Good point.

hwm

I can give you an interesting example of this right here in UT. There are all kinds of billboards all over the SLC area promoting the local release of mormon themed and produced movies. Usually comedies, but there are some dramas too. They seem to do pretty well and are in multi-plexes all over the area.

It's a market that seems like it would only appeal to the small metro area here, but there are something like 12-15 million Mormons worldwide who might buy their DVD. It's a cottage industry that seems to be thriving...in a micro sense.

Any idea if the HD DVD component outputs will be similarly crippled? Maybe that will tilt the race to the good guys or at least the less bad, bad guys :)

I would think the people with older HD sets will be the early adopters who would now be looking at HD DVD and Blue-Ray.

I understand why they are doing this but they are only contributing to the eventual failure or at best, slow slow slow, rise of their technology. So you are going to sell a format that most people cant even see the difference in from normal viewing distances (480p compared to 1080i on movies) and then tell half the people that are already in the minority that it wont work on their expensive TVs?

Stupid... this tech will not take off until there is ONE format and it is as cheap as current players and medias, period endstop...



ash =o)

The pirates will find alternative means, the most obvious is to optically reproduce an exact copy of a legal disk, not a cracked data stream, onto a new master, then manufacture a whole slew of "legal" disks from that.

Defeatable - Yes. A coat of blackbard paint would just about do it but DVD players have to be able to see the data pits or they simply can't work.

Will take the whole encryption game off the table and the big players who are suckered into adopting the new techology will have themselves been ripped off. Unfortunately, this loss will be passed on to us cashcows.

Like I've said before, these rules are not for the pirates. These are for the adverage joe consumer, to prevent him or her from making their own (pirated) copies. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. This whole thing relies on an expiring physical distribution model that is giving way to digital broadcast and internet downloads, and history reminds us how easy it is to circumvent that.

However, it will prevail in the interim. The adverage Joe knows little about DRM, trusted computing, and HDCP. He just want's things to work. So for everyone one of use whom march out of the Best Try store in digust, there will be ten folks standing in the register line with bigs smiles on their faces, completely oblivous.

I remember an interview with a kid whom circumvented the DVD CSS, wearing a T-Shirt that had the crack code silk-screen upon it. When asked why he was doing it (and I don't remember the exact words), he remarked that smart people will never have to pay for their media.

I don't support piracy, I pay for my media. However, I feel all this paranoia will only hurt the consumer. A wars at hand, and we'll get caught in the cross-fire.

Smart people may not have to pay for their media, but they'll certainly have a bad afterlife to look forward to depending on their religion. Download a music MP3 off the net from a brand new album without paying for it, it's still stealing. I don't know where people's morals have gone.

But yeah, it ultimately hurts the Average "plug-and-play" Joe. Overall, I'd wish they'd come up with some sort of cable design other than DVI, HDMI, and component that combines the best qualities of all of them that will last for twenty years at least. The format thing needs to be fixed too, make an uber disc design and keep it going for longer than VHS has lasted. This copy protection stuff is whack, if even we on this forum can come up with dozens of ways to simply copy this stuff without it even coming out then they're certainly going in the wrong direction. Make burners more expensive or require people to have a business or licensce for them, don't just let anybody get an HD-DVD or Bluray burner.

Problem is, to boycott the equipment you'll have to forego the content that requires the equipment to view. It's like someone who prefers (for whatever reason) VHS tape over DVD. Try renting the latest titles on VHS - they're going the way of the dodo. When your neighborhood rental shop only stocks HiDef DVDs and all of them require an HDMI/AACS equipped deck and TV to view, you simply won't be able to rent movies anymore. We just finished paying off a Sony 57" HD set we bought a few years ago - guess, what - no HDMI terminal. Pisses us off, but we like movies so it's either buy a replacment set this year or be stuck with being only able to view reruns of "Friends" and "Frasier."

This is really nuts.

This sort of thing doesn't even slow down the big pirating operations. Counterfeit DVDs are mass produced in factory like setups, and it won't be long until these disks are too. It's not the little guy hurting Hollywood at all. More often than not, when John Q. Public buys a counterfeit movie, he doesn't even know it (he's neither stealing or profiting).

This sort of nonsense only hurts the average guy, from Joe six-pack construction worker to the guy fixing engines on airliners, who wants to watch a good looking movie after a long day of work, that he paid for with money he worked hard to earn, on a nice television that he worked just as hard to pay for. So he gets dished up this crap instead? What are these people thinking?

DVD Jon has already registered the site deaacs.com. :D

Hehehe, I'm sure he has. He must have been the first of a huge queue...

I'm not an early adopter myself, but what those corporate puppets are doing to their BEST customers is plain-jane-jaw-dropping absurd.

Jack, those morals are comparable to those of our politicians (that we aren't speaking about). At that level however, the damage is much worse.

FWIW, I love the sharpness of HD, but I'm still content enjoying SD. And enjoying SD's content. When Capote makes its way to DVD, I won't be concentrating on how sharp Hoffman looks. (yeah, alcohol in my system:)

These rules are stupid.I mean ,if really wanted to get an analog out with full res in order to copy something I'll just feed it into my pc and export in via one of the 3 types of analog out I use for previewing.
They're just hurting the consumers.

They may hurt themselves pretty badly too, if all the issues with the new HD players cause people to avoid buying them and the whole thing flops. I heard an estimate that the recent debacle with Sony's DRM screw-up for their music CDs will cost them and the industry as much as $1 billion in lost sales. You'd think someday corporations would wake up and realize that pissing off consumers is bad for business, but so far that doesn't seem to have happened.

Maybe we should all go back to wax clyinders for music and flip-books for video. Who's with me? :-)

I wonder how aware consumers are going to be? Most people don't know the difference between s-video, composite and component right now. Will they realize when they spend $2000 on a Blue Ray player that they're only going to get the same quality as a regular DVD? Sony isn't known for publicizing things like this very much. I would almost think there could be class action lawsuit over this.