It's official: BOTH Blu-ray and HD-DVD downrez component (1 Viewer)

[DaViD Boulet]

I plan to review my BD titles in full 1080P res when possible (on my friend's 1080P projector), downconverted to 720P (my DLP's native res), and dowconverted to 540P (upconverted by my PJ to 720P).




True.

If you ever found yourself double-dipping on a DVD title just to get DTS auido etc....then just get the HD version for audio alone....even if you can't watch it in full 1080P on your current display!

 

[Cees Alons]

David,

You almost sound like certain people who are minimizing hunger and poverty: "Those people eat less, but, you know, they really need less!"

Downrezing delivers a lesser product. Period.
And, studios: we don't want it. Period again.


Cees

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Cees,

And that "lesser product. Period." will look better than DVD and even better than most 1080I sources.



Is a comment to which I'll add not further remarks. I agree 100%!

 

[Glenn Overholt]

It must be fun grabbing sections of legal acts and interpretations of them, and bending the rules to fit your judgements.

In its simplist terms, copyright refers to the legal right to of an artist to control the use and reproduction of their works. If the studios wanted us to copy their movies, they wouldn't have put any "copy protections" on them!

Even without any of this "protection", the works still belong to the holder of the copyright. LD's and early VCR tapes didn't have any protection, but they were still protected under copyright, and it was (and still is) illegal to make a copy for any use unless you get permission from the holder. Has anyone here ever asked a studio for permission to make - even a backup?

seen these before?

FBI ANTI-PIRACY WARNING - The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infrigement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

ATTENTION International agreement and national laws protect copyrighted motion pictures, videotapes and sound recordings. UNAUTHORIZED REPRODUCTION, EXHIBITION OR DISTRIBUTION OF COPYRIGHTED MOTION PICTURES CAN RESULT IN SEVERE CRIMINAL AND CIVIL PENALTIES UNDER THE LAWS OF YOUR COUNTRY.

The International Criminal Police Organization-INTERPOL, has expressed its concern about motion picture and sound recording piracy to all of its member national police forces. (Resolution adopted at INTERPOL General Assembly, Stockholm, Sweden. September 8, 1977.)

Methinks some people hate these warnings because they have a guilty conscience. Either that, or they think that they are 'above' the law.

Put yourselves in the studio's shoes for a moment. You spend millions making a movie, and then find out that there are thousands of free copies out there, and you won't see one penny of it. Gee, maybe if they had more money, they'd be able to hire even better people for their next film!

Glenn

 

[JeremyErwin]

ah, but what about fair use?

/me ducks.

 

[Vader]

Glenn,

I only objected to your statement that "I am not buying the product, only the right to use it". At least Microsoft puts this into their EULA, but I would love to see their lawyers do their best to "revoke" my license to use my legally purchased copy of Windows. DVDs have no such disclaimer on the packaging, only that I cannot copy it. I am not going to get into the legalities, as there are many here (including you) that have forgotten more about that then I will likely ever know. However, as far as I am concerned, when I buy something, it is my property (otherwise it would be called 'leasing'). And if that means making duplicates for my personal use (ie. taking to work to listen to, on a flight to play on a portable player, etc.) in order to protect my investment, that, that too, is my right. Make no mistake, Disney makes a significant percentage of their profit from parents who allow their children to handle their "Disney Classics" (and they like it that way). I simply choose not to play that game. Once I make the purchase, the studio is now completely out of the equation (unless they buy the disc back from me, at which point it becomes their property again). The BS line that ol' Bill started that "you are not buying this product, only a license to use it" is just that....


This is my point: The only money that the studio won't see from any duplicates I may make (for my son to do unspeakable things to) is the loss of an additional sale when he ruins the original. For for a medium that (with proper care) will outlast me, I shouldn't have to buy another, ever...

