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Pirated HD-DVD's released online (1 Viewer)

Ryan-G

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Oct 13, 2005
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621
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5747

Apparently, HD-DVD piracy is now a reality. It's going to be interesting to see what effect, if any, this has on the format war.

It's intereting to note that while the method works for both HD-DVD and BR keys, BR is not yet pirated.

I'd say it's fairly certain at this point, that if BR isn't pirated, regardless of which way the format goes at least Fox and Disney will stay BR only to the bitter end. So HD-DVD hopefulls should probably write off any Fox/Disney titles for a long time even if the format war shifts towards HD-DVD.

Thankfully though, file sizes are prohibitive enough that the impact should be fairly minimal for the foreseeable future. At this point, it's the threat of epidemic level piracy, rather than the reality of epidemic level piracy, which is probably years away from being remotely possible.

19.4 gigs is over 24 hours of D/l time, pretty much a deterent to piracy at this point in the game.
 

Shawn Perron

Supporting Actor
Joined
Oct 25, 2002
Messages
500
This news is a few days old. Every current HD-DVD on the market at this time are having thier keys discovered, posted and being pirated one by one. This is a very bad thing for both formats, but especially for HD-DVD since they have no other form of protection to fall back on. No HD-DVD will be protected again until they update the AACS protection on the discs some time in the future. Supposedly it could be as much as a few months before they update the AACS security on the new discs. Even after they update the security, all titles prior to that point will always be unprotected. Something like rom mark would be great for them since it would atleast prevent the movies from being burned to a disc and played on set top boxes like the toshiba units.

Even if the Blu-Ray movies were unencrypted, there is a chance that they still will not play because of the rom mark security all BD movies have. If I understand the way it works, all BD movies have contain a rom mark identifier that will only allow play back when the correct rom mark from the Blu-Ray disc is also present. Since the psysical disc will not be available for the software to properly verify, the movies should not play on either software or hardware players. The only possible way they could play the unencrypted Blu-Ray movies would be with an unofficial 3rd party program. None of the comercial players should play the movies without the rom mark off the disc. It may be found out if this works shortly if the AACS keys for Blu-Ray movies have been discovered the same way.
 

SVTStingRay

Stunt Coordinator
Joined
Sep 26, 2006
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100
Real Name
Daniel
the more they overdo the plumbing, the easier it is to stuff up the drain.
 

Ryan-G

Supporting Actor
Joined
Oct 13, 2005
Messages
621

I don't believe that'd work.

I believe the rom mark is embedded in the movie, and even on an HD-DVD it wouldn't play.

Regardless, all BR has to do is switch to BR-50's, and make sure that the movie + sound exceeds 30 gigs. At that point, you couldn't burn to HD-DVD, unless you recompressed it, which could get pretty ugly. Compressing a compressed file never works out well, with normal files you don't get a whole lot of space savings.

So you'd have to Rip the BR, have sufficient drive space to decompress it, and convert it to another format. Which could result in synch problems, and would require a monster of a machine to manage the whole process in a reasonable amount of time I'd think. I'd imagine it'd be an impossible process on a single core, unbearable on a dual core, and probably not much better on a quad core without some serious multi-threading.

Converting a few hundred megs takes a pretty decent amount of time with resolutions at or below DVD, quadrupiling that resolution and adding in some fairly decent sound files I'd expect would get really time consuming.
 

Shawn Perron

Supporting Actor
Joined
Oct 25, 2002
Messages
500
The way both formats deliver audio is noncompliant with the other. Even if the video files were totally compliant with either format, which they may not be, the audio would not play on a player from the other format. The only player that might be able to play a disc like that is the LG, but then again, it might not.
 

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