Thanks for the note. We had initially uploaded to YouTube, but later shifted to DM on account of copyright concerns (Fair use and all that is good to talk about, but the possibility of tussling that out with YouTube is not something we really want to do). I have fixed the text.
I worked for a medium size consumer electronics manufacturer in Japan when DVD was about to launch as a director or marketing. Many of the regional distributors in various global markets for future DVD players were asking me about the Regional encoding for disks and how it would affect their sales or ability to have content. I told them then that the stupid idea of having a region for disks would create a so called 'black market' for region free players. I have also worked in the US high end manufacturing sector and followed the 'breaking' of all encryption schemes with great interest.
I have done many public AV demonstrations with disk based source material and I always have been EXTREMELY OFFENDED by the FBI label telling me I am a thief for disks that I purchased at retail for my use. Anyone ripping the titles will choose to delete that stupid and offensive section of the disk and the only loser is the normal retail user. Any copy protection code will be broken quickly. ANY... If Blu-Ray wants to be succeed for a longer period of time it should be attempting to be easier to use. HDMI and HDCP are only short term solutions that have caused more trouble than they have fixed, by a long sight. USELESS FEATURES, FORCED TRAILER VIEWS and other such idiocy merely feed into consumer dissatisfaction with the format.
Make it easy to use for the normal retail customer, make it have good simple features and put the stupid FBI and trailer views in the back of the disk, if they are there at all, and let the consumer watch their purchase in peace. I hate the various encumbering schemes attempted to make using products that we have paid good money for and irritated by while trying to enjoy a movie.
"A look at the market trends seem to indicate that online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are overtaking conventional media distribution channels such as DVDs and Blu-rays." I guess you are solely talking about the North American market? I haven't seen such numbers for Germany or Europe, much less for Russia, Asia and Africa....
I believe that the European market already has some online streaming services such as LoveFilm and even Netflix is setting up shop over there soon. In India, the first VoD subscription service was started last month. Internet infrastructure needs to come up to speed first for online streaming services to be effective. So, yes, many comments in the piece are based upon our opinion, being here in the US, but we do feel that the trend will soon reflect worldwide.
I have to say that the offerings are pretty much non-existent here in Finland. A couple ISPs offer some kind of movie rental services but the quality is 480p and you have to be a customer of that ISP to get access. Usually, you also need a specific plan which may not be available everywhere (at one point, they offered it only for ADSL contracts, high-speed optics were left out). iTunes offers HD quality but the selection is rather small, at least right now.
As far as I know, there is no online streaming service similar to Netflix. All services are pay as you watch, which is quite expensive.
Also, it's definitely not the internet infrastructure that is causing it here. The average internet speed is faster here than in the US according to NetIndex. Plus we don't have any caps.
I think one of the key things is dubbing/subtitling. I think UK is a lot ahead of us because their native language is English so all content is ready for them. However, other countries have their own language. Dubbing or subtitling takes time and money, so it makes sense that the companies are concentrating on English countries first.
Lovefilm is pretty much none existent no matter country. You can pretty much forget about any such service in EU/EEA, it's to regionalized and oligopoly oriented which basically forms distribution monopolies not even Mussolini could fatom, it's further exacerbated by the music rights which is also negotiated at a national level making it impossible to even stream stuff you own the rights for to different countries, all at national levels and too many content distributors to deal with. It's the only one field that isn't fully included in the common market. Any other service, software, games and books is fine doing cross border with no local agreements at all. Amazon sells us EU citizens about 1 million ebooks for example. I think Lovefilm in UK where most movie and TV rights go trough when they are sold to us, still has about 6000 titles on the streaming instant on version. It's nothing nothing at all compared to Amazons over 100 000 titles in the states.
Even if companies in London say sell TV-rights to another country there are still some shows/networks that will have local distributors where they have been granted a monopoly over a region making it impossible to get the rights for your territory and means you can't just go to the creators and official distributors and so on. Companies in London sometimes even releases DVD's with Scandinavian subtitles but aren't allowed to sell their own movies/releases in those countries if somebody else own the regional rights, which means they might not end up doing a release at all or will be doing their own technical inferior one. Subtitling is definitively not an issue at all here.
Services with 2000-6000 titles is pretty much useless, you can't subscribe to your favorite show or see the movies you like. Your better of subscribe to some physical dvd/bd disc rental service where the offering is better. I don't know of a EU country where that isn't true at least. In US Netflix physical service of course has worse catalog then Amazon VOD and Netflix on-demand offerings.
Netflix has just launched here and the pricing is very good but the selection unfortunately isn't, Lovefilm instant are meant to have a slightly better selection but the market is still quite a bit behind the US. I prefer buying my films on blu-ray for the quality and not having to worry about bandwidth but I could certainly see myself using something like Netflix for films I fancy watching as one-offs.
> Maybe they want it this way. After all, streaming gives absolute control of the content to the provider, not the consumer.
Bingo. They'd rather you rent it every time you want to watch it than be able to buy once and watch it forever (after the requisite 15 minutes of unskippable preview, fluff, FBI warnings, etc. See the "pirate dvd" image below :) )
If you are displaying it on a screen, streaming from the internet, local network, secured VPN, DVD, Blu Ray or anything else. You can make a copy of that movie in full quality. That's the bottom line, there's literally nothing you can do to stop that.
If the filthy rich movie studios want to stay in business they need to just "trust" (Huh, I KNOW what a fucking concept) that the people who can afford to pay for their content will. Because they honestly WANT to support the people who made the content they like, and want more of it. This means no DRM of any kind, it doesn't work, so it's just a waste of money. And, this is the big one, lowering prices. A LOT. I don't mean instead of releasing at 25 dollars USD release at 20, I mean release at 5, and let it drop RAPIDLY!!!
Get with the times. I don't even own DVD's anymore, I have 6TB of external storage, with redundancy. I don't want 5000 physical cases laying around my house when I can have ONE NAS. If there's no physical media to buy, just a digital copy you download off the internet. That means there's less cost. No disc, no case, no artwork for either. No shipping and no middle man. (The retailer selling the physical media). Meaning digital copies should be quite a bit cheaper, not the same price, not even close.
It seems like perfectly clear common sense to me, and everyone I've seen on reddit or any other online forum. How out of touch do studio execs have to be to continue trying to hold on to how things were in the mid 1900's and on? Seriously, it's 2012, move on.
Stream dual 1080p video for 3D with a DTS-HD MA audio track and then MAYBE....You can't stream that off netflix or hulu. The bandwidth coming from a Blu-Ray is much higher than you could stream on most internet connections.
" The net result is that almost every new Blu-ray fails to play back on a player if it doesn’t have the latest firmware updates."
Wrong buddy...I have a first gen Samsung Blu-Ray player and haven't ever once had a disk not play. Some load slowly, but that's because the drive is not as speedy as newer models. Everything works though and always has.
I have started timing how long it takes to get bluray movies to play from the time the disc is inserted until the time when the main movie is playing. Any thing possible to speed up the process is done, such as using the disc menu, next track, fast forward, etc.
What I have found is that it takes on average 15 minutes to start a movie. In our age of instant gratification this is nauseating. One movie took 2 hours before giving up. It insisted on downloading previews from the Internet and playing them. While the picture and sound quality is significantly better than other media, the user experience is so far behind. How do they expect to survive?
One special note, Transformers: Dark of the Moon started up almost immediately. Thank you!
We actually got a movie the other day that wouldn't let us skip ANY of the previews, and to top it off, we were interrupted watching it had to reboot it and wait through all the previews a second time. The studios really know how to make everyone hate them.
It takes less effort to pirate the movie you want to watch then to get it through any other source.
This is like going to a nice expensive restaurant not get seated promptly, having the service suck, and food take forever. So you go home and make whatever you originally wanted off their menu and tip yourself handsomely.
Why should anyone pay for an inferior product/service especially when you are trying to attract the business of a bunch of cooks.
All of the mentioned issues in the article are why I don't own any BluRay discs and most likely never will. Ironically I own two BluRay players (both given away by Sony for free as part of other purchases), but until it becomes as easy, quick and cheap to use as watching a regular DVD I will never own any BluRay media.
Even more ironic is that I own a Sony DVD (The Tourist) that refuses to play on my Sony BluRay player. LOL. I assume I could connect the player to the internet to let it update itself, but I refuse to connect anything that I consider to be a standalone device to my home network.
Smells like BS to me. You "say" you won't hook up a bluray player but I can almost guarantee you have other devices like a cable/uverse/dish box on your network that goes out and downloads program data and firmware patches all the time without your knowledge. Managed modem by your ISP, cell phone and tablets on your wifi reaching out and checking for updates from your carrier. All kinds of devices on your network that are standalone.
Physical media and DRM needs to die. I haven't bought any physical media in years now.
In the last sentence you state that the consumers need to wake up and decide if it's worth it to us, but its really the industry that needs to wake up.
I think allso so. BD guality is so much better than what you can get downloaded, because it would reguire so much bandwide.
And the only reason I really hate DVD and BD is that DRM and other stuff that makes it so difficult to watch my disks... "You need bios, upgrade" you need new version of..." and so on...
I want my 4k movies in so insane high guality that it would be unpractical to send them via internet and without DRM please... and is physical format... what ever that would be.
I don't understand the dichotomy between the droves of people who jump on and smear every review of a sub-premium monitor on this site (oh my, it's *e*-IPS!!?!?!?!) while an article on Blu-Ray's results in a near universal proclamation of streaming content adoration.
It just seems to me there should be more of a middle ground between people willing to pay 3x-5x as much for a monitor that looks ever so slightly better and has juuuuust the right colors here and there versus people who don't care if their NetFlix streaming version of Transformers has periodic blocky fadeouts and frequent black crush highlighting the obvious heavy compression artifacts throughout.
Blu Ray is premium. You buy the 55" premium television, get the 7.1 booming surround sound system set up, buy your favorite popcorn, and pop your beautiful, high-quality Blu-Ray movie in. You don't turn on your cheap, crappy pseudo-HD compression nightmare streaming service just to save 2 minutes and feel smug about it.
Actually, you just described why I cringe just about any time I pay for any media. I do pay, most of the time, at least, since I don't really want to watch something I'm not willing to support by paying, but there is literally no convenient, high quality video source available.
I won't touch Blu-ray for most of the reasons discussed above. All streaming I've tried is terrible, even if it will actually play at "720p". (Netflix and Hulu generally do select the maximum quality. Amazon has a tendency to play at the lowest quality even though my connection has never tested at less than 22 Mb/s.)
iTunes is fairly good, at least for 720p (I haven't tried 1080p yet), but most of what I watch is TV shows, and I don't really want to pay to own entire seasons that I'll only watch once. (The $0.99 rentals were nice while they lasted, but I'd be happy to pay even a bit more than that.)
The whole situation is just sad. I'm just waiting, hoping they figure it out eventually like the music industry did (mostly).
I don't pirate but I correlate this to why I rip all my movies.
Studios wonder why people want to rip their moves to their HDs, for me this is one of the main reasons. I don't care about the extras (if I did I can always actually put in the disk) I just want to see the movie.
I allso hate those extras and I have paid for that movie! And if pirate can get the movie without those "extra" features... I am really pissed off... I allso byumy movies but every time I watch again those extra warning screens I wonder why... I want that movies studio gets my money, thats ok, but I don't want to give up my sanity, by watching all those extras
Want me to cough-up for that TV series Im watching atm? Extremely simply answer! Match the convenience level of the above pic (link) coupled with a sane price tag.