 

[FrancisP]

Gee if they spent less on making movies they'd have more.
If I were in charge I wouldn't spend $200 million on King Kong or $250 million on a new Superman movie. Even in inflation adjusted dollars, the original King Kong didn't cost that much and it is still the better film. Hollywood wastes so many dollars on bloated production budgets and it
doesn't produce better films.

 

[Marko Berg]

Glenn,

The presence of warning title cards on DVDs do not irritate me because of what is said in them. They irritate me because they do nothing to stop piracy, and they make my movie-watching inconvenient when those warnings are unskippable.

The presence of such warnings is ridiculous anyway. If copyright law allows for copies to be made for certain purposes, and (where I live) this is sometimes allowed, then no warning title card or EULA can revoke that right. Laws supercede contracts, therefore any terms of a contract that try to restrict your legal rights are considered null and void.

 

[george kaplan]

I guess so. You're doing it as much as anyone else.

 

[johnnyPower]

so which is actually technically better (the betamax) of the two?

 

[Kelly Grannell]

Blur ray Disc is the Betamax of the two.

 

[RobertR]

Letting them know how you "feel about it" means nothing if you follow it up with "but don't worry, studios, it will do NOTHING to keep me from buying into the new format anyway" (which is your apparent attitude). It makes their actions completely devoid of any consequence.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Robert,

I personally am not trying to champion the cause for boycotting based on downrezing. I never claimed to. The downresing issue doesn't upset me that much personally...it's not my cross to bear because I plan to upgrade to a (HDMI equipped) 1080P projector in the future anyway (I'll be boycotting titles that aren't optimally transfered and mastered...that's what I care about).

However, my statement to "encourage" others who feel differently is because I respect their feelings on the matter and would suggest that if they feel strongly that they do something to make their opinion count.

"Letting the studios know" could mean NOT BUYING their product and then calling their 1-800 number to tell them why.

I personally will be buying Blu-ray because I want to. That's my own decision.

However, if someone else feels strongly about the downresing issue I encourage *them* to make their point heard in the best way that they can. If not-purchasing either HD format is the way they want to do it, I respect and support their choice.


p.s.

With any luck, we'll have some downres-free BD and HD DVD titles to choose from along side the "resolution-restricted" titles...and I can assure you that if sales of those resolution-unrestricted titles out-pace downresed titles (and consumers provide this feedback to the studios via their consumer input lines to indicate the rationale behind their purchase choice), this will have an impact.

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Mounted as an ISO on Daemon, it plays in WinDVD. However, as it disabled Macrovision, it's not bit-for-bit, so I'll need to repeat the experiment. Under CSS Cracking Method, I did select "None", so nominally CSS is still there, and according to the Copyright Office's interpretation of the DMCA, this should be kosher.

But this is getting too much into cracking, and flirting with Forum rules violations, and away from the main point. I concur with Glenn on this one, and I think I'll just leave it at that.

 

[JeremyErwin]

hey, I'm not interested in discussing piracy methods. As I understood it, the original conception behind the CSS Spec was that

1. Content would be encrypted.
2. Although this content could conceivably be copied, it could not be decrypted without access to a key.
3) which could not be copied.

4) Hence, DVDs could only be played on authorized players, and only if they were accompanied by the key...

5)These authorized players were authorized because they encoded the video output with macrovison (which VCRs were obligated to respect), were limited to playing discs of one region, encrypted digital video outputs, and so on. I've heard that the early CSS licenses even restricted screenshots, although this may only have been a technical limitation...

Similarly, it is possible to make the viewing of certain materials mandatory in practice. Although it is theoretically possible to write a dvd navigation library that avoids such complications, such code causes its own problems. An analogy can be drawn to the conflict between the writers of "pop-up blockers" and advertisers. Popups are occasionally useful (when they don't contain ads), so a total disabling of function is too restrictive, yet if one only restricts the use of one or two functions, a clever advertiser may use misdirection and obfuscation to popup an ad. It requires a light touch.

