quote:

Originally posted by Derek Wright:
really means - we have stopped production (actually last month) we have sacked the workers and scrapped the plant and we are now in the process of dumping our remaining stock into the retail channel.

I love this man.

The only downside to Blu-ray winning this war is that the Blu-ray camp doesn't seem keen on supporting DTS. Anyone else noticed how few Blu-ray discs are mastered with DTS MAster Audio?

Does anyone have an opinion on which format is actually the best ,as I seem to remember Betamax was better than VHS ,& that lost out!!

Technically, Blu-ray has more capability than HD-DVD. The main difference between the two formats is simply storage capacity. Blu-ray has far more scope than HD-DVD for really huge capacity. All the rest, interactive playability, audio codecs, etc, can be worked into whichever disc you like.

Thanks for the quick reply Frank ,I knew it wasn't my eyes!

Does not Blue Ray have the potential for more stringent DRM controls and the need to get permission to play the dvd by ethernet connection.

Apologies if this is a very naïve question.
Like many people I was waiting to see how the HD war resolved. Now it has gone the way of Blu-ray, do machines exist which will play Blu-ray discs but also act as hard-disc recorders?
I have very limited space under the television and a single machine would be the way to go. As I need to change existing DVD/hard disc recorder soon, as it doesn’t have a built in digital tuner, I am wondering about the possibility of an all-in-one solution.
Thanks
Glyn

could be what you are looking for?
http://hdtv.engadget.com/2006/09/13/is-this-sonys-blu-r...rder-with-hard-disk/

Could be but doesn't look like it will be available anytime soon...?

quote:

Originally posted by Derek Wright:
Does not Blue Ray have the potential for more stringent DRM controls and the need to get permission to play the dvd by ethernet connection.

Yes it does, although an active internet connection is not mandatory yet; keys allowing the software to read the disc data are still locally stored.

and it won't take too long for some clever person to spot a market gap for a player that ignores them, much like multi-region DVD players.

quote:

Originally posted by djftw:
and it won't take too long for some clever person to spot a market gap for a player that ignores them, much like multi-region DVD players.

Actually, this can't be done so easily (legally speaking). Keys are used to decrypt the signal stored on the disc, much like keys allowing a macrovision protected DVD to be played. Region codes are only a way to artificially segment the market and are legally and easily crackable.

quote:

(legally speaking)

I'm not sure about Switzerland, but I'm not sure this would be illegal in the UK, there was a legal precedent set by a ruling about recording your own LPs onto tapes that basically means once you have bought a piece of copyrighted material you can duplicate it and view/listen to it through whatever medium you want, just so long as it is strictly for personal use. The case was sited recently in a case about someone breaking iTunes files DRM.

Well, cracking those keys would be like cracking an encrypted password to get access to a protected content; you can't do it this way. Breaking iTunes DRM is another story: it's about someone selling you accessible content and telling you what you can and can't do with it, in the purpose of favoring its own business. This doesn't work here in Switzerland, because the law still allows us to buy music and do about whatever we want with it, including sharing it on private P2P networks (although downloading it would be illegal, don't ask...!). A guy here started a business by cracking iPods content protection, allowing people to recover music files stored on it, which you can't even do using iTunes.

quote:

Originally posted by Glyn:
Apologies if this is a very naïve question.
Like many people I was waiting to see how the HD war resolved. Now it has gone the way of Blu-ray, do machines exist which will play Blu-ray discs but also act as hard-disc recorders?

