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
Re:Sky (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sky (Score:5, Funny)
April 22, 2029 Headline: The First HD DVD Movie Finishes Downloading from BitTorrent
Re:Sky (Score:5, Funny)
Link? (Score:5, Funny)
The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, there are always more insecure computers to use as temporary storage. Maybe they'll come up with a distributed storage system where the pirated file is split up over 10-20 machines.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Funny)
> 10-20 machines.
I get it - you have to borrow 20 machines if you want to watch a film. No, it makes sense, I never thought of that.
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Informative)
You mean, you'd need four of those drives to store all 100 movies, which is $576 vs. the $2,000 to buy all 100 movies, rather than needing for 500 gig drives to store each 20 gig movie.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Funny)
But I want SERENITY NOW!!!
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Interesting)
On 768Kbps DSL, it would take 57 Hours (2.375096451 Days).
On 3Mbps DSL/Cable, it would take 14.59 Hours.
On 5Mbps Cable, it would take 8.755 Hours.
On 30Mbps FTTP, it would take 1.45 Hours.
On a T3 (45 Mbps), it would take 58.7 Minutes.
On a OC-3 (155 Mbps), it would take 16.9 Minutes.
And finally, on an OC-768, it would take 3.94 Seconds.
That last one is 40Gbps....sweet.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Funny)
*calls Comcast*
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: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.
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Oh sure, they do now. HD is still very bleeding edge. But history has shown that prices for storage media drop exceedingly fast once the drives become readily available. Single layer DVD's were expensive just a few years ago. Now, you can buy them in the grocery store for $0.50 each or less. Dual layer DVD's are between $0.50 and $1. We won't see HD or Blu-Ray disks get cheap until one of them becomes ubiquitous (not for a few more years, at
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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The CD was safe until we started to accumulate several Gigabytes of storage space. Noone was going to distribute CDs when a single CD would occupy at least a third of the entire drive, not to mention the fact that every measly Megabyte travels at least one minute via Modem.
The latter again was true for the DVD, which was safe until more storage, bigger bandwidth, and also enough CPU power to en- and decode the rips was there: Here, I'd say, one driving factor also was that people were pissed wi
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutely. If pirates are willing to rip off a HD version of "Serenity", then there should be enough demand to make another movie.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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!"
St
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.
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Bandwidth is getting faster and cheaper and storage is getting bigger and cheaper. Just give it a couple of years and a 20GB download won't seem that big.
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).
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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, Funny)
Because it's 'rar'ed and broken down into 16MB chunks, of course.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That does not explain why you then put the rars in a torrent.
Re:The size will be the limiting factor not DRM. (Score:4, Interesting)
And that you can go to vcdquality.com to check things out before you download, right?
And that you can download one rar file, check the "keep broken files" box (or append the appropriate flag in Linux), and play it in VLC before you download the whole thing?
Just checking.
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:Best copy protection? just don't sell anything (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Best copy protection? just don't post anything (Score:2, Insightful)
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BIG difference to tapedecks! (Score:2)
Today, copying does not mean loss of quality.
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3...2...1... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, Look for my 3000 UUEncoded posts (Score:4, Insightful)
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We win (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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The point is that without smoothly getting movies into distribution, the movies won't make nearly as much money. The people making the movies have zero interest, in most cases, in actually dealing with theatre chains, HBO, Apple, NetFlix, etc... they want to make movies. The people who pr
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh huh. It's called "an economy." The guy that changes the oil in the car that a set lighting technician drives to work doesn't directly "add to the creative process" either. Nor does the person who grows the food that tech eats. But you don't get well-made, expensive, technically fantastic work without an economy of specialists. If you really think that the lighting technician should be equally concerned with (
Moo (Score:5, Funny)
News at 11:00.
On Bit Torrent at 11:05.
Serenity.HDTV.720p_Dual_x264-CLT-HD (Score:2, Informative)
Which, I'm perfectly legal to do as I'm using direct FTP so the sharing is done by the uploading side.
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What I'm talking about is pretty solid, because apart from the clearly phrased law even the hungarian equivalent of RIAA is reluctantly admitting this in a FAQ on their home pa
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Yes I am so confident. See this [artisjus.hu] (hungarian RIAA) link. Actually it is not only for digital copies, but if I d
Oy! (Score:5, Informative)
"It's so big they'll never have enough bandwidth!"
"It's so big they'll never have enough
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)
Getting off at the next port... (Score:2, Funny)
Definitive Proof-of-Concept (Score:4, Informative)
Good job beating the DRM MAFIAA again! Information truly was meant to be free
mandelbr0t
Yo. (Score:5, Insightful)
'nuff said.
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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.
Re:Yo. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're making a joke, right? Because to produce an album you also need song writers, an audio tech
Re:Yo. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, before you say that i'm being hypocritical, let me explain:
The digital distribution era has made the old way of doing things obsolete. As you said, for a couple of grand, someone can setup a recording studio and put together a pretty decent album. The problem starts with the record companies.