The question I have is whether the members of this forum engage in non-piratical activity that nevertheless falls outside what the dvdcca originally envisioned. The viewing of discs outside ones own region, for example.

 

[Ryan-G]

I know I said I'm not posting on this thread again, and I'm not here to debate anything further. But, while following up on my original thoughts I discovered a torrent site that tracks total downloads rather than present, and the numbers are more telling than even the original post. Remember too, this is a single site, not even more than a tiny fraction of what's going on.

I'll also admit, I'm cherry picking examples, the lower counting ones I'm not listing. Nor am I listing ones still found in theaters(To my knowledge).

Lord of War- 67,086
Transporter 2- 55,241
8 Mile- 13,800
7 seconds- 21,462
Stealth- 60,979
Fantastic Four- 388,954
The Interpreter- 22,981
Mr and Ms Smith- 3,125,883(Between 4 torrents, each of which is a different format, such as PAL)
Elektra- 14,416
War of the Worlds- 37,690
Serenity- 29,319
Star Wars Episode II- 42,487
Braveheart- 2,788,955
Robots- 369,379
The Girl Next Door- 296,185

With just 15 titles, it's a grand total of 7,334,817 lost incidences of revenue. With a total purchase value of roughly 146,696,340, assuming an average price of just 20$. It's safe to assume some percentage of that 7 million wouldn't be purchases and some percentage would be rentals, but even at a 25% purchase number we're still talking around 37 million dollars in losses from a single site. Which is easily one less movie a year.

This is why there's downconversion, not because Hollywood has an ulterior motive. Before it comes up again, you can't stop it by removing the webpage, torrents don't need webpages to work, Usenet and E-mail are very capable of diseminating torrents effectively.

Decide for yourselves. Is it a major problem now? As I said, this is only a single site, and only 15 of the listings.

(As a side note, there's probably between 20-50 more titles on this site with totals in the tens of thousands, and probably another 20-50 up to ten thousand downloaded.)

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Once again, I'll bet money, real money, not Hollywood play-money, that every single one of those things you listed was originally duplicated from some kind of digital recording [DVD or maybe DV/mini-DV tape, including internal studio evaluation or special-purpose copies], and not recorded from an analog component output of any video playback device.

ICT will be close to irrelevant to video downloading of this kind, as well as to disc duplication.

 

[Kelly Grannell]

Ryan, although I do agree that the numbers seems to be scary, you forgot 1 thing.

No way on earth that the number equals can be construed as loss of income, even at 'only' 25%. Why? Because the downloaders, almost all of them, are not the buying demographic. It's either they eventually watch the movie on TV for (virtually) free, or they won't even rent it.

During my audio download era (8-10 years ago), from 100 albums I download, on average I don't even end up buying one album. So it's less than 1% for me, and don't forget, I'm downloading for the purpose of finding which album is worth buying. The rest? I delete them from my HDD because they are not even worthy to reside on my HDD.

My point? Yes, they do lose LOTS of money, which I agree, but it's about the same amount of dollars they spent to develop and implement anti-copy schemes.

 

[george kaplan]

Go on, pull the other one. You think 1 of 4 people who download this crap to their computer, is going to, if it's unavailable, go ahead and spend $20 to buy the dvd? That's funnier than any Hollywood comedy released this year.

The vast majority of people who download a movie and watch it on their computer, have got to be college kids, largely in dorms. That $20 is now going for beer, and if you take away their free downloads, it'll still go for beer, they'll just go back to watching free tv, or whatever college kids did before these downloads. They sure as hell ain't going to pay for the corresponding dvds 25% of the time.

Hell, if it's 1/10 of 25% of 1/2 of 1 percent of downloads that would actually be purchases, I'd be shocked.

 

[Kyle_D]

As a college student, I can back this up fully

One other thing. The guys who download movies are usually the CS majors who do so to show off. They don't do it because they actually have any interest in the movie, but because it gets them social attention.

The guys who are actually into movies, like me, pride themselves in building actual collections.