One solution for this if you want the hard-disc recorder for recording freeview is too look at getting a PS3 with the Play TV add-on that turns it into a digital video recorder. I think the hard-drive in the PS3 is user upgradeable so dropping big drive in shouldn't be a problem. The Play TV add on isn't out quite yet but previews of it look quite interesting, it even powers the PS3 up/down for making recordings so you don't have to leave it switched on.

quote:

Originally posted by {OdS}:
Well, cracking those keys would be like cracking an encrypted password to get access to a protected content; you can't do it this way. Breaking iTunes DRM is another story: it's about someone selling you accessible content and telling you what you can and can't do with it, in the purpose of favoring its own business. This doesn't work here in Switzerland, because the law still allows us to buy music and do about whatever we want with it, including sharing it on private P2P networks (although downloading it would be illegal, don't ask...!). A guy here started a business by cracking iPods content protection, allowing people to recover music files stored on it, which you can't even do using iTunes.

Actually, it's entirely legal to break the region coding, which as mentioned above is very easily done. What you mustn't do is copy the disc for any reason other than a personal backup.

If you're running discs on computer you can buy programs which remove all the protection as well as the region coding from Blu Ray.

The question of keys is very interesting. Apparently a new disc can have all sorts of keys on it and the PS3 will replace the keys it has stored if they are newer than the old ones. In this way Sony and/or the Blu-ray consortium can control content, viewing etc. This is another downside to Blu-ray winning since HD-DVD had no limitations. I believe Blu-ray can even reset a player which has been region-freed to the region it's meant to be assigned.

However, the whole region-free business is really a non-issue nowadays. Originally, regioning was enforced to try to stagger releases and keep price differences up. Prices across the world are now much closer to each other and releases are becoming much more world-wide. Once those companies started on the convergence road, they never realised how far-reaching it would be since this is a consequence of convergence - a convergence of the market.

quote:

Originally posted by Frank Abela:
The question of keys is very interesting. Apparently a new disc can have all sorts of keys on it and the PS3 will replace the keys it has stored if they are newer than the old ones. In this way Sony and/or the Blu-ray consortium can control content, viewing etc. This is another downside to Blu-ray winning since HD-DVD had no limitations. I believe Blu-ray can even reset a player which has been region-freed to the region it's meant to be assigned.

If I'm not mistaken, the aim is to help fight pirate copies of a given movie. New editions reset the fingerprint used to identify a certain movie and new keys are needed to access the data. Thus, a pirate copy has a limited time to live on an up-to-date system. This is where the (soon-to-be-mandatory) active internet connection plays its main role obviously.

quote:

Originally posted by {OdS}:
This is where the (soon-to-be-mandatory) active internet connection plays its main role obviously.

The internet connection is not mandatory for profile 1.1 (Final Standard Profile) and is only required for BD-Live (profile 2.0 features). So if you are not interested in the BD-Live features there is no reason for you to worry about not having the network connection. They can't change keys to stop media already in circulation (how can they change them in a machine with no connection and they can't change the discs already made) but they have revoked player keys for some software players that had been hacked to allow copying, people using these players had to update to play new movies. They are very unlikely to revoke anything that would stop profile 1.0 or 1.1 standalone players working.

Matt,

Thanks for clearing things up! About not updating an offline standalone player: I imagine this could be done very easily using rootkits stored on new editions of a given movie. I don't think this will happen though, as it seems way too hazardous.

Now to raise the level of debate significantly - can you play normal dvd's on the 'blu rayban' machine just in case i ever get one?

Regards

Diccus

Yes you can play normal DVDs on the blu-ray machines just as you could also play them on HD DVD machines. You probably already realize that you can't play the blu-ray discs on a normal DVD player.
ATB
Mark

Cheers Mark, yeah I had worked that one out Is there a blu ray with a hard drive built in yet?

regards

Diccus

Diccus: none that I know of. We'll need to wait a few months I guess. Unless you wish to buy a PS3?

quote:

Originally posted by Mark Gilbert:
you can't play the blu-ray discs on a normal DVD player.

stick and carrot

I'll hang on to me pound notes for the time being,thanks

Strange shopping in Belfast today no evidence of price reductions in HMV or Zavvi of HDD DVDs
seems to only be online at the moment apart from the 3for2 offer ,but that also applies to Blu-ray as well !