Blue-Ray: firmware hacks to be prosecuted?

[Fluff]

Think how valuable the information could be for the film companies.

[Dr Mordrid]

They can afford to sell their crap to the Chinese for $4.99, and you can bet it's not at a loss, yet they charge $20 or more elsewhere. IMO their supposed loss numbers really prove is how much they're soaking everyone else.

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

And even if they have it imported, its always dubbed and the dubbing takes the Japanese feel away.

Xenophobic American Gurm Responds: Yeah, heaven forbid you take away the overenthusiastic shouting, flickering epilepsy-lights, and cutesy children's voices from what is essentially an adult game.

Otaku Gurm Responds: Dubbing to English has been a travesty for years. You'd think they could get some voice talent that knows how to preserve the original feel. Christ, they managed it with ROBOTECH (Macross) and STAR BLAZERS (Yamato), you'd think they could do it now?

[Nappe1]

afaik, HD-DVD as well as BluRay supports DRM. So, I doubt there's much choices if you want watch HD material from next generation discs.

of course, at least on BluRay, DRM is optional and defined in content. (so not all releases will be using DRM.)

(why both supports it? It's called Hollywood that wants this, so if you want some studios support your media, your better play with their rules.)

[Gurm]

afaik, HD-DVD as well as BluRay supports DRM. So, I doubt there's much choices if you want watch HD material from next generation discs.

HD-DVD, however, has NOT been announced to require you to "phone home" every time you want to watch a movie. Blu-Ray has. That means that Blu-Ray is TEH SUKC and thus loses.

[Nappe1]

umm... I am not sure about this, but if both uses same protection methods, I'd be very suprised if other would have Phone Home (tm.) and another does not. More likely I think that HD-DVD has not announced this yet, just because having this kind of bad publicity first, would have been a death strike for HD-DVD. Blu-Ray again, has superior technology and more industrial support behind it so they can take hits like this better. (besides, IF HD-DVD has also phone home after this, I think it will hit them quite hard, because ppl usualy takes this stuff like they tried to hide the information, but this all is to be seen later.)



This might be a wrong place to tell about this (just because everyone has already decided that having net on disc player is only bad thing(tm.)), but when I read the public Blu-Ray Specifications, there's note about having downloadable content available for movies. For Example, movies can get more languages (subtitles) after the initial release, that can be downloaded from net. Even additional sound tracks are possible. (here's your original Japanese spoken anime movies. ) How about automatic firmware updates? possibility to support even wider media / media streams just by downloading additional player software? Think about another side of the coin as well. The fact that Blu-Ray standard defines support for Java, means that most of players are based on real systems, instead of collection of hardware codecs soldered together. This again gives possiblity to make additions to player software later on.

[Marshmallowman]

So this would kind of put a crimp on portable players
or even people in remote locations where there only entertainment is a DVD player and a stack of disks

[Sasq]

So this would kind of put a crimp on portable players
or even people in remote locations where there only entertainment is a DVD player and a stack of disks

but but everyone has broadband don't they??

*ex Telstra radio installer speaking.