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  1. #1
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    Exclamation "Why you should boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD" - bluraysucks.com

    From a post from corfy you can reach an official Ubuntu project site where you will find a link to this article. Since I find it very interesting I want to share...

    From bluraysucks.com:

    Why you should boycott Blu-ray and HD-DVD

    It is with great regret that I inform you of the ways in which the movie industry wishes to ruin your enjoyment of high definition movies at home. If you've ever watched HDTV, you know how amazing it is. At 5 times the resolution of normal television, it looks fantastic. And the quality of the movies on a Blu-ray or HD-DVD disc is even better, because of less compression. I want it, and you want it. Right?

    Well, there's just one problem. The movie industry assumes you are a criminal, and has added technologies to Blu-ray and HD-DVD that vastly restrict your potential enjoyment of their HD movies. I don't want it, and you don't either. Here's why.

    (Note: There are a lot of acronyms on this page, so first, some quick definitions.)

    DRM - Digital Restrictions Management - technology to restrict what you can do with media you purchase
    AACS - Advanced Access Content System - the DRM infection used for both Blu-ray and HD-DVD
    BD+ - an addition to AACS for Blu-ray discs, that provides additional restrictions to what you can do
    MMC - Mandatory Managed Copy - a theoretical way for you to make a legal copy of a movie
    HDCP - High-bandwith Digital Content Protection - Encryption of data over digital connections
    HDMI - High Definition Multimedia Interface - A digital connection found on most new HDTV's, all HDCP compliant
    DVI - Digital Visual Interface - Precursor to HDMI, found on many older HDTV's. However, many DVI connections are not HDCP compliant, making them worthless for Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
    ICT - Image Constaint Token - Downsamples HD output to standard resolution when hooked up over analog (component) cables.
    MPAA - Motion Picture ***. of America - trade organization representing the major movie companies
    RIAA - Recording Industry ***. of America - trade organization representing the major music companies

    Reasons to be outraged

    * How old is your HDTV? If you bought it prior to 2005, and there are over 3 million of you who did, the MPAA thinks you shouldn't be able to watch HD movies in high definition. They are insisting that your TV supports digital encryption via an HDMI port or an HDCP-compliant DVI port, which these earlier TV's lack. If you have to stoop so low as to hook up your shiny new player via, God forbid, analog (component), the industry thinks you're not worthy. There's a fun little surprise they built in to Blu-ray and HD-DVD for people just like you, and it's called the Image Constaint Token. If it's enabled on a movie, and your connection does not support HDCP, then the movie is downsampled to 1/4 its native resolution, which is essentially the same as a standard DVD. While no movies have yet been released with the ICT enabled, know this: It will happen. It's just a matter of time.

    * Thinking about buying a new HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive for your computer? If you want to use it to watch movies, think again. You'll need to buy a lot more than just the drive. Remember, analog = BAD, digital encryption = GOOD. You'll need to open up that wallet of yours for a brand new HDCP-compliant video card, AND, an HDCP-compliant monitor. Notice the word compliant. That is very important. There are some products that just claim to be HDCP "compatible", but they will NOT work for viewing high definition movies.

    * AACS means that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will never be compatible with free software, affecting nearly everyone that wants to view these movies on their computer but isn't running Windows or Mac OS X. While this is a minority of computer users, they should not be ignored. Some might say history is doomed to repeat itself.

    * Excited about Mandatory Managed Copy? Don't be. While it theoretically allows things such as making legal backups and streaming content from one part of your house to another, the studios have the option of charging you money to do that. Current HD players don't even support MMC. Your player also has to be connected to the internet. That's not inherently bad, but is certainly open for abuse. What if you don't have an available internet connection close to your home theater? What if you don't have broadband? The MPAA humbly requests that you cry them a river. It's hard to believe they even considered something like MMC, considering this. Choice quote: "Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices". Translation: please purchase another copy of content you have already paid for, thank you. There is a very interesting interview with an HD-DVD rep here about MMC.

    * Ladies and gentlemen, I have proof that the MPAA and RIAA want to eat your children.
    To them, DRM is more important than human life. Wow.

    * "Hacking" your player, for example to remove the region coding, or playing a bootlegged disc, may lead your player to self destruct. (Applies to Blu-ray only).