The record companies sign the artists, front the very large amount of money it takes (under the old system) to record an album , and promotes and distributes the album. The contracts that the artists sign say that the artist gets so much money per album sold...usually around a dollar...only problem is that most of those contracts also stipulate that the artist doesn't see a dime until their $1 per album that they are supposed to get has paid for every single cost that the record company has incurred...from the recording, to the promotion, to the packaging and distribution...from what i've read, except for the HUGE pop artists, most artists would be lucky to see $100k from an album from the record sales...and how many artists release more than a couple of albums? Very few.
Under the old distribution system, the exchange was pretty simple: The artist gave the record company the rights to sell their album in exchange for the promotion. The record companies had a monopoly on the distribution channels...If you were an artist, you didn't get any publicity unless you went to a record company. So the artist got their name out there, and then they were free to exploit that publicity...in the form of concerts, merchandise, public appearances, endorsements, etc...which almost every artist does in one form or another since they make very little, if anything at all, from the sales of their albums.
Okay...now flash forward to today...the internet has sparked self distribution...Now for a couple of thousand dollars, someone can setup a website, produce their own album, and get free publicity on the internet by GIVING away the music. Oh, by the way, if you like the music, buy our CD direct from the source, or get a t-shirt, bumper sticker, poster, or come see us perform!
So...you may now ask what's the difference between the music and movie industries: It's simple...obsolescence. As you've said...you can produce a pretty professional album with a few thousand dollars, and enough time and dedication to make it work...assuming your music is good. Suddenly there is no need for all those people to be working on an album. The times in the music industry have changed...it's time for them to find a new line of work...these modern day candle stick makers are being put out of business by today's light bulb.
When you compare it to the movie industry: It's just not possible to produce a feature length film with only a few thousand dollars...even Memento, which was a great indie film with practically zero special effects and all using no name (at the time) actors cost $9 million...according to wikipedia.
So...lets compare: Cost to produce a low budget album: $5,000. Cost to produce a low budget movie: $9,000,000...cost difference: 1,800%. Cost of album on iTunes: $10. Cost of movie on iTunes: $10-$15. Cost difference: 0%-50%. Something just doesn't add up here.
So, the way I see it: I support the artists/actors, and the people who are truly needed to produce a work. All you need to produce an album is the artists time, and a few thousand dollars in costs to get it recorded...Artists can (and have) distribute/promote their music free over the internet, myspace, etc. They can sell their songs on iTunes using that indie music label (can't think of their name right now). They can use companies like cafe press, or even just have merchandise printed and sell directly using paypal and a $20/mo web hosting account.
The point: Artist can (and have) produce, distribute, and prom
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!
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not really.
1 HD-DVD : $20.50 at newegg.com
1 500GB Hard drive : $159.99, also at newegg.com
for the price of the drive, you can buy 8 movies, but the drive will hold roughly 25 movies.
actual cost per downloaded movie : $6.40 (not one cent of which goes to the MPAA) so you save $14.10 per movie.
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1 Terabyte Harddrives... (Score:2)
This medium (or blue-ray or some hybrid) will be around for years to come. In two years time, 1 terabyte of storage will probably be standard on mid range computers.
Price of HD players (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Call me paranoid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
"Dave...what's this TOR thing I keep seeing on the ip list?"
"It means we have no chance of catching whoever's sharing their files though it"
"Ah."
Re:Call me paranoid... (Score:5, Funny)
"It means they have no chance of completing their 20GB download before the next format wars start."
"Ah."
There.. fixed that for you.
Prohibitive cost of drives (Score:2)
Why are people complaining about size? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (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.
Apparently... (Score:5, Funny)
You can't stop the signal. (Score:5, Funny)
Superman Returns is on usenet (Score:2)
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.
Priceless... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Redunant: I won't be downloading anytime soon (Score:3, Interesting)
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And the size doesn't really matter. I can download a DVD in less than an hour on my connection, and it's getting more common to have these fast connections here. if I had a HDDVD player and a TV where it would matter (I don't own a TV) then I would go for it.
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"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.
Re:BitTorrent isn't a thing (Score:4, Funny)
There already are software BluRay players (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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.
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Re:All discussion of pirating aside (Score:5, Informative)
I'd really like to see you get modded down because you're spreading falsehoods, not being insightful.
There is no such constitutional right... (Score:3, Interesting)
The right to make backups applies specifically to computer software and evolved contemporaneously.
The closest you have as to a right to space-shift is the 1999 judgement in the Rio case that "such copying is a paradigmatic noncommercial personal use." Again, I don't disagree that it should be allowed, but it's not exactly a constitutional right.
Re:What's the news? (Score:4, Informative)
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/Mikael
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Stalin only turned Hitler's worst enemy when Hitler betrayed him by violating the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact and invading URSS-owned territories and then Russia itself. Weren't for this and Stalin wouldn't have opposed him in the slightest.
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