No fancy tech or laws required.
This coming from a pretty straight laced fellow, who pays his taxes and bills and I think Ive 2 audio tracks out of many, many thousands that were pirated (before the preview extension I pirated to see if I liked, then actually bought it legitimately if I did, deleted if I didnt - the 2 which I didnt pay for are from a certain artist - initials JB >.< - who I couldnt live with myself if I gave him a cent, hes got a *stupid* amount of money already)
Aside from a certain percent of people who simply refuse to pay for anything they can possibly get for free, I think the vast majority of people would fall into line if you price it sensibly and make it as simple and convenient as possible. Music is there now, films arent far off (speaking more so of streaming, but even physical BDs are coming to a more reasonable price level.) My main beef is TV, the time gap between regions (US content specifically) to view my fav shows is immense and you just cant get up to the minute anything via paid for services (in Ireland), if you could, I'd be all over it.
Lol! Yeah, thats exactly what I thought of when I read this article.
Such a shame, the time and money wasted (in vain!) trying to get a small percent and ultimately punishing the legitimate customer is all thats going on here.
Instead, understand there is a percent (a greater percent I'd be willing to bet good money on) of people who don't enjoy getting shafted and paying crazy money for a film or watch things weeks (or more) after they have been aired else-where and then go about getting it by whatever means necessary, most know a friend or a friend-of-a-friend that has damn near everything and will stream it to you for nothing.
If Netflix (AFAIK in the US have a better selection - I'm hoping it advances here) or Lovefilm or whoever else runs services here actually had the content (rather than largely ancient stuff which accounts for the bulk on offer currently), I'd subscribe!
Sadly I know only too well that there are layers of BS at work preventing this to happen, rather than just a greedy A-hole. But the platform is there, the devices are there, the infrastructure is widely available (needs to be expanded further), but it can be done. The obstacles lie entirely with some snotty out of touch publishers and advertisers who seem hell bent on throwing good money after bad. They wont win!
I haven't viewed a single DRM-protected video in probably over 6 years (I became so incredibly annoyed with VHS/DVD and television advertising/unskippable content and all that) but since my last endeavor with that things have only seem to have gotten worse. I honestly didn't know that there were things like regional restrictions (what the hell?) and the necessity for approved screens (WHAT THE HELL?!?!) to view certain copyright. It just seems really, really out of this world. Cinavia really just seems to be a logical step on the way. I am already calling it: somewhere in a future BD specification they will require physical bd stores to knife any and every customer who buys protected content. The revision after that ensures that this indeed results in death. What the hell are those consumers thinking, buying our stuff? We don't want that, go away! RRRAAaaAAaarghhh!
If I want to see something, I type it into youtube and I usually get a good idea of the content. I can skip advertising within a couple of seconds, get HD resolution and if I like it, I can subsequently download it legally or, if it's not available in my region for some arbitrary reason (this really seems to be much the norm these days) I can pirate it. That way I don't waste any time on frankly something I am not entertained by in the slightest, I have full control over my own purchases and my viewing behaviour. Just like I had with earlier VHS releases (which had maybe 2 minutes of pre-roll stuff) and subscription VOD services like a lot of starcraft (or in general: gaming-related) stuff.
Matroskas, really? I don't understand why the article seems to imply this is the dominant format. MKV is mainly the format you only see with anime, where subtitles and multiple audio streams are much more relevant. The broader video scene has favored avi containers with h.264/xvid encoding for years for everything from cams to blu-ray rips.
Everytime I read MKV in this article I had to cringe and question the credibility of the author.
Why would I sacrifice quality when ripping (which is what h.264/xvid is doing)?
MKV is perfect if I want to grab just the movie and the main audio track from the disc. No quality loss, and smaller than if I did an ISO or folder structure rip.
DRM hurts nobody except legitimate consumers. As this article explains, any DRM the providers can come up with is cracked within two weeks.
The music industry is finally coming around to selling DRM-free tracks. Why can't the movie studios do the same?
High definition stuff in AVI? The only ones I have seen are the XViD encodes of Blu-rays and they are very rare compared to H.264 in MKVs.. I will leave it to the other readers to judge for themselves, but my research indicates that MKV is the most common container for high definition stuff and AVIs are suited for standard definition TV recordings and DVDRips / BDRips of 1 and 2CD sizes.
Are you serious? MKV is of course the ultimate video format right now, nothing else comes close. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. I rip all my movies to MKV. Only kids posting crappy quality torrents use Divx/Xvid and all the .avi variations.
Sorry man but H.264 MKV files are THE only way to go.
I mean sucks. I have to get updates when new movies come out and if my Player doesn't have an update I bought a movie for nothing. At least you can but ones with DVDs in it also.
And whoever is writing the Java code should be killed. I don't need bells and whistles, I need HD video. AT least you should be able to opt out of special features. I could write that with my eyes closed. And I do C#.
Someone else mentioned the time it takes to actually play a disc...unacceptable... I still can't get Thor and Green Lantern to play .. at least not all the way through...even more unacceptable... Then when you throw in the horror of the HDMI handshake, it's amazing anyone buys them...Picture and sound is beautiful though...
Indeed. The problem is not the concept, but the implementation. Very poor quality control. What nobody seems to cover is the fact that BD player manufacturers are forced to operate at really low margins. Then when you consider that at the time they designed a player and set the cost margin, those manufacturers had no idea that the content providers were going to force through a new DRM method practically every time a new movie came out. Those new firmware updates that everyone screams for cost the manufacturer and eat into their already low margins.
Thus, DRM increases the cost of making BD players. Yet, the BD manufacturers realize that nobody will buy their product if they start raising the price, so they instead cut corners, resulting in poor quality, badly coded firmware with little or no quality control. The push for new DRM methods is making the manufacture of BD players unprofitable, so will in that way eventually kill BD.
Every movie I've ever bought always works on a 1st gen Samsung Blu-Ray player. I have never been asked to update. What you're saying is spewing an internet fallacy back out again like a monkey.
I've got an original PS3 and most disks never have an issue, but I remember buying a new bluray several years ago, putting it in and blam - you have to update your firmware (or whatever the message was) to play this disk.
Not a fallacy at all - happened to this user. Once a new updated DRM is pushed out onto a BluRay that requires an update on the player end you'll get that message and have to update.
I just bought the BluRay of the movie Super. Only to find out that my admittedly old PowerDVD 8 BD Edition would not play it. 10 dollar BD movie and 30 minutes searching the Internet and 'gray' areas for a player to play it. :(
Ended up just downloading a 1080p BD rip from a torrent site and watched that.
Because without tools like AnyDVD HD being available, their content is a huge time waster and completely out of touch with my viewing habits. I cringe to think that parents suffer through 2-3 minutes of outdated commercials, FBI warnings, and loading screens each time the family wants to sit down and watch a movie. In my household, it's browse to the file via my Tversity DLNA server and hit play. For Bluray, it's browse to the ISO file, load, and play. I watch almost no TV because of ads and fluff, and I watch very few movies. When I do, I want to watch a movie and not be inconvenienced. I also like to own things rather than rent, so the streaming industry really holds nothing of value for me. DRM free downloads in 1080p quality, and you'll get my money. Anything less won't get purchased and can be easily replaced with the Internet, games, and a good book like it currently is in my household for the most part.
"Despite the studios putting in lots of money and effort into promoting 3D, it doesn't seem to have taken off as much as expected."
The problem is that while a few movies may be decent in 3D, the price premium for these discs are way too high. I usually scope out stores for any good Blu-ray deals (sub-$10 deals), and 3D Blu-ray discs are usually $10 more than the 2D version. I was actually rather surprised when I saw Target selling The Immortals in 3D for only $2 more than the 2D version. Of course, that was only a sale, and last I checked, it was back to the usual $10 premium.
3D tech is really so inconvenient to use that only an enthusiast would ever consider it... for the rest of the world the low quality, pain in the @ glasses & the ridiculous pricing schemes are a no-brainer... no thanks
I can't remember the particular Blu-ray at this moment, but in the not too distant past I got one of the slimiest rental hack-jobs I'd seen yet. Lots of the discs from Netflix state 'Rental' on the label and are less showy, including different menus, etc. Basically, I know what I'm getting before the disc is actually in the player. The slimy movie in question, however, appeared by all accounts to be a retail disc. It had the retail menus, and all of the options in those menus were selectable. The slimy part? When you selected an item not on the rental disc, ready to settle in and watch, it popped up a message suggesting you go buy the Blu-ray.
Say I want to buy a movie or TV series. If I buy it on BluRay, I can't watch it on my iPad. If I buy it on iTunes, I can't watch it on my preferred PC player or TV (not without buying an Apple TV), and it costs twice as much as the bluray.
Meanwhile, if I were to download a torrent of the movie or TV episode, it plays on my TV, it plays on my computer, it is easily transcodable or remuxable to my iPad, and there is no DRM hassle whatsoever.
About the only bright spot in all this is Netflix, where the DRM simply isn't a problem by virtue of being completely transparent, and having clients for every conceivable device I'd want to watch it on. The problem is that I can't get all my content through Netflix, as much as I'd like to.
The music industry FINALLY got a clue, and at this point they begrudgingly sell their content DRM-free at reasonable prices. The current road the television and movie industries are on ends in a cliff.
I agree with the music industry getting a clue finally with the DRM-free... but as for reasonable prices I'd have to disagree wholehartedly.
IF... they were selling songs for about 90 cents each for CD quality FLAC or Apple Lossless then ok... but for the compressed mp3 format then the only price I'D pay is about 2cents per song.
I didn't invest in a hi-fi stereo to play crappy mp3 files
Quality wise, it is pretty good. However, it still comes bundled with all the Blu-ray issues.. You can rent and watch it on a device but it comes with issues such as a 24 or 48 hour watch window. If you buy it, the purchased copy which is downloaded can only be played on that particular device / still bundled with DRM.
I will ping Vudu PR about the details of the encoding process they are using (after our AppleTV 3 review is up, because it has some relevant details I would like to point out to their PR).
I can't help but think that the use of fancy DRM features by content has to be an element of the following:
Senior Exec: "WE NEED TO PROTECT OUR CONTENT, WHY AREN'T WE DOING MORE TO PROTECT OUR CONTENT!?"
Engineer: "Yes sir, right away sir. There is this lovely new DRM produced by 'company x' that will protect our content to a high level....."
Senior Exec: "Excellent work young engineer. You're in line for a promotion for such innovation and forward thinking."
I hope my point come through OK. In all industries, in my experience there tends to be a fair bit of 'management appeasement' which can lead to poor choices being seen as great ones.
I'd bet you that the guys who make these systems never actually have to tolerate these systems when they are at home watching a movie from their own collection
I tried BD-Live, once. An hour later (had to update the player ROM and sit through random crashes) I was treated to the crappiest, slowest interactive experience I'd ever seen. It was like a flash website from 1999 running on a 100MHz Pentium, with tiny text that wasn't legible on my TV. I was like "damn, these people just don't get it".
What they don't get is that we just want to watch the whole damned thing - that's it, that's all. About 10% of us might watch a "making of" short, and about 0.5% of us are geeky enough to watch the whole movie with an annoying director voice over. We don't want to play a game, or have a click through adventure - we want to WATCH THE FEATURE.
Same with TV shows. Either put up full episodes on the web (even laden with crap ads), or don't. I don't want to watch "clips", I don't want to see character interviews. I want to WATCH THE SHOW.