    * There are a few other restrictions the MPAA originally requested, but since they're such a nice and friendly group of people, they went easy on us. They had planned to require that your player be connected to the internet at all time for it to function, so they could monitor its usage and make sure you weren't up to no good. Also, they considered having each disc being playable by only one player, meaning that if you played a new movie in your player, your friend couldn't watch the same disc in his player. How thoughtful!

    ...
    Continue on the next post...

  2. #2
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    Comes from previous post...

    Other reasons you don't need HD-DVD or Blu-ray

    * The jump from VHS to DVD was dramatic and obvious - superior video quality, digital surround sound, non-degrading storage format, multiple audio tracks, etc. The jump from DVD to the next generation does not provide any benefits other than higher resolution, which to be fair is a great reason to want that upgrade, but there is nothing else. Cool menus and new interactive layer? People just want to watch the stinking movie. Better sound? Bah. 5.1 channel Dolby or DTS is pretty much the best it's going to get. Do you really want more speakers behind you than in front of you?

    * Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD will be a format war, leaving both consumers and retailers very frustrated. Do you want to gamble with investing thousands of dollars in a technology that may not be around in a few years? Some studios will only release their movies on one or the other format (Sony Pictures obviously will only do Blu-ray), which means if you want access to all possible movies, you will either have to buy both players or get a dual-format player.

    * New technology is expensive. HD-DVD players are $500+, and Blu-ray is $1,000+. Most of the movies retail for over $30. For computer storage, blank media will also cost around $30 minimum. Surely these costs will drop over time, but at the very least, you should consider waiting a while before joining the herd.

    * The biggest lie of all is that we even need these new technologies to have HD video on a disc. DVD video has been around for almost 10 years now, and since then vastly superior video compression technologies have been introduced, namely MPEG-4 and all its variants (h.264, DivX, XviD, etc). These compression formats are absolutely amazing in regards to size vs quality. A hi-def movie in any of these formats could easily fit onto a dual layer DVD, which holds about 9 GB. The only problem is that you can't really 'update' your existing player. In the consumers' best interest, what they would do is release new DVD players that not only supported these newer formats, but also had the ability to be upgraded for future technologies. We wouldn't need these expensive blue lasers to fit more data on a disc. Unfortunately, this solution doesn't line the pockets of shareholders and executives, so it is unlikely to happen.

    * The public is not ready for a new format already. A lot of people have spent a lot of money building their DVD collections, a format that just became mainstream ~5 years ago. Do you really want to go out and replace all of those movies? These new players will be backwards compatible with your old movies for sure, but if you just blew a grand on a shiny new player, you're going to want to watch your favorite movies in all their HD glory, right? Haven't you ever heard someone say, "Well, looks like now I have to buy another copy of the White Album" ?


    If you have suggestions to add to this page, or additional links with more information, or anything else, please comment below.

    Be sure to check out the news as well, updated as often as there is news about Blu-ray, HD-DVD, or AACS.


    There are 903 user comments regarding this article.

    Last updated November 16, 2006
    Yes, the article is old but what have called my attention is this part:

    The biggest lie of all is that we even need these new technologies to have HD video on a disc. DVD video has been around for almost 10 years now, and since then vastly superior video compression technologies have been introduced, namely MPEG-4 and all its variants (h.264, DivX, XviD, etc). These compression formats are absolutely amazing in regards to size vs quality. A hi-def movie in any of these formats could easily fit onto a dual layer DVD, which holds about 9 GB. The only problem is that you can't really 'update' your existing player. In the consumers' best interest, what they would do is release new DVD players that not only supported these newer formats, but also had the ability to be upgraded for future technologies. We wouldn't need these expensive blue lasers to fit more data on a disc. Unfortunately, this solution doesn't line the pockets of shareholders and executives, so it is unlikely to happen.
    What do you think?

  3. #3
    j7wild Guest
    I can play a Blu-Ray DVD on my new PC BR drive just fine.... no new software needed and it didn't ask me to connect to the internet.


