The First HD DVD Movie Hits BitTorrent 537
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."
Sky (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't take the sky from me
The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Best copy protection? just don't sell anything (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
With 500GB of storage costing $150 or less, 2TB of storage space will set you back $600.
Yo. (Score:5, Insightful)
'nuff said.
Probably not a good idea just yet (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I really don't understand why the RIAA/MPAA bother at all - There are just to many people out there who find it _fun_ to spend their time cracking things simply because they can, and it is a great challenge to take on. It's not the money, it's not the legality, it's probably not even the fact that they want to rip the movie onto their hard-drive. It's the fact that when the RIAA says "You can't do this", their first thought is "Just watch me". No-one can compete with that, not even multi-billion dollar companies. And I love that fact
Also.. 20gb?! Somehow I enjoy the thought of piracy a lot less when everything I save in not buying movies, I spend in buying hard-drives / bandwidth!
Are the pirates winning or the content providers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not sure that is the case. I have not been interested in a format that has no provision for backup or ability to shift to other players -- like linux laptops. I have no interest in a disk that won't look as good as a DVD if I play it in my 1 year old non-HDMI HDTV.
If HDDVD disks can now be reliably ripped, I am interested.
I'll buy a set top player and a computer drive sooner.
I'll pester Blockbuster to start renting the disks.
If Muslix64 et al. are blocked, I am back to no interest.
20GB is a lot now. But it won't always be (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yo. (Score:1, Insightful)
Call me paranoid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Best copy protection? just don't post anything (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yo. (Score:3, Insightful)
right after I downloaded it to make sure it wouldn't suck.
But i'm a browncoat, so I probably would have bought 2 copies anyway.
Why are people complaining about size? (Score:3, Insightful)
For now. Maybe. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 first and last movie (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Yo. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably not a good idea just yet (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, Look for my 3000 UUEncoded posts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We win [not] (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, this is a pretty wild way to spend your bandwidth. Supposing you get 150 KB/s sustained on the torrent, your computer's still going to be chewing on it for over 37 hours.
On the other hand, if you drive to the store and back, you can probably have that HD-DVD in about an hour. That's over 5.5 MB/s of bandwidth. Pick up a few more movies at the same time, and your bandwidth increases to 22 MB/s. Sneakernet [wikipedia.org] has a lot going for it, in this case.
Re:True content control (Score:3, Insightful)
"HD-DVD and Blu Ray protection is 100% useless and here is our proof!" You really do not need it to be that big to see it looking fantastic on a 42"-50" LCD or plasma. Larger such as many 150" or larger home theatres will look not as good as the compression starts to show through.
Hot stock tip! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yo. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would people get this? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why is it so huge? A 720p rip of a typical movie is only about 4.5GiB
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best copy protection? just don't sell anything (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Does this make sense to you: (Score:3, Insightful)
From the writeup:
Well, I just happen to know:
Does this mean that all of those Sensormatic tags, all of those cameras, and so on are "futile?" Not hardly. You wouldn't make such a ridiculous statement because you know that retail anti-theft mechanisms are meant to be a deterrent. Nobody -- least of which the retail industry -- expects these measures to prevent 100% of retail theft.
And so it goes with DRM. If we pretend that the content industry expects it to prevent 100% of piracy, then yes -- we can have a jolly laugh at their expense. Why then, "futile" does sound like a good word, and after this little warm-up straw man exercise, we're ready to hit Burning Man. But it's intellectually dishonest.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd be surprised when trackers have people on links better than bbb.se links, downloading over p2p still relies more on the offer than on the capacity of your own link.
Re:Yo. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're making a joke, right? Because to produce an album you also need song writers, an audio technician, probably a seperate studio engineer, managers, studio support staff, etc, etc. How can you say "all these people need to get paid" about the behind the scenes movie crew but totally ignore the fact that similar, if smaller in number, crews exist in the music world? Yes, it's true that for a couple grand someone can set up their own recording studio and put together a pretty decent album, but you can sorta do the same for video, these homebrew studios aren't what you're talking about. You're talking about professionally produced music from major labels which do incur studio and crew costs, just like movie studios. So what are you saying, that you don't care about the music studio crew because there are fewer involved, but once we get to movie crew size you're screwing over too many people? Tell me then, what is the exact number of people who need to have their income threatened for you to not pirate what they help produce? Hint, if you can't name a number then you're being hypocritical in your reasoning.
Additionally, you've got your argument confused as to who gets paid when. All those movie studio crews got paid before the movie hit the theaters, they got their hourly rate in weekly checks like most of us, and the actors get a hefty lump sum and then sometimes parts of the boxoffice take. By pirating movies those background people don't get paid only in the sense that the studios will lose money on the pirated film and choose not to shoot another film, thus not hiring any crew. In the music business the artists don't get paid when you pirate because the majority of their contracted income is based directly on album/songs sales (then seperately there is merch and concerts).
I'm trying to point out the inconsistencies in your reasoning here. You're free to decide to pirate or not, but you should at least get your story straight as to why if you're going to offer it to others in a public forum.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:2, Insightful)
2. Convince the public that the old media isn't good enough
3. PROFIT!
Re:Piracy isn't the main issue (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Though I assume you knew that anyways. The real news was back when the HD-DVD protection was broken. The fact that rips appeared online was inevitable after that point. One might argue the breaking of the DRM was inevitable too, but still possibly newsworthy to report when it actually happened.
Re:Why are people complaining about size? (Score:3, Insightful)
DVD (good old red laser), or some sort of close relative to it, could still be the winner in the format war. I sure wouldn't shed a tear to see both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray lose.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it that on slashdot of all places there are still so many idiots. Haven't you noticed that your max download speeds have been 1/10th of your max connection speed for the last 15 years? Did you really think you just couldn't max out that dial up connection when you were connection to a major server? Did it not dawn on you that there had to be some other explanation for that?
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:3, Insightful)
Say I'm a hip, young, 20-something marketing guy working in the entertainment industry. I tell my boss "Hey, Serenity didn't sell that great, but look at all the downloads! Clearly people want a sequel."
Now, this is me as the 60-year old gruff old guy: "You mean we're producing and marketing stuff to people who don't want to pay for things? That's wasted money. We're never doing a sequel of this! Let's work on that next Britney Spears album!"
Stuff like through ripped HD-DVDs on Bittorrent ALWAYS backfires. People on Slashdot try to twist it every which way to make it sound like pirating is a positive thing.
These marketing guys, for all their venom, aren't idiots. Notice when Family Guy was brought back to life, it was DVD *SALES* that did the job -- not merely interest. Movies being downloaded off the net for free is simply interest.