I still have yet to purchase a blu-ray player. They are dipping below $50, finally, 3 years after that milestone should have occured. This is of course because blu-ray was the inferior format compared to HD-DVD. If HD-DVD had "won" the format war there would be 5-10 times as many HD discs sold by now. Burners would be $20 and there would be 100 times more burning going on.
Of course "they" dont want that, even though "they" would have actually made a whole lot more money if "they" had simply taken their heads of of their butts. I will never buy anything blu-ray, until it is cracked open and all that DRM crap is stripped. If that never happens, then the market will simply move around blu-ray, to online or even usb flash based. (A 4GB drive only costs about $5 in bulk, and 4GB is enough for a 1080p film with more than good enough quality.)
When Avatar came out my Dad went out and got the blu-ray, totally stoked that he'd get to see it in HD. Sure enough however the disc didn't play! He calls up his programmer son and asks WTF?
I look into and and he needs to upgrade his firmware....he will never buy a blu-ray again.
I did upgrade his player later on that year but I know for sure he'll never buy another, and any person who he talks to might not either (he's quite convincing lol)
It's been a while that companies do some shady stuff vs legit customers in the name of "fighting piracy", but it's depressing to see nobody notices. No LAN play "to fight piracy" by Blizzard (in fact, they simply wanted to have share of what Korean Starcraft channels earn), "you gotta be online to play this game" => say goodbye aftermarket.
Oh, and the most hilarious "stuff recorded on this TV can only be played on this TV". Niiice. That will show them, the evil pirates with blue-ray rips. Remind me why do we still use HDMI with all the "advanced encryption"?
How are consumers expected to update their firmware if they don't have home broadband internet?
My parents live in a rural area and have to use a USB 3g internet provider. There isn't any easy way to connect their blu-ray player to the internet for it to download a firmware update.
Screw all the ridiculous high prices for bluray movies, get a fat pipe internet connection and usenet provider and you're set. BTW, for those looking to ditch torrents and get into usenet, Astraweb has a new plan, $50 for 1TB of downloads. Of course, if you download a ton, then get the unlimited plan for $9-11 a month.
"Thomson's NexGuard is a type of video watermarking scheme which works with the help of the BD+ SVM. The BD+ content code embeds some invisible information in the video track which contains details of the player / drive used to decrypt the stream."
I can't think of a blu-ray rip that would include this watermark. How could it, if the rip is not taken from the video feed, the file itself is decrypted with a drive that's not a BD-video drive (a proper BD player)? Am I missing something, or are they that clueless that they think people are pirating by connecting their players' video outputs to a VCR?
I freaking HATE Cinavia protection. I ripped my entire DVD/BluRay library to digital MKV files (hundreds of movies) and have been using a Samsung 6500 BluRay player to stream the movies from my home server. I have three of those players in the house and everything had been awesome....until recently. About a month ago a recent firmware ADDED the Cinavia protection to the Samsung player and now many of my movies no longer play and I get those stupid Cinavia protection errors.
Anandtech PLEASE raise hell, raise awarness about this evil technology. Consumers should be able to rip their old school discs to digital files without having to deal with horrid DRM getting in the way of enjoying a movie.
And a warning to users to stay away from Samsung. They crippled my devices a year after I bought them with this new Cinavia protection. They took away functionality and are evil bastards for doing so. I believe a lawsuit is in order, you can't sell a product and then a year later disable the main feature I use it for and get away with that crap. Who's with me???
We are really sorry for using DailyMotion, but the fact is that there is a risk of copyright infringement or similar action notice sent to YouTube from the studios (further considering the fact that what we have written in the piece is a bitter pill to swallow for them).
YouTube's policy is 3 strikes and channel closed (no questions entertained). We can't take the risk of endangering the official YouTube channel for this purpose. However, I have taken the risk of uploading the videos on YouTube from another account after reading your comment. The links are here:
Cinavia is one of the main reasons why I stopped using my PS3 as a media playback device and have moved to the 360. I loved the UI of the PS3 as it lets you skip by looking at frames, but I bought my PS3 from the US and I live in UK, so every time I buy an official Blu-Ray, it doesn't work due to some stupid region restrictions. and for the ones that do work, I have to sit through 10-15 min of commercials and stupid warnings. So every time the warning pops up, I just plug my HDD out of the PS3 and pop it into my 360 and continue watching.
I do what most other 'sane' people do... I pirate sh!t off the internet now. I tried to go the official route... I really tried, but you get treated like some garbage and have to sit through 10 min of studios flashing warnings that I'll go in jail if I pirate this even though I just legally bought it. Fu*k that sh!t.
I am a legitimate customer. I buy Blu-rays. What I want to do is as follows:
Rip down to NAS and watch them anywhere in house or portable player (Tablet, Laptop, PSP). That means I also need to have a SD version for some of the smaller screens.
I do not want all the health warnings etc.
Scrub regional coding
Does that make me someone who is ripping off artists - no it does not.
Is this article about the downfalls of DRM or a gripe about how Blu-ray discs contain too many difficult-to-skip trailers? If there were no trailers, why would one bother stripping the DRM? Further, what does anybody care if there is DRM if it can simply be stripped off and the content then streamed? Is the argument that spending money on DRM ultimately raises the cost of Blu-ray discs.
If so, just vote with your wallet. We're not talking about bread here folks.
Ah well, I guess it's not my issue. I'm fine just renting Blu-rays.
Agreed. I don't think I've ever had a BD fail to play, and it takes seconds to skip the previews after pressing [>|] a handful of times (yes, a bit inconvenient but we have remote controls and it sure beats fast forwarding a VHS tape).
The crux of the problem is "why get something for $X when you can get it for free?", where X>0. Of course more people would pay $2 vs $20, but not 10x as many, and there will still be plenty of folks who won't even pay $2 even if they could afford it.
What I don't understand is that part of the argument is that the movies offered are "crappy", i.e. not worth paying for. Yet once it's free, it's worth wasting 2 hours watching/having on a hard disk. Pirated crap is still crap.
Unfortunately, neither side is willing to give the other the benefit of a doubt.
the point is that DRM = Pain in the @ for the person who purchases the product
DRM has ZERO impact on piracy and as such is an abject failure. What is the point of DRM since all it accomplishes is forcing legitimate folk to suffer and stare confusedly as their home entertainment system that is talking about firmware upgrades... I can guarantee you my parents haven't got a f'n clue what firmware is.
I do occasionally buy Blurays, as it is currently my only way to support movies I like. I never play the actual retail disk though. One of my recent purchases was The Thing (2011) bluray, which comes with UltraViolet.
Curiosity over-powering me, I thought to check out UltraViolet. I typed in the WWW address, and the numbers, and in less than a second, I was told that "UltraViolet is not available in your country". With no option to do anything else, but close the browser. The disk is not region protected either, just not for "my kind".
Why is it *my* money is no good anyway? What is it about my cash that stinks so much :)
I would even be happy with a system where I can just "donate" money to the movie makers directly, and only get a receipt back (for legal defence). I'll get the movies by other means...
Netflix and Hulu are non-starters for anyone who cares enough about the fidelity of what they are watching to want a BD. The user experience is awful by comparison. The fidelity is crummy, sound is barely passable, and the content choices very limited.
And guess what - the studios will keep it that way because they want to preserve their optical disk market.
Throw monthly bandwidth caps on top of this, plus the fact that studios can (and do) pull content from streaming distribution you have a situation that clearly points to the fact that physical media are going to be with us for the forseeable future.
Personally I'm fine with that because I want something that gives ME control over what I can watch. Not some studio or streaming service executive.
on Page 4 the article says: assumptions... 3. People interested in backing up their purchased Blu-rays on hard drives do so in the ISO or folder backup format
but on page 6, it says: MKV: This is undoubtedly the most popular format for storing HD movies. In this backup mode...
So first you imply that people using MKVs are pirates, and then you recommend it.
I've found that large DVD/BD collections are unmanageable in ISO format due to disk space. One of my clients has a 12TB RAID5 (7 2TB drives) for his media, plus another RAID5 mirror, and is constantly plagued by failing drives, etc. I recommended he switch to MKV and has cut his storage requirements by at least 50%.
Also, as you point out on page 6, the load times are ridiculous for BDs and ISOs.
Pirates use MKVs, but not all people who use MKVs are pirates :) I still recommend MKV like you do for large collections where hard drive space is an issue.
The reason I talked about backups in ISO or folder format is because those are the types of backups which require a Blu-ray player with menu support (and which are more likely to have Cinavia and get affected).
As someone who has been victimized by these jerks. I love your article and agree that BD Live its trash, I have never read the FBI Warnings, I change inputs on my TV till it's over since I can't fast forward it, I do the same with the trailers.
But how about this.
I've payed extra to buy quite a few Blu-Rays that included digital copies. I downloaded them in iTunes only to discover that not only are they all SD copies. but that Apples cloud storage dose not store or stream to my Apple TV, iPhone, or iPad because they were not purchased directly through iTunes. But if i ripped the Blu Ray. I could stream or store the HD copies on any device I own. Apple or not. Witch means I payed extra for nothing.
As was most recently shown with the iPod, and before that with the McDonalds and 7-11s of the world, convenience usually wins. Personal MP3 players often have sound quality well below what is available to consumers in home stereos they already owned, yet my experience is today the vast majority of music today is played back on this lower quality, more convenient format.
The same thing is happening with Blu-Ray. Consumers with the right infrastructure will prefer more convenient approaches such as streaming or piracy. Consumers without may find themselves spending their recreational time doing something else entirely.
Not sure why the content owners are shooting themselves in the foot like this. Its especially puzzling since with Blu-Ray being the format that presumably brings the most dollars directly to the studio, you'd think they'd want to make that the best, most convenient experience possible. Instead, its probably the worst.
So Ganesh doesn't trust what he can't steal. If you can't steal a high def movie in Blu-Ray format off of a file sharing service, or you can't rent something and then copy it to keep a copy, you just shouldn't support Blu-Ray as a standard. Whine, whine whine.
Students tend to have no money so they justify stealing music or software. Hopefully when they mature and become employed, their ethics will also mature and they will take pride in being "legit" and purchasing and owning things. Until then renting from RedBox and NetFlix is still cheap and legal.
Besides, it's too hard to pirate with ISP 3 strikes warnings and bandwidth caps. If you like streaming Netflix and don't like bandwidth caps, get service on a business account.
If you read the whole piece, I am actually trying to convey that unless Blu-rays give consumers a better experience than Netflix / Vudu streaming (which is basically instant watch as long as the bandwidth is there), Blu-rays will start to decline in popularity. I am not suggesting that one needs to copy it or get off a file sharing service for that. Why can't studios just give a MKV on a Blu-ray disc (with same DRMs) which enables a consumer to start watching the movie immediately without all the trailers / load screens / warnings etc.? These are the types of measures I would like to see the studious adopt.
Netflix also has DRM obviously, but we are not complaining about it because it is transparent to the user and doesn't treat him like a criminal.
The 'whining' is about making sure studios see where they can improve the consumers' Blu-ray experience. It is obvious that DRM is not going to go away any time soon. However, when measures like Cinavia come about, they punish the legit consumer more than the actual pirates (and I have explained in detail why that is the case).
kinda have to agree with you... used to have a big DVD collection until I realized that it really was just a collection. I used to buy movies out of habit and a desire to own it... I'd watch them once and file it away into the collection where it would sit for YEARS...
in short, why buy when you'd have to rent it 5 times before you paid the price of buying it..?