  4. #4
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    actually, the technology exists that you can put a Bluray or HDDVD onto a 4g DVD disc and play it. though i have no idea how it looks, im sure there has some loss to it due to the compression.

    regardless, let the MPAA, RIAA and whomever else throw in all the kitchen sinks they can into the encryption. please, throw it all in there - that way, it might take a week before someone cracks it (instead of a few days like before) and they can move onto developing movies that people would rather buy than pirate.
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  5. #5
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    This is obviously an old article.
    For the sake of having a balanced argument, I'd like to fix a few things.

    The cost of blu-ray players has gone down quite a bit.. now running around 200-300 dollars.

    ICT - Image Constaint Token still hasn't been used.

    The format war is over. Blu-ray won.

    Some blu-ray movies now come with a portable digital copy to be used on things like the PSP and I-phone. (who cares... but it is there)

    The jump from VHS to DVD was dramatic and obvious... The jump from DVD to the next generation does not provide any benefits other than higher resolution,
    Actually quite incorrect. The jump from DVD to HD is actually *much* higher than the jump from VHS to DVD.
    Not only does your resolution jump 5 times higher, it uses less compression for video giving you a clearer picture, but less compression is used for audio as well. So while you may not be interested in adding speakers to you're setup, the ones you do have will sound a lot better. (audio was a bigger factor for me than video for getting a blu-ray player).

    While it's true that you can get a 1080 picture on a dvd using some of the new compression formats, they are highly compressed and are no where near blu-ray quality. They would also require all users to buy new machines that can play them, and new discs that utilize them. So there is really no upside to this over blu-ray anyways.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jean-Pierre Bazinet View Post
    Not only does your resolution jump 5 times higher
    this is correct when you used the pal system. for ntsc user like all north americans use, it's even 6 times higher

    as for all the negative things posted in the article, there are some cures if you use a pc as htpc or home server: anydvd hd!!!
    i don't say that you should use it for pirating films like a maniac. but if you use to get rid of all the restrictions, then i see no
    problem in using it.

  7. #7
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    sometimes I think that such articles are written by people who dont have money for new technology so they try to justify not buying it ...

    jp said it all
    Me angry! Where´s my food!

    My DVD Collection, My Blu-ray collection

  8. #8
    j7wild Guest

    Thumbs down

    I looked at most of the articles from the links Jmcc posted, 90% of them are old articles going back as far as 2005....


  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by j7wild View Post
    I looked at most of the articles from the links Jmcc posted, 90% of them are old articles going back as far as 2005....

    Sorry

    Quote Originally Posted by Nance View Post
    DVD rules!!!! VHS to DVD was a big thing, but not DVD to HDDVD. Not for me. I spend a lot of money on them really and I (personally) don't think the difference of DVD versus blueray or anything else is that extraordinary for rebuying movies that I will only see a couple of times. Yes money is an excuse, is it all about money anyway, if I was rich I would buy everything my mind can imagine. But you have to think that I'm not a movie maniac, I always prefer books than movies, so maybe I'm impartial, but I will not buy any blueray or hddvd, hoping that it will became obsolete in the time (and it will probably). I don't care that much about the quality, I just want to watch movies without spending like crazy.
    For me is not difficult because I was in the need to sell the DVD collection I had (only 19 titles), so if I have to rebuild it, why not in Blu-ray?

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    well for example in our country, its not ilegal to make copies, but to break such restricitons ....

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    DVD rules!!!! VHS to DVD was a big thing, but not DVD to HDDVD. Not for me. I spend a lot of money on them really and I (personally) don't think the difference of DVD versus blueray or anything else is that extraordinary for rebuying movies that I will only see a couple of times. Yes money is an excuse, is it all about money anyway, if I was rich I would buy everything my mind can imagine. But you have to think that I'm not a movie maniac, I always prefer books than movies, so maybe I'm impartial, but I will not buy any blueray or hddvd, hoping that it will became obsolete in the time (and it will probably). I don't care that much about the quality, I just want to watch movies without spending like crazy.
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    I think for the average person they wouldn't spot the differences between Blu-ray and DVD.

    Take my parents for example, they could see the difference between VHS and DVD. The size of the disc, the improved visuals, the ability to skip tracks, added features such as menus etc. Now when I showed them Blu-Ray they didn't see the difference, even though the sound/visuals were 10 times better. The average person won't notice the difference, you'd be surprised by how people don't even notice picture quailty.

