and the signal was that bad it would have already muted the sound and put up a message on the screen "Please stand by, acquiring signal"..

So, just like they are forcing digital TV upon us, they will force whatever media type gives THEM the upper hand, the most control. They will NEVER gives us any technology that gives US the upper hand..

Encryption....

[wed128]

Even with all the encryption in the world, some part of the signal chain has to be decrypted right? they can't eradicate piracy when all a pirate needs is an EE degree and a soldering iron...

free shit.

[rice_burners_suck]

This is so retarded. The Blu-ray disc is so much more superior than this HD-DVD garbage. But once again, the studios are going with mediocre technology because they don't want people to have access to good technology.

All they care about is that StupidPeople and StuplePeopid won't copy all kinds of movies, music, pictures, software, and other media. That's all they care about. Bunch of greedy scumbags. You wait and see. The free software movement is changing software. More and more governments, corporations, businesses, and individuals are switching every day. Right now, this software is catching up to commercial software in many areas. It has already exceeded it in others. In the next few years, it will exceed commercial software in many areas. The desktop will switch to free software. This same movement, I believe, will eventually take control of the music, movies, and other media industries. This movement will continue to grow, until the messiah shows up and everything is free in the world, and all work will be done by robots, and all we'll do is hang out at the beach and have a good time. That'll be cool.

Dont need to crack the keys, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I use a software player, is there going to be some kind of key exchange (itself encrypted) between my drive and video card via PIO, or is the data just going to go in the clear from the drive to my framebuffer? It seems to me that unless this pathway is secure, I could apply some creative device virtualization with VMWare and capture the frames to memory.

I can make it look to the drive like I'm pushing "pause" on my software player every 5 seconds, while i then go and do a high-quality encode of the captured frames...

Otherwise, it seems to me all vendors are going to need to private keys so that my XYZ drive will encrypt specifically for an ABC video card and all that ever goes over IDE/PCI-X is encrypted...

Who has the real scoop on this?

Re:Copyright expiration?

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Who are we kidding? By the time any copyrights on motion pictures made today are allowed to expire, civilization will have completely collapsed and/or the Sun will have burned out.

Re:HD

[Anonymous Coward]

HD sucks horribly. nobody in the industry will admit it.

nobody will broadcast the real hd content because its too damned expensive and the cable companies need to cut their channels in 1/2

99.997% of all "HD" broadcasts today are not HD but simply digital ED.

anyone that buys a HD tv right now is a fool. buy a low end ED plasma (the $1900 gateway/samsung model) and tell your friends it's HD.

in 10 years it MIGHT be ready for HD, but until then it's worthless.

Shame.

[vanillacoke]

Not a single question there addresses fair use. Or even the ability to use the HD DVD as i see fit.

People already downloading HD content now.

[SuperKendall]

Plenty of people watch Divx stuff now that is pretty highly compressed, lots of people would be satisfied just to get the extra resolution even with more compression artifacts.

There are already a large number of people downloading copies of HD TV shows, not much shorter than a full movie. You can thank BitTorrent for making that possible - and people seem willing to wait literally days for show to finish transferring.

Re:Very misleading

[Chandon Seldon]

The theory is that if you can introduce executable code, you can make the protection system use a slightly different method each time, making it so that a given crack will only work on a given printrun of disks.

The reason this won't work for this sort of thing is that the hardware is staying constant, so all you need to do to get a general case break is to build an emulator.

Re:A Spensive

[drew]

that's funny. i don't remember having been forced to buy a single copy of any star wars movie. ever...