I have a good laptop and a 3D projector at my disposal. I would love to buy a few 3D blu-rays and rent lots more. However, I can't legally watch them because the projector isn't HDMI 1.4 compliant (and there's some other technical stuff I don't understand) and licensing issues prevent anyone from releasing software that will let me play 3D blu-ray on my setup.
I have 2 legal options: 1. Spend thousands more pounds on equipment that is approved (too expensive) 2. Go without (unsatisfactory)
I have 2 illegal options: 1. Buy/rent the 3D blu-ray and rip to MKV file. Watch and enjoy (time consuming/inconvenient) 2. Download from the web and don't pay anybody (time consuming, getting easier)
I really think that there should be a legal option that looks like this: Rent/buy 3D blu-ray. Watch and enjoy (convenient, everybody happy).
As many people have said, they really have shot themselves in the foot.
Its interesting to note that CD's have now been around for 30+ years and none of them have any DRM, yet the music industry still exists and continues to grow.
I don't see any difference between the CD and the DVD in terms of distributing entertainment to the consumer, but they seem to believe there is one.
DAT SCMS, DRM, SWG, Blu-Ray... The list goes on and on. Sony, hope it dies a slow an agonizing death. Will never buy a Sony product again, for as long as I live.
My freshman year of college I downloaded music and movies. I went to a well regarded university with Tech in its name. That year, every person on campus had watched LOTR weeks before it came out. I was a pirate, for one year.
I have always worked hard though, and after that first year I didn't have time to consume massive amounts of media. Convenience started to matter, and services started to pop up that legally offered a means to consume media for a reasonable fee. My pirating days were over, not long after they began.
Here's what bothers me. I have two HP LP2465 monitors hooked up to a nice home built computer. What do they lack? HDCP. I purchased AnyDVD HD for the sole purpose of playing my legally acquired Bluray collection on my computer. Someone should go to jail for that, and it shouldn't be me. Next up? I encountered that lovely little DRM issue with Silverlight while trying to watch movies on my paid subscription for Netflix. I have to run extra cabling to my Bluray players, so they can update to play discs that I bought... legally. I have to update, right as I'm excited to watch. The last time I didn't have to worry about DRM? My freshman year of college. Take note content industry, you didn't slow me down or even inconvenience me for that brief sliver of time in which I stole from you. No, only now, as a paying customer, do you make my life miserable. Thanks for that.
The majority of my friends aren't geeks like I am so most of them have no clue as to what DRM even is. While DRM is a major headache for a person like me where I'd like to have all my content in a central location, DRM isn't a major headache for the average consumer who just wants to buy a BD at Best Buy and play the movie when they get home and most of the time this works out for the average consumer who buys everything legitimately. Of course there are headaches for the average consumer such as firmware updates but c'mon, issues like these aren't common for the average consumer. One other thing unrelated to DRM, some of my friends LOVE to show off their massive BD collection.
Also, the scenario where a consumer unknowingly buys a pirated BD is pretty ridiculous unless you regularly buy your BDs on the streets of Downtown LA or China.
I understand why the Studios are taking measures like using Cinavia to protect their content.
I'm not being an apologist for the studios but movies cost A LOT of money to produce. Just ask any independent film maker. I feel anybody who reads this article and then goes and spends 50 to 100 million dollars to produce a movie, I'd bet you'd want to get the maximum profits out of that movie which includes the sale of BDs.
Also, low budget movies don't rake in a lot of profit. That's why low budget movies like Blair Witch Project or My Fat Greek Wedding garner a lot of attention when they make lots of money at the box office. This isn't common.
There's no doubt that piracy hurts everyone except the people who pirate the material and the people who buy the pirated material or get it free if its made available such as when Napster was around. Take PC Games for instance. The PC Game piracy is so bad that the Publishers are currently using some draconian methods to combat it. This ONLY hurts the legitimate purchasers of the game. Back in the day, (like 1998) I'd buy a game, bring it home, install it, the game would ask me for the serial # on the Jewel Case, I'd enter it, wait a few more minutes and then I'm playing. Now, you usually have to be connected online to even play single player games. Now Big Brother knows when and how long I've been playing their game.
I'm for the argument that if the Music industry had embraced technological advances such as MP3s instead of trying to combat it, they'd probably be in a better position than they are today but there's no doubt that piracy hit the music industry hard.
The reason for this long post is this. I was just thinking the other day that there isn't a legitimate way to purchase movies in file format so I could put it on my NAS and play it through my Western Digital set top box. The only options for a person like me is to either download the content through P2P or RIP a DVD or BD myself and encode it into a format that my WD set top box could read which I am not admitting to. Because of the DMCA, ripping movies is illegal. And why was the DMCA written into law? Because of rampant piracy. CDs aren't encrypted so the DMCA doesn't apply to CDs so legitimate purchasers are allowed under law to RIP it to MP3 and play it on any device they choose. CDs don't have encryption because they were created in the early 80s and MP3s weren't even invented back then.
If the average consumer has access to free stuff and they know how to use it, then they'll use it but if that access gets cut off and it becomes too difficult for the average consumer to figure out, then they'll eventually buy the stuff they want. If Napster and Kazaa and all those other easy file sharing programs were still around today, I'd bet Katy Perry wouldn't be selling the same amount of downloads from iTunes or Amazon.
This sounds selfish of me but If piracy wasn't so rampant now and people would actually pay for the content they want, then there probably wouldn't be a bill written into law such as the DMCA and then I'd be free to RIP any movie that I legitimately purchased and enjoy it today on any device I please or I could've been buying movies in MP4 or some other format that my set top box could read. Thanks Pirates! (and I'm not talking about Pittsburgh)
The developers of the DVD-Ranger software have the first future-proof solution for Cinavia free DVD and Blu-ray
Santa Ponsa (Spain), 09/21/2012 – Many DVD and Blu-ray users know this problem: the DVD or Blu-ray playback stops suddenly with a cryptic error message or remains frozen or silent. This is caused by the relatively new copy protection system Cinavia.
Shortly after the Cinavia solution of DVDFab has been once again made useless by the Cinavia producer, DVD-Ranger Software offers help. The developers of DVD-Ranger have eliminated the Cinavia’s signal during the development of other software by accident. The Cinavia’s signal has been changed so that it has become unreadable. They have not fought against the Cinavia’s system directly; it is more likely triggered by a design error of Cinavia itself.
Pixbyte has chosen the release date for the DVD-Ranger 5 with Cinavia module to be 10/31/2012 (Halloween). At the moment, the solution is being tested by well known people in the world of copying. Approx. 55% of all reported Blu-ray Region A/B disks and DVDs have been successfully tested so far. It will be also tested on PS3, various Blu-ray players and PowerDVD.
Pixbyte is known by the DVD neXt COPY Software and DVD-Ranger products line. Pixbyte has been present for about 10 years on the backup and copy software market.
Price and availability: DVD-Ranger 5 is currently available as pre-order at a price of $69.99. The final release price will be approx. $89.99. The Cinavia module will cost approx. $39.99 (included in pre-order).
About Pixbyte: Pixbyte is a trusted and respected researcher and developer of CD/DVD and BD recording and conversion technology. Its products are sold worldwide and are utilized by end-users and companies. The products are designed to provide speed and quality of copy operations and are developed continually in accordance with technological progress.
Great site where I recently bought a wife (https://ukrainianmailorderbrides.com/) Go to the site and buy a wife for yourself. Great girls, great choice and different ages
A very unpleasant situation. But when you solve the problem - go to our website https://polsport.tv/ choose a wife and shoot hot videos. A lot of girls of different nationalities and different ages
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
121 Comments
Back to Article
SpaceRanger - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Those aren't youtube videos..
ganeshts - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Thanks for the note. We had initially uploaded to YouTube, but later shifted to DM on account of copyright concerns (Fair use and all that is good to talk about, but the possibility of tussling that out with YouTube is not something we really want to do). I have fixed the text.yelped - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Yup, this idiocy is really getting out of hand.I personally don't watch movies at all, but I hate watching all this big-brother bullying.
So, thanks for writing this article!
zxr250cc - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
I worked for a medium size consumer electronics manufacturer in Japan when DVD was about to launch as a director or marketing. Many of the regional distributors in various global markets for future DVD players were asking me about the Regional encoding for disks and how it would affect their sales or ability to have content. I told them then that the stupid idea of having a region for disks would create a so called 'black market' for region free players. I have also worked in the US high end manufacturing sector and followed the 'breaking' of all encryption schemes with great interest.I have done many public AV demonstrations with disk based source material and I always have been EXTREMELY OFFENDED by the FBI label telling me I am a thief for disks that I purchased at retail for my use. Anyone ripping the titles will choose to delete that stupid and offensive section of the disk and the only loser is the normal retail user. Any copy protection code will be broken quickly. ANY... If Blu-Ray wants to be succeed for a longer period of time it should be attempting to be easier to use. HDMI and HDCP are only short term solutions that have caused more trouble than they have fixed, by a long sight. USELESS FEATURES, FORCED TRAILER VIEWS and other such idiocy merely feed into consumer dissatisfaction with the format.
Make it easy to use for the normal retail customer, make it have good simple features and put the stupid FBI and trailer views in the back of the disk, if they are there at all, and let the consumer watch their purchase in peace. I hate the various encumbering schemes attempted to make using products that we have paid good money for and irritated by while trying to enjoy a movie.
Cheers,
zxr250cc
SlyNine - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
DVDFab has a free DVD/Blueray decryptor. Which will burn a bluray in to a folder structure on your HDD.I use ClownBD to get demux the video/audio and MKVtoolnix's MKVmerge to remux into MKVs.
Sorry to hijack your thread but I wanted this on the first page.
SlyNine - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
And to save money on backups, Flexraid is AWESOME. Snapshot based raid for free baby.Aankhen - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I liked the bit about both of the three videos too. ;-)Death666Angel - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
"A look at the market trends seem to indicate that online streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are overtaking conventional media distribution channels such as DVDs and Blu-rays."I guess you are solely talking about the North American market? I haven't seen such numbers for Germany or Europe, much less for Russia, Asia and Africa....
ganeshts - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I believe that the European market already has some online streaming services such as LoveFilm and even Netflix is setting up shop over there soon. In India, the first VoD subscription service was started last month. Internet infrastructure needs to come up to speed first for online streaming services to be effective. So, yes, many comments in the piece are based upon our opinion, being here in the US, but we do feel that the trend will soon reflect worldwide.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I have to say that the offerings are pretty much non-existent here in Finland. A couple ISPs offer some kind of movie rental services but the quality is 480p and you have to be a customer of that ISP to get access. Usually, you also need a specific plan which may not be available everywhere (at one point, they offered it only for ADSL contracts, high-speed optics were left out). iTunes offers HD quality but the selection is rather small, at least right now.As far as I know, there is no online streaming service similar to Netflix. All services are pay as you watch, which is quite expensive.
Also, it's definitely not the internet infrastructure that is causing it here. The average internet speed is faster here than in the US according to NetIndex. Plus we don't have any caps.
I think one of the key things is dubbing/subtitling. I think UK is a lot ahead of us because their native language is English so all content is ready for them. However, other countries have their own language. Dubbing or subtitling takes time and money, so it makes sense that the companies are concentrating on English countries first.
Exodite - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Ditto for Sweden.I often lament the complete lack of legal, and convenient, ways of accessing digital media.
I pay for cable access but frankly I download all my shows as it's simply that much more convenient.