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    don't forget that the real differences between dvd and hd really show on a big screen. but even on a normal screen (around 32") you should see a difference.

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    Sorry I haven't jumped in until now. I have been physically out of it over the last couple of days (been fighting a particularly nasty cold).

    I just want to throw my two cents in. Yes, most of the articles written about this subject are from 2005-2006. Of course, Blu-Ray was just released in 2006, so it isn't that old of a format.

    And while the cost has gone down, and the level of quality of Blu-ray may have gone up now that the format has been out for a bit, some of the other arguments are still fairly valid.

    And to partially counter one of JP's arguments, ICT (Image Constraint Token) has been not been used yet. The major Hollywood studios have agreed to not implement ICT until at least 2010, to give early adopters of Blu-Ray and HDDVD time to upgrade their players. Otherwise, their players won't support ICT, and any disc with ICT won't play with full quality on their players. (1)

    But the fact remains that Blu-Ray does use a lot of DRM (digital rights management) which is there to make sure that there are no un-authorized viewings of the content. Of course, an exec in Hollywood is makiing the decision about what is authorized and what isn't.

    The argument in favor is this practice cuts down unauthorized copying of their movies, preventing piracy. The other side of the argument, though, is you aren't even legally allowed to make backup copies of the movies you spent so much money on to buy to begin with, let alone transfer copies to other devices. Yes, some movies come with a copy that can be transferred to iPods, but so far, that seems to be the exception, not the rule. (2) It also makes it difficult to legally play Blu-Ray on some so-called "non approved" systems, which can include many Linux systems.

    Yes, the software to crack these digital restrictions is out there, but this software is technically illegal in many countries, including the U.S.A. Consequently, unless you have a player that has been pre-approved by Sony, (i.e. one in which pays Sony for the right to play), the disc either won't play, or won't play at full quality, even if you have the hardware to play it.

    BTW, this kind of thing isn't new. DVDs use the Content Scrambling System (CSS) to protect DVDs. (3) This turned out to be particularly weak, and was quickly cracked, and is widely available on the internet. Nevertheless, theunauthorized software to do this is still illegal in the U.S. (4)

    Of course, the legal issues differ from one country to another. And since this is a multi-national forum, readers from other countries may want to check out the legality in their own countries.

    And if you are thinking this kind of thing only applies to movies... think again. Use iTunes? You better make sure that the music you download works on your MP3 player. Of course, this isn't an issue with iPods, but not all MP3 players are capable of reading the Fairplay DRM scheme used by iTunes. (5) Most other download services employ a similar DRM scheme.

    While it is legal to remove DRM from music files, it is not legal to distribute that music to others who do not own the files. But for users who have legally purchased music downloads, DRM can become a nuisance. It may prevent them from getting full use of their music.
    taken from http://musicdownloadreview.net/what-is-drm.html

    If you are interested in DRM, you might want to check out the pages at howstuffworks.com:
    Introduction to How Digital Rights Management Works
    DRM Framework
    DRM Reality
    DRM Controversy

    I'm not sure I agree per se with the idea that Blu-ray should be boycotted. There are too many other things out there that are worse than Blu-Ray. However, that doesn't mean that people getting Blu-ray shouldn't be aware of what they are getting.
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    ^You pretty much got all the points I was going to mention^

    Also I wanted to note on the HDMI and DVI hookup. The reason the industry wants to switch to these is not because they think your "tv isn't good enough," its because they are easier to use, and provide a better picture.

    Not to mention the copyright protection. It sounds like the article was written by someone who copies dvd's all the time and can't do it with the new ones. Of course companies are going to increase copyright protection and raise prices of blank discs. Looks what happened with Music Cd's and what is now happening to DVD's. All brand new dvd's now come out at 14.99 or 12.99, as opposed to 6 months ago when they came out at 19.99 or 17.99. With the growing amount of 1 day rental boxes and cheaper and easier ways to copy people are renting movies, making a copy , and bringing them back the next day. The difference between Blu-ray and Dvd is drastic, its just going to take a few years to get it into full swing with the community.

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