I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable amount, say what I'm currently paying for cable, for access to digital media in a timely and convenient manner.
It's not happening though, which is why my shows come off the 'net and my movies are bought in hard-copy Blu-rays.
Penti - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Lovefilm is pretty much none existent no matter country. You can pretty much forget about any such service in EU/EEA, it's to regionalized and oligopoly oriented which basically forms distribution monopolies not even Mussolini could fatom, it's further exacerbated by the music rights which is also negotiated at a national level making it impossible to even stream stuff you own the rights for to different countries, all at national levels and too many content distributors to deal with. It's the only one field that isn't fully included in the common market. Any other service, software, games and books is fine doing cross border with no local agreements at all. Amazon sells us EU citizens about 1 million ebooks for example. I think Lovefilm in UK where most movie and TV rights go trough when they are sold to us, still has about 6000 titles on the streaming instant on version. It's nothing nothing at all compared to Amazons over 100 000 titles in the states.Even if companies in London say sell TV-rights to another country there are still some shows/networks that will have local distributors where they have been granted a monopoly over a region making it impossible to get the rights for your territory and means you can't just go to the creators and official distributors and so on. Companies in London sometimes even releases DVD's with Scandinavian subtitles but aren't allowed to sell their own movies/releases in those countries if somebody else own the regional rights, which means they might not end up doing a release at all or will be doing their own technical inferior one. Subtitling is definitively not an issue at all here.
Services with 2000-6000 titles is pretty much useless, you can't subscribe to your favorite show or see the movies you like. Your better of subscribe to some physical dvd/bd disc rental service where the offering is better. I don't know of a EU country where that isn't true at least. In US Netflix physical service of course has worse catalog then Amazon VOD and Netflix on-demand offerings.
Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Netflix has just launched here and the pricing is very good but the selection unfortunately isn't, Lovefilm instant are meant to have a slightly better selection but the market is still quite a bit behind the US. I prefer buying my films on blu-ray for the quality and not having to worry about bandwidth but I could certainly see myself using something like Netflix for films I fancy watching as one-offs.John
LancerVI - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I agree. They are promoting their own death.Ten years from now, physical media will be all but gone IMHO.
Maybe they want it this way. After all, streaming gives absolute control of the content to the provider, not the consumer.
Anonymous Blowhard - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
> Maybe they want it this way. After all, streaming gives absolute control of the content to the provider, not the consumer.Bingo. They'd rather you rent it every time you want to watch it than be able to buy once and watch it forever (after the requisite 15 minutes of unskippable preview, fluff, FBI warnings, etc. See the "pirate dvd" image below :) )
Hrel - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
If you are displaying it on a screen, streaming from the internet, local network, secured VPN, DVD, Blu Ray or anything else. You can make a copy of that movie in full quality. That's the bottom line, there's literally nothing you can do to stop that.If the filthy rich movie studios want to stay in business they need to just "trust" (Huh, I KNOW what a fucking concept) that the people who can afford to pay for their content will. Because they honestly WANT to support the people who made the content they like, and want more of it. This means no DRM of any kind, it doesn't work, so it's just a waste of money. And, this is the big one, lowering prices. A LOT. I don't mean instead of releasing at 25 dollars USD release at 20, I mean release at 5, and let it drop RAPIDLY!!!
Get with the times. I don't even own DVD's anymore, I have 6TB of external storage, with redundancy. I don't want 5000 physical cases laying around my house when I can have ONE NAS. If there's no physical media to buy, just a digital copy you download off the internet. That means there's less cost. No disc, no case, no artwork for either. No shipping and no middle man. (The retailer selling the physical media). Meaning digital copies should be quite a bit cheaper, not the same price, not even close.
It seems like perfectly clear common sense to me, and everyone I've seen on reddit or any other online forum. How out of touch do studio execs have to be to continue trying to hold on to how things were in the mid 1900's and on? Seriously, it's 2012, move on.
cmdrdredd - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
no....Stream dual 1080p video for 3D with a DTS-HD MA audio track and then MAYBE....You can't stream that off netflix or hulu. The bandwidth coming from a Blu-Ray is much higher than you could stream on most internet connections.
" The net result is that almost every new Blu-ray fails to play back on a player if it doesn’t have the latest firmware updates."
Wrong buddy...I have a first gen Samsung Blu-Ray player and haven't ever once had a disk not play. Some load slowly, but that's because the drive is not as speedy as newer models. Everything works though and always has.
Botia - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I have started timing how long it takes to get bluray movies to play from the time the disc is inserted until the time when the main movie is playing. Any thing possible to speed up the process is done, such as using the disc menu, next track, fast forward, etc.What I have found is that it takes on average 15 minutes to start a movie. In our age of instant gratification this is nauseating. One movie took 2 hours before giving up. It insisted on downloading previews from the Internet and playing them. While the picture and sound quality is significantly better than other media, the user experience is so far behind. How do they expect to survive?
One special note, Transformers: Dark of the Moon started up almost immediately. Thank you!
Colin1497 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
We actually got a movie the other day that wouldn't let us skip ANY of the previews, and to top it off, we were interrupted watching it had to reboot it and wait through all the previews a second time. The studios really know how to make everyone hate them.superccs - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
It takes less effort to pirate the movie you want to watch then to get it through any other source.This is like going to a nice expensive restaurant not get seated promptly, having the service suck, and food take forever. So you go home and make whatever you originally wanted off their menu and tip yourself handsomely.
Why should anyone pay for an inferior product/service especially when you are trying to attract the business of a bunch of cooks.
cbgoding - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
"we can't but help"should probably be
"we can't help but"
ludikraut - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
All of the mentioned issues in the article are why I don't own any BluRay discs and most likely never will. Ironically I own two BluRay players (both given away by Sony for free as part of other purchases), but until it becomes as easy, quick and cheap to use as watching a regular DVD I will never own any BluRay media.Even more ironic is that I own a Sony DVD (The Tourist) that refuses to play on my Sony BluRay player. LOL. I assume I could connect the player to the internet to let it update itself, but I refuse to connect anything that I consider to be a standalone device to my home network.
l8r)
SandmanWN - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Smells like BS to me. You "say" you won't hook up a bluray player but I can almost guarantee you have other devices like a cable/uverse/dish box on your network that goes out and downloads program data and firmware patches all the time without your knowledge. Managed modem by your ISP, cell phone and tablets on your wifi reaching out and checking for updates from your carrier. All kinds of devices on your network that are standalone.BlueAqua - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Physical media and DRM needs to die. I haven't bought any physical media in years now.In the last sentence you state that the consumers need to wake up and decide if it's worth it to us, but its really the industry that needs to wake up.
Exodite - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
There's nothing inherently wrong with physical media, indeed it makes a lot of sense for most consumers.The only issue is the DRM nightmare, though that isn't really any better on (legally) digitally distributed media.
haukionkannel - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I think allso so. BD guality is so much better than what you can get downloaded, because it would reguire so much bandwide.And the only reason I really hate DVD and BD is that DRM and other stuff that makes it so difficult to watch my disks... "You need bios, upgrade" you need new version of..." and so on...
I want my 4k movies in so insane high guality that it would be unpractical to send them via internet and without DRM please... and is physical format... what ever that would be.
seapeople - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I don't understand the dichotomy between the droves of people who jump on and smear every review of a sub-premium monitor on this site (oh my, it's *e*-IPS!!?!?!?!) while an article on Blu-Ray's results in a near universal proclamation of streaming content adoration.It just seems to me there should be more of a middle ground between people willing to pay 3x-5x as much for a monitor that looks ever so slightly better and has juuuuust the right colors here and there versus people who don't care if their NetFlix streaming version of Transformers has periodic blocky fadeouts and frequent black crush highlighting the obvious heavy compression artifacts throughout.
Blu Ray is premium. You buy the 55" premium television, get the 7.1 booming surround sound system set up, buy your favorite popcorn, and pop your beautiful, high-quality Blu-Ray movie in. You don't turn on your cheap, crappy pseudo-HD compression nightmare streaming service just to save 2 minutes and feel smug about it.
chaos215bar2 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Actually, you just described why I cringe just about any time I pay for any media. I do pay, most of the time, at least, since I don't really want to watch something I'm not willing to support by paying, but there is literally no convenient, high quality video source available.I won't touch Blu-ray for most of the reasons discussed above. All streaming I've tried is terrible, even if it will actually play at "720p". (Netflix and Hulu generally do select the maximum quality. Amazon has a tendency to play at the lowest quality even though my connection has never tested at less than 22 Mb/s.)
iTunes is fairly good, at least for 720p (I haven't tried 1080p yet), but most of what I watch is TV shows, and I don't really want to pay to own entire seasons that I'll only watch once. (The $0.99 rentals were nice while they lasted, but I'd be happy to pay even a bit more than that.)
The whole situation is just sad. I'm just waiting, hoping they figure it out eventually like the music industry did (mostly).
SlyNine - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Screw that man and screw your idea, I want to OWN my collection!jnmfox - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Always makes me think of this image:http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pir...
I don't pirate but I correlate this to why I rip all my movies.
Studios wonder why people want to rip their moves to their HDs, for me this is one of the main reasons. I don't care about the extras (if I did I can always actually put in the disk) I just want to see the movie.
haukionkannel - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Good point!I allso hate those extras and I have paid for that movie! And if pirate can get the movie without those "extra" features... I am really pissed off...
I allso byumy movies but every time I watch again those extra warning screens I wonder why... I want that movies studio gets my money, thats ok, but I don't want to give up my sanity, by watching all those extras
Swirlser - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
http://www.lauexplorer.com/2010/03/10/products/leg...Want me to cough-up for that TV series Im watching atm? Extremely simply answer! Match the convenience level of the above pic (link) coupled with a sane price tag.
No fancy tech or laws required.
This coming from a pretty straight laced fellow, who pays his taxes and bills and I think Ive 2 audio tracks out of many, many thousands that were pirated (before the preview extension I pirated to see if I liked, then actually bought it legitimately if I did, deleted if I didnt - the 2 which I didnt pay for are from a certain artist - initials JB >.< - who I couldnt live with myself if I gave him a cent, hes got a *stupid* amount of money already)
Aside from a certain percent of people who simply refuse to pay for anything they can possibly get for free, I think the vast majority of people would fall into line if you price it sensibly and make it as simple and convenient as possible. Music is there now, films arent far off (speaking more so of streaming, but even physical BDs are coming to a more reasonable price level.) My main beef is TV, the time gap between regions (US content specifically) to view my fav shows is immense and you just cant get up to the minute anything via paid for services (in Ireland), if you could, I'd be all over it.
jnmfox - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
LOL, great minds think alike!Swirlser - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Lol! Yeah, thats exactly what I thought of when I read this article.Such a shame, the time and money wasted (in vain!) trying to get a small percent and ultimately punishing the legitimate customer is all thats going on here.
Instead, understand there is a percent (a greater percent I'd be willing to bet good money on) of people who don't enjoy getting shafted and paying crazy money for a film or watch things weeks (or more) after they have been aired else-where and then go about getting it by whatever means necessary, most know a friend or a friend-of-a-friend that has damn near everything and will stream it to you for nothing.
If Netflix (AFAIK in the US have a better selection - I'm hoping it advances here) or Lovefilm or whoever else runs services here actually had the content (rather than largely ancient stuff which accounts for the bulk on offer currently), I'd subscribe!
Sadly I know only too well that there are layers of BS at work preventing this to happen, rather than just a greedy A-hole. But the platform is there, the devices are there, the infrastructure is widely available (needs to be expanded further), but it can be done. The obstacles lie entirely with some snotty out of touch publishers and advertisers who seem hell bent on throwing good money after bad. They wont win!
ssj3gohan - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I haven't viewed a single DRM-protected video in probably over 6 years (I became so incredibly annoyed with VHS/DVD and television advertising/unskippable content and all that) but since my last endeavor with that things have only seem to have gotten worse. I honestly didn't know that there were things like regional restrictions (what the hell?) and the necessity for approved screens (WHAT THE HELL?!?!) to view certain copyright. It just seems really, really out of this world. Cinavia really just seems to be a logical step on the way. I am already calling it: somewhere in a future BD specification they will require physical bd stores to knife any and every customer who buys protected content. The revision after that ensures that this indeed results in death. What the hell are those consumers thinking, buying our stuff? We don't want that, go away! RRRAAaaAAaarghhh!If I want to see something, I type it into youtube and I usually get a good idea of the content. I can skip advertising within a couple of seconds, get HD resolution and if I like it, I can subsequently download it legally or, if it's not available in my region for some arbitrary reason (this really seems to be much the norm these days) I can pirate it. That way I don't waste any time on frankly something I am not entertained by in the slightest, I have full control over my own purchases and my viewing behaviour. Just like I had with earlier VHS releases (which had maybe 2 minutes of pre-roll stuff) and subscription VOD services like a lot of starcraft (or in general: gaming-related) stuff.
Sanctusx2 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Matroskas, really? I don't understand why the article seems to imply this is the dominant format. MKV is mainly the format you only see with anime, where subtitles and multiple audio streams are much more relevant. The broader video scene has favored avi containers with h.264/xvid encoding for years for everything from cams to blu-ray rips.Everytime I read MKV in this article I had to cringe and question the credibility of the author.
Spivonious - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Why would I sacrifice quality when ripping (which is what h.264/xvid is doing)?MKV is perfect if I want to grab just the movie and the main audio track from the disc. No quality loss, and smaller than if I did an ISO or folder structure rip.
DRM hurts nobody except legitimate consumers. As this article explains, any DRM the providers can come up with is cracked within two weeks.
The music industry is finally coming around to selling DRM-free tracks. Why can't the movie studios do the same?
ganeshts - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
High definition stuff in AVI? The only ones I have seen are the XViD encodes of Blu-rays and they are very rare compared to H.264 in MKVs.. I will leave it to the other readers to judge for themselves, but my research indicates that MKV is the most common container for high definition stuff and AVIs are suited for standard definition TV recordings and DVDRips / BDRips of 1 and 2CD sizes.iamezza - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
mkv is definitely the most dominant format for HD content.avi is the most dominant for SD content.
Iketh - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
MKV is the future... you sir, are outdatedarcher75 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Clearly your out of touch with how things are done now. MKV's are indeed the way to go for HD and have been for quite a while now. AVI's? Seriously?~wolverine~ - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
You have no idea what your talking about.p05esto - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Are you serious? MKV is of course the ultimate video format right now, nothing else comes close. You obviously don't know what you're talking about. I rip all my movies to MKV. Only kids posting crappy quality torrents use Divx/Xvid and all the .avi variations.Sorry man but H.264 MKV files are THE only way to go.
SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I'd say for HD stuff MKV is the only way to go. I don't believe you can even put HD audio in AVI.SlyNine - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Also AVI has limited B-Frame support according to Wiki.My guess is you'll be googling what B-Frames are.
cjb110 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I've started seeing a lot more .mp4's about, esp for HD TV stuff. But MKV is by far the leading format that is being used through out the scene.AVI's are still popular for the non-hd, or the hd->non-hd conversions.
khory - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
mp4s are getting popular because a lot of the mobile devices can decode them in hardware.BaronMatrix - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I mean sucks. I have to get updates when new movies come out and if my Player doesn't have an update I bought a movie for nothing. At least you can but ones with DVDs in it also.And whoever is writing the Java code should be killed. I don't need bells and whistles, I need HD video. AT least you should be able to opt out of special features. I could write that with my eyes closed. And I do C#.
Someone else mentioned the time it takes to actually play a disc...unacceptable... I still can't get Thor and Green Lantern to play .. at least not all the way through...even more unacceptable... Then when you throw in the horror of the HDMI handshake, it's amazing anyone buys them...Picture and sound is beautiful though...
IF IT PLAYS...
I reiterate the SUBJECT.
Jaybus - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Indeed. The problem is not the concept, but the implementation. Very poor quality control. What nobody seems to cover is the fact that BD player manufacturers are forced to operate at really low margins. Then when you consider that at the time they designed a player and set the cost margin, those manufacturers had no idea that the content providers were going to force through a new DRM method practically every time a new movie came out. Those new firmware updates that everyone screams for cost the manufacturer and eat into their already low margins.Thus, DRM increases the cost of making BD players. Yet, the BD manufacturers realize that nobody will buy their product if they start raising the price, so they instead cut corners, resulting in poor quality, badly coded firmware with little or no quality control. The push for new DRM methods is making the manufacture of BD players unprofitable, so will in that way eventually kill BD.
cmdrdredd - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Every movie I've ever bought always works on a 1st gen Samsung Blu-Ray player. I have never been asked to update. What you're saying is spewing an internet fallacy back out again like a monkey.ganeshts - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Just want to make sure you are not trolling...Sasparilla - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
I've got an original PS3 and most disks never have an issue, but I remember buying a new bluray several years ago, putting it in and blam - you have to update your firmware (or whatever the message was) to play this disk.Not a fallacy at all - happened to this user. Once a new updated DRM is pushed out onto a BluRay that requires an update on the player end you'll get that message and have to update.
scottwilkins - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Blu-Ray was the worst thing to ever hit the consumer market. Even Sony's CEO once stated he made a mistake with it.Only thing that keeps me from streaming more, is now ISPs are putting in data caps. Consumers just can't win these days!
Bateluer - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I just bought the BluRay of the movie Super. Only to find out that my admittedly old PowerDVD 8 BD Edition would not play it. 10 dollar BD movie and 30 minutes searching the Internet and 'gray' areas for a player to play it. :(Ended up just downloading a 1080p BD rip from a torrent site and watched that.
Sasparilla - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Reminds me of this cartoon:http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Awesome!... thanks for posting that...totally hilarous... the mockup of the torrent site was pure win
Golgatha - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Because without tools like AnyDVD HD being available, their content is a huge time waster and completely out of touch with my viewing habits. I cringe to think that parents suffer through 2-3 minutes of outdated commercials, FBI warnings, and loading screens each time the family wants to sit down and watch a movie. In my household, it's browse to the file via my Tversity DLNA server and hit play. For Bluray, it's browse to the ISO file, load, and play. I watch almost no TV because of ads and fluff, and I watch very few movies. When I do, I want to watch a movie and not be inconvenienced. I also like to own things rather than rent, so the streaming industry really holds nothing of value for me. DRM free downloads in 1080p quality, and you'll get my money. Anything less won't get purchased and can be easily replaced with the Internet, games, and a good book like it currently is in my household for the most part.Aikouka - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
"Despite the studios putting in lots of money and effort into promoting 3D, it doesn't seem to have taken off as much as expected."The problem is that while a few movies may be decent in 3D, the price premium for these discs are way too high. I usually scope out stores for any good Blu-ray deals (sub-$10 deals), and 3D Blu-ray discs are usually $10 more than the 2D version. I was actually rather surprised when I saw Target selling The Immortals in 3D for only $2 more than the 2D version. Of course, that was only a sale, and last I checked, it was back to the usual $10 premium.
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
3D tech is really so inconvenient to use that only an enthusiast would ever consider it... for the rest of the world the low quality, pain in the @ glasses & the ridiculous pricing schemes are a no-brainer... no thanksTegeril - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I can't remember the particular Blu-ray at this moment, but in the not too distant past I got one of the slimiest rental hack-jobs I'd seen yet. Lots of the discs from Netflix state 'Rental' on the label and are less showy, including different menus, etc. Basically, I know what I'm getting before the disc is actually in the player. The slimy movie in question, however, appeared by all accounts to be a retail disc. It had the retail menus, and all of the options in those menus were selectable. The slimy part? When you selected an item not on the rental disc, ready to settle in and watch, it popped up a message suggesting you go buy the Blu-ray.Hate.
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
wow that's lame... the industry is totally out of touch with reality aren't theyGuspaz - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
But they make it impossible for me.Say I want to buy a movie or TV series. If I buy it on BluRay, I can't watch it on my iPad. If I buy it on iTunes, I can't watch it on my preferred PC player or TV (not without buying an Apple TV), and it costs twice as much as the bluray.
Meanwhile, if I were to download a torrent of the movie or TV episode, it plays on my TV, it plays on my computer, it is easily transcodable or remuxable to my iPad, and there is no DRM hassle whatsoever.
About the only bright spot in all this is Netflix, where the DRM simply isn't a problem by virtue of being completely transparent, and having clients for every conceivable device I'd want to watch it on. The problem is that I can't get all my content through Netflix, as much as I'd like to.
The music industry FINALLY got a clue, and at this point they begrudgingly sell their content DRM-free at reasonable prices. The current road the television and movie industries are on ends in a cliff.
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I agree with the music industry getting a clue finally with the DRM-free... but as for reasonable prices I'd have to disagree wholehartedly.IF... they were selling songs for about 90 cents each for CD quality FLAC or Apple Lossless then ok... but for the compressed mp3 format then the only price I'D pay is about 2cents per song.
I didn't invest in a hi-fi stereo to play crappy mp3 files
arjuna1 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Yet another department where pirates get better service than paying customers.Gotta love the entertainment industry.
mindbomb - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
it actually seems alright from what's presented in this article.Are they encoding from a lossless master, or do they just simply use blurays?
ganeshts - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Quality wise, it is pretty good. However, it still comes bundled with all the Blu-ray issues.. You can rent and watch it on a device but it comes with issues such as a 24 or 48 hour watch window. If you buy it, the purchased copy which is downloaded can only be played on that particular device / still bundled with DRM.I will ping Vudu PR about the details of the encoding process they are using (after our AppleTV 3 review is up, because it has some relevant details I would like to point out to their PR).
deva - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I can't help but think that the use of fancy DRM features by content has to be an element of the following:Senior Exec: "WE NEED TO PROTECT OUR CONTENT, WHY AREN'T WE DOING MORE TO PROTECT OUR CONTENT!?"
Engineer: "Yes sir, right away sir. There is this lovely new DRM produced by 'company x' that will protect our content to a high level....."
Senior Exec: "Excellent work young engineer. You're in line for a promotion for such innovation and forward thinking."
I hope my point come through OK. In all industries, in my experience there tends to be a fair bit of 'management appeasement' which can lead to poor choices being seen as great ones.
Zoomer - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
The engineers don't care; their product experience isn't really that impacted by all that crap. Which they bypass.colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I'd bet you that the guys who make these systems never actually have to tolerate these systems when they are at home watching a movie from their own collectionarcher75 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Streaming doesn't work for me. The quality is poor, even on FIOS and there is no HD audio. Luckily I have no bandwidth caps but most do.So once quality improves and HD audio is included i'm on board. Until then i'll happily stick with discs.
cmdrdredd - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Exactly. You cannot stream dual 1080p video for 3D and get Lossless audio. Almost nobody has enough bandwidth to handle that kind of traffic.joshv - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I tried BD-Live, once. An hour later (had to update the player ROM and sit through random crashes) I was treated to the crappiest, slowest interactive experience I'd ever seen. It was like a flash website from 1999 running on a 100MHz Pentium, with tiny text that wasn't legible on my TV. I was like "damn, these people just don't get it".What they don't get is that we just want to watch the whole damned thing - that's it, that's all. About 10% of us might watch a "making of" short, and about 0.5% of us are geeky enough to watch the whole movie with an annoying director voice over. We don't want to play a game, or have a click through adventure - we want to WATCH THE FEATURE.
Same with TV shows. Either put up full episodes on the web (even laden with crap ads), or don't. I don't want to watch "clips", I don't want to see character interviews. I want to WATCH THE SHOW.
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
lol... agree 100%Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I still have yet to purchase a blu-ray player. They are dipping below $50, finally, 3 years after that milestone should have occured. This is of course because blu-ray was the inferior format compared to HD-DVD. If HD-DVD had "won" the format war there would be 5-10 times as many HD discs sold by now. Burners would be $20 and there would be 100 times more burning going on.Of course "they" dont want that, even though "they" would have actually made a whole lot more money if "they" had simply taken their heads of of their butts. I will never buy anything blu-ray, until it is cracked open and all that DRM crap is stripped. If that never happens, then the market will simply move around blu-ray, to online or even usb flash based. (A 4GB drive only costs about $5 in bulk, and 4GB is enough for a 1080p film with more than good enough quality.)
noeldillabough - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
When Avatar came out my Dad went out and got the blu-ray, totally stoked that he'd get to see it in HD. Sure enough however the disc didn't play! He calls up his programmer son and asks WTF?I look into and and he needs to upgrade his firmware....he will never buy a blu-ray again.
I did upgrade his player later on that year but I know for sure he'll never buy another, and any person who he talks to might not either (he's quite convincing lol)
Golgatha - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Probably one of the best to get a PS3. Easy firmware updates.colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
or don't buy movies /fixedspwatkins - Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - link
> Probably one of the best to get a PS3. Easy firmware updates.Probably one of the best to get a PS3. Constant, time-consuming, daily firmware updates.
Fixed that for you.
bigboxes - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Sanctusx2 doesn't know what he's talking about. MKV is a container. H.264/X624 is a codec. Together they can produce something beautiful.p05esto - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
True, a container like AVI. But you still usually see H.264 inside of MKV files which is the way to go (IMO).medi01 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
It's been a while that companies do some shady stuff vs legit customers in the name of "fighting piracy", but it's depressing to see nobody notices. No LAN play "to fight piracy" by Blizzard (in fact, they simply wanted to have share of what Korean Starcraft channels earn), "you gotta be online to play this game" => say goodbye aftermarket.Oh, and the most hilarious "stuff recorded on this TV can only be played on this TV". Niiice. That will show them, the evil pirates with blue-ray rips. Remind me why do we still use HDMI with all the "advanced encryption"?
titanmiller - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
How are consumers expected to update their firmware if they don't have home broadband internet?My parents live in a rural area and have to use a USB 3g internet provider. There isn't any easy way to connect their blu-ray player to the internet for it to download a firmware update.
gigahertz20 - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
Screw all the ridiculous high prices for bluray movies, get a fat pipe internet connection and usenet provider and you're set. BTW, for those looking to ditch torrents and get into usenet, Astraweb has a new plan, $50 for 1TB of downloads. Of course, if you download a ton, then get the unlimited plan for $9-11 a month.andy o - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
"Thomson's NexGuard is a type of video watermarking scheme which works with the help of the BD+ SVM. The BD+ content code embeds some invisible information in the video track which contains details of the player / drive used to decrypt the stream."I can't think of a blu-ray rip that would include this watermark. How could it, if the rip is not taken from the video feed, the file itself is decrypted with a drive that's not a BD-video drive (a proper BD player)? Am I missing something, or are they that clueless that they think people are pirating by connecting their players' video outputs to a VCR?
Farfle - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
You forgot "or" in the title, right before the colon.p05esto - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I freaking HATE Cinavia protection. I ripped my entire DVD/BluRay library to digital MKV files (hundreds of movies) and have been using a Samsung 6500 BluRay player to stream the movies from my home server. I have three of those players in the house and everything had been awesome....until recently. About a month ago a recent firmware ADDED the Cinavia protection to the Samsung player and now many of my movies no longer play and I get those stupid Cinavia protection errors.Anandtech PLEASE raise hell, raise awarness about this evil technology. Consumers should be able to rip their old school discs to digital files without having to deal with horrid DRM getting in the way of enjoying a movie.
And a warning to users to stay away from Samsung. They crippled my devices a year after I bought them with this new Cinavia protection. They took away functionality and are evil bastards for doing so. I believe a lawsuit is in order, you can't sell a product and then a year later disable the main feature I use it for and get away with that crap. Who's with me???
Blibbax - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
The industry sure does do an excellent job of making TPB more attractive.blowfish - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
None of the shenanigans of the BDA surprise me - the industry is run by Shylocks, for whom money is everything.AbRASiON - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link
I hope so, I'm planning to move to XBMC (instead of my PS3) for this very reason over the coming months.ComputerGuy2006 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I took off my pants, bent over the table and allowed several sites JS access to my PC... and I still cant view the videos... Why not use utube?ganeshts - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
We are really sorry for using DailyMotion, but the fact is that there is a risk of copyright infringement or similar action notice sent to YouTube from the studios (further considering the fact that what we have written in the piece is a bitter pill to swallow for them).YouTube's policy is 3 strikes and channel closed (no questions entertained). We can't take the risk of endangering the official YouTube channel for this purpose. However, I have taken the risk of uploading the videos on YouTube from another account after reading your comment. The links are here:
Cinavia - Message Code 01 - The Wolfman.MTS : http://youtu.be/rtw2RvoBxCE
Cinavia - Message Code 03 - Battlefield LA - 20 Minutes Delay.ts : http://youtu.be/5TEw0dsWU1Q
Cinavia - Message Code 03 - The Losers.MTS : http://youtu.be/KYbR0WSkxaM
strangevil - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Cinavia is one of the main reasons why I stopped using my PS3 as a media playback device and have moved to the 360. I loved the UI of the PS3 as it lets you skip by looking at frames, but I bought my PS3 from the US and I live in UK, so every time I buy an official Blu-Ray, it doesn't work due to some stupid region restrictions. and for the ones that do work, I have to sit through 10-15 min of commercials and stupid warnings. So every time the warning pops up, I just plug my HDD out of the PS3 and pop it into my 360 and continue watching.I do what most other 'sane' people do... I pirate sh!t off the internet now. I tried to go the official route... I really tried, but you get treated like some garbage and have to sit through 10 min of studios flashing warnings that I'll go in jail if I pirate this even though I just legally bought it. Fu*k that sh!t.
cjs150 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I am a legitimate customer. I buy Blu-rays. What I want to do is as follows:Rip down to NAS and watch them anywhere in house or portable player (Tablet, Laptop, PSP). That means I also need to have a SD version for some of the smaller screens.
I do not want all the health warnings etc.
Scrub regional coding
Does that make me someone who is ripping off artists - no it does not.
And finally the price is way too high in the UK
khory - Thursday, April 5, 2012 - link
This describes my situation perfectly.Willhouse - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Is this article about the downfalls of DRM or a gripe about how Blu-ray discs contain too many difficult-to-skip trailers? If there were no trailers, why would one bother stripping the DRM? Further, what does anybody care if there is DRM if it can simply be stripped off and the content then streamed? Is the argument that spending money on DRM ultimately raises the cost of Blu-ray discs.If so, just vote with your wallet. We're not talking about bread here folks.
Ah well, I guess it's not my issue. I'm fine just renting Blu-rays.
fuzzymath10 - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
Agreed. I don't think I've ever had a BD fail to play, and it takes seconds to skip the previews after pressing [>|] a handful of times (yes, a bit inconvenient but we have remote controls and it sure beats fast forwarding a VHS tape).The crux of the problem is "why get something for $X when you can get it for free?", where X>0. Of course more people would pay $2 vs $20, but not 10x as many, and there will still be plenty of folks who won't even pay $2 even if they could afford it.
What I don't understand is that part of the argument is that the movies offered are "crappy", i.e. not worth paying for. Yet once it's free, it's worth wasting 2 hours watching/having on a hard disk. Pirated crap is still crap.
Unfortunately, neither side is willing to give the other the benefit of a doubt.
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
the point is that DRM = Pain in the @ for the person who purchases the productDRM has ZERO impact on piracy and as such is an abject failure.
What is the point of DRM since all it accomplishes is forcing legitimate folk to suffer and stare confusedly as their home entertainment system that is talking about firmware upgrades... I can guarantee you my parents haven't got a f'n clue what firmware is.
lundman - Thursday, March 22, 2012 - link
I do occasionally buy Blurays, as it is currently my only way to support movies I like. I never play the actual retail disk though. One of my recent purchases was The Thing (2011) bluray, which comes with UltraViolet.
Curiosity over-powering me, I thought to check out UltraViolet. I typed in the WWW address, and the numbers, and in less than a second, I was told that "UltraViolet is not available in your country". With no option to do anything else, but close the browser. The disk is not region protected either, just not for "my kind".
Why is it *my* money is no good anyway? What is it about my cash that stinks so much :)
I would even be happy with a system where I can just "donate" money to the movie makers directly, and only get a receipt back (for legal defence). I'll get the movies by other means...
otbricki - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Netflix and Hulu are non-starters for anyone who cares enough about the fidelity of what they are watching to want a BD. The user experience is awful by comparison. The fidelity is crummy, sound is barely passable, and the content choices very limited.And guess what - the studios will keep it that way because they want to preserve their optical disk market.
Throw monthly bandwidth caps on top of this, plus the fact that studios can (and do) pull content from streaming distribution you have a situation that clearly points to the fact that physical media are going to be with us for the forseeable future.
Personally I'm fine with that because I want something that gives ME control over what I can watch. Not some studio or streaming service executive.
Sasparilla - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
"...and the content choices very limited. And guess what - the studios will keep it that way because they want to preserve their optical disk market."Bingo.
bobbozzo - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
on Page 4 the article says:assumptions...
3. People interested in backing up their purchased Blu-rays on hard drives do so in the ISO or folder backup format
but on page 6, it says:
MKV: This is undoubtedly the most popular format for storing HD movies. In this backup mode...
So first you imply that people using MKVs are pirates, and then you recommend it.
I've found that large DVD/BD collections are unmanageable in ISO format due to disk space.
One of my clients has a 12TB RAID5 (7 2TB drives) for his media, plus another RAID5 mirror, and is constantly plagued by failing drives, etc.
I recommended he switch to MKV and has cut his storage requirements by at least 50%.
Also, as you point out on page 6, the load times are ridiculous for BDs and ISOs.
Please fix your comment on page 4.
ganeshts - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
Pirates use MKVs, but not all people who use MKVs are pirates :) I still recommend MKV like you do for large collections where hard drive space is an issue.The reason I talked about backups in ISO or folder format is because those are the types of backups which require a Blu-ray player with menu support (and which are more likely to have Cinavia and get affected).
Matt355 - Friday, March 23, 2012 - link
As someone who has been victimized by these jerks. I love your article and agree that BD Live its trash, I have never read the FBI Warnings, I change inputs on my TV till it's over since I can't fast forward it, I do the same with the trailers.But how about this.
I've payed extra to buy quite a few Blu-Rays that included digital copies. I downloaded them in iTunes only to discover that not only are they all SD copies. but that Apples cloud storage dose not store or stream to my Apple TV, iPhone, or iPad because they were not purchased directly through iTunes. But if i ripped the Blu Ray. I could stream or store the HD copies on any device I own. Apple or not. Witch means I payed extra for nothing.
MamiyaOtaru - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
I will never purchase a bluray. 3d movies are right out too.brucek2 - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
As was most recently shown with the iPod, and before that with the McDonalds and 7-11s of the world, convenience usually wins. Personal MP3 players often have sound quality well below what is available to consumers in home stereos they already owned, yet my experience is today the vast majority of music today is played back on this lower quality, more convenient format.The same thing is happening with Blu-Ray. Consumers with the right infrastructure will prefer more convenient approaches such as streaming or piracy. Consumers without may find themselves spending their recreational time doing something else entirely.
Not sure why the content owners are shooting themselves in the foot like this. Its especially puzzling since with Blu-Ray being the format that presumably brings the most dollars directly to the studio, you'd think they'd want to make that the best, most convenient experience possible. Instead, its probably the worst.
The Jedi - Saturday, March 24, 2012 - link
So Ganesh doesn't trust what he can't steal. If you can't steal a high def movie in Blu-Ray format off of a file sharing service, or you can't rent something and then copy it to keep a copy, you just shouldn't support Blu-Ray as a standard. Whine, whine whine.Students tend to have no money so they justify stealing music or software. Hopefully when they mature and become employed, their ethics will also mature and they will take pride in being "legit" and purchasing and owning things. Until then renting from RedBox and NetFlix is still cheap and legal.
Besides, it's too hard to pirate with ISP 3 strikes warnings and bandwidth caps. If you like streaming Netflix and don't like bandwidth caps, get service on a business account.
ganeshts - Sunday, March 25, 2012 - link
If you read the whole piece, I am actually trying to convey that unless Blu-rays give consumers a better experience than Netflix / Vudu streaming (which is basically instant watch as long as the bandwidth is there), Blu-rays will start to decline in popularity. I am not suggesting that one needs to copy it or get off a file sharing service for that. Why can't studios just give a MKV on a Blu-ray disc (with same DRMs) which enables a consumer to start watching the movie immediately without all the trailers / load screens / warnings etc.? These are the types of measures I would like to see the studious adopt.Netflix also has DRM obviously, but we are not complaining about it because it is transparent to the user and doesn't treat him like a criminal.
The 'whining' is about making sure studios see where they can improve the consumers' Blu-ray experience. It is obvious that DRM is not going to go away any time soon. However, when measures like Cinavia come about, they punish the legit consumer more than the actual pirates (and I have explained in detail why that is the case).
colonelciller - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
kinda have to agree with you... used to have a big DVD collection until I realized that it really was just a collection. I used to buy movies out of habit and a desire to own it... I'd watch them once and file it away into the collection where it would sit for YEARS...in short, why buy when you'd have to rent it 5 times before you paid the price of buying it..?
insx - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
I have a good laptop and a 3D projector at my disposal. I would love to buy a few 3D blu-rays and rent lots more. However, I can't legally watch them because the projector isn't HDMI 1.4 compliant (and there's some other technical stuff I don't understand) and licensing issues prevent anyone from releasing software that will let me play 3D blu-ray on my setup.I have 2 legal options:
1. Spend thousands more pounds on equipment that is approved (too expensive)
2. Go without (unsatisfactory)
I have 2 illegal options:
1. Buy/rent the 3D blu-ray and rip to MKV file. Watch and enjoy (time consuming/inconvenient)
2. Download from the web and don't pay anybody (time consuming, getting easier)
I really think that there should be a legal option that looks like this:
Rent/buy 3D blu-ray. Watch and enjoy (convenient, everybody happy).
As many people have said, they really have shot themselves in the foot.
rickcain2320 - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
Its interesting to note that CD's have now been around for 30+ years and none of them have any DRM, yet the music industry still exists and continues to grow.I don't see any difference between the CD and the DVD in terms of distributing entertainment to the consumer, but they seem to believe there is one.
Valis - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link
DAT SCMS, DRM, SWG, Blu-Ray... The list goes on and on. Sony, hope it dies a slow an agonizing death. Will never buy a Sony product again, for as long as I live.jharper12 - Thursday, March 29, 2012 - link
My freshman year of college I downloaded music and movies. I went to a well regarded university with Tech in its name. That year, every person on campus had watched LOTR weeks before it came out. I was a pirate, for one year.I have always worked hard though, and after that first year I didn't have time to consume massive amounts of media. Convenience started to matter, and services started to pop up that legally offered a means to consume media for a reasonable fee. My pirating days were over, not long after they began.
Here's what bothers me. I have two HP LP2465 monitors hooked up to a nice home built computer. What do they lack? HDCP. I purchased AnyDVD HD for the sole purpose of playing my legally acquired Bluray collection on my computer. Someone should go to jail for that, and it shouldn't be me. Next up? I encountered that lovely little DRM issue with Silverlight while trying to watch movies on my paid subscription for Netflix. I have to run extra cabling to my Bluray players, so they can update to play discs that I bought... legally. I have to update, right as I'm excited to watch. The last time I didn't have to worry about DRM? My freshman year of college. Take note content industry, you didn't slow me down or even inconvenience me for that brief sliver of time in which I stole from you. No, only now, as a paying customer, do you make my life miserable. Thanks for that.
GoodToGo - Saturday, March 31, 2012 - link
I just wanted to say what an amazing read this was.*Tips hat*
PeTroL42 - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
The majority of my friends aren't geeks like I am so most of them have no clue as to what DRM even is. While DRM is a major headache for a person like me where I'd like to have all my content in a central location, DRM isn't a major headache for the average consumer who just wants to buy a BD at Best Buy and play the movie when they get home and most of the time this works out for the average consumer who buys everything legitimately. Of course there are headaches for the average consumer such as firmware updates but c'mon, issues like these aren't common for the average consumer. One other thing unrelated to DRM, some of my friends LOVE to show off their massive BD collection.Also, the scenario where a consumer unknowingly buys a pirated BD is pretty ridiculous unless you regularly buy your BDs on the streets of Downtown LA or China.
I understand why the Studios are taking measures like using Cinavia to protect their content.
I'm not being an apologist for the studios but movies cost A LOT of money to produce. Just ask any independent film maker. I feel anybody who reads this article and then goes and spends 50 to 100 million dollars to produce a movie, I'd bet you'd want to get the maximum profits out of that movie which includes the sale of BDs.
Also, low budget movies don't rake in a lot of profit. That's why low budget movies like Blair Witch Project or My Fat Greek Wedding garner a lot of attention when they make lots of money at the box office. This isn't common.
There's no doubt that piracy hurts everyone except the people who pirate the material and the people who buy the pirated material or get it free if its made available such as when Napster was around. Take PC Games for instance. The PC Game piracy is so bad that the Publishers are currently using some draconian methods to combat it. This ONLY hurts the legitimate purchasers of the game. Back in the day, (like 1998) I'd buy a game, bring it home, install it, the game would ask me for the serial # on the Jewel Case, I'd enter it, wait a few more minutes and then I'm playing. Now, you usually have to be connected online to even play single player games. Now Big Brother knows when and how long I've been playing their game.
I'm for the argument that if the Music industry had embraced technological advances such as MP3s instead of trying to combat it, they'd probably be in a better position than they are today but there's no doubt that piracy hit the music industry hard.
The reason for this long post is this. I was just thinking the other day that there isn't a legitimate way to purchase movies in file format so I could put it on my NAS and play it through my Western Digital set top box. The only options for a person like me is to either download the content through P2P or RIP a DVD or BD myself and encode it into a format that my WD set top box could read which I am not admitting to. Because of the DMCA, ripping movies is illegal. And why was the DMCA written into law? Because of rampant piracy. CDs aren't encrypted so the DMCA doesn't apply to CDs so legitimate purchasers are allowed under law to RIP it to MP3 and play it on any device they choose. CDs don't have encryption because they were created in the early 80s and MP3s weren't even invented back then.
If the average consumer has access to free stuff and they know how to use it, then they'll use it but if that access gets cut off and it becomes too difficult for the average consumer to figure out, then they'll eventually buy the stuff they want. If Napster and Kazaa and all those other easy file sharing programs were still around today, I'd bet Katy Perry wouldn't be selling the same amount of downloads from iTunes or Amazon.
This sounds selfish of me but If piracy wasn't so rampant now and people would actually pay for the content they want, then there probably wouldn't be a bill written into law such as the DMCA and then I'd be free to RIP any movie that I legitimately purchased and enjoy it today on any device I please or I could've been buying movies in MP4 or some other format that my set top box could read. Thanks Pirates! (and I'm not talking about Pittsburgh)
DVDRanger1 - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
The developers of the DVD-Ranger software have the first future-proof solution for Cinavia free DVD and Blu-raySanta Ponsa (Spain), 09/21/2012 – Many DVD and Blu-ray users know this problem: the DVD or Blu-ray playback stops suddenly with a cryptic error message or remains frozen or silent. This is caused by the relatively new copy protection system Cinavia.
Shortly after the Cinavia solution of DVDFab has been once again made useless by the Cinavia producer, DVD-Ranger Software offers help. The developers of DVD-Ranger have eliminated the Cinavia’s signal during the development of other software by accident. The Cinavia’s signal has been changed so that it has become unreadable. They have not fought against the Cinavia’s system directly; it is more likely triggered by a design error of Cinavia itself.
Pixbyte has chosen the release date for the DVD-Ranger 5 with Cinavia module to be 10/31/2012 (Halloween). At the moment, the solution is being tested by well known people in the world of copying. Approx. 55% of all reported Blu-ray Region A/B disks and DVDs have been successfully tested so far. It will be also tested on PS3, various Blu-ray players and PowerDVD.
Pixbyte is known by the DVD neXt COPY Software and DVD-Ranger products line. Pixbyte has been present for about 10 years on the backup and copy software market.
Price and availability: DVD-Ranger 5 is currently available as pre-order at a price of $69.99. The final release price will be approx. $89.99. The Cinavia module will cost approx. $39.99 (included in pre-order).
About Pixbyte:
Pixbyte is a trusted and respected researcher and developer of CD/DVD and BD recording and conversion technology. Its products are sold worldwide and are utilized by end-users and companies. The products are designed to provide speed and quality of copy operations and are developed continually in accordance with technological progress.
Cypher1994 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
I like your Stanley Kubrick reference.ceceliagibson - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link
Hi very useful info about cinavia errors, this will protect playstation devices against playing un authorized movies.Carole Harris - Monday, March 14, 2016 - link
Here is a bit more information on Cinavia, pertaining to what it is and how it functions: http://cinavia-removal.webs.com/But please, ignore the webmaster's link at the bottom of the article, as DVDFab can be used to remove Cinavia without question.
DVDRanger - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link
Cinavia has been broken by a software company. I suggest to search for DVD-Ranger and CinEx to forget Cinavia forever.Marrie Hill - Sunday, February 13, 2022 - link
Great site where I recently bought a wife (https://ukrainianmailorderbrides.com/) Go to the site and buy a wife for yourself. Great girls, great choice and different agesMarrie Hill - Friday, March 18, 2022 - link
A very unpleasant situation. But when you solve the problem - go to our website https://polsport.tv/ choose a wife and shoot hot videos. A lot of girls of different nationalities and different ages