Camcorder pirates beware!

[Jammrock]

Just spoted this on CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/04/19/camcorder.piracy.ap/index.html

Some handheld computers "have an attachment that can record up to 122 minutes," said Jeffrey Godsick, executive vice president of marketing at 20th Century Fox. "Well, that's a whole movie in many cases. You can take the attachment and run it through a small hole in a tie or a shirt."

This is big business. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates studios lose more than $3 billion per year from piracy in various forms. So the movie industry is trying to fight back with a high-tech solution of its own.

Cinea LLC, which created an encryption system for DVDs, and Sarnoff, a technology research firm, are developing a system to modulate the light cast on a movie screen to create a flicker or other patterns that would be picked up by recording devices, making the resulting images unwatchable. The disruptive flickers would be unseen by the human eye in the movie theater.

The "forensic watermark" system is designed to be used with digital projectors, which show movies stored on computer discs rather than traditional 35-millimeter film. Only a small number of theaters have digital projectors, although it is expected that most theaters will go digital by the end of the decade.

Very interesting says I says me.

Jammrock

[KvHagedorn]

If they weren't such dicks no one would steal from them.. except the Chinese.

[Dr Mordrid]

So when the flicker occurs you cut those frames out and do an interpolation between the previous and subsequent frames.

Some editing tools that have scripting so this could be automated, making their expensive anti-piracy hardware useless....as usual.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

There is even a flicker filter for virtual dub which corrects the brightness. So no need to interpolate

AZ

[Dr Mordrid]

The addition of interpolated frames is to keep the frame count acurate and equal between the audio and video streams, which is critical for maintaining A/V synch. This especially important with a recording ~2 hrs. long.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

With the filter I was talking of, there is no need to CUT frames, all frames are brightness adjusted.

AZ

[Wombat]

Blah, why bother. It's still better to get DVD rips.

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by az
With the filter I was talking of, there is no need to CUT frames, all frames are brightness adjusted.

AZ

That depends on if what they're doing just brightens the frame or cause it to be whited out. Without knowing what they're doing any attempts at an absolute solution are speculation.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

Professional pirates don't film, neither rip DVDs. What are film scanners for?

AZ

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by Wombat
Blah, why bother. It's still better to get DVD rips.

That or just capture the DVD decks S-video output then encode it using very high quality settings at 4500 kbps VBR. Burns and plays very nicely.

Dr. Mordrid

[dZeus]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
That or just capture the DVD decks S-video output then encode it using very high quality settings at 4500 kbps VBR. Burns and plays very nicely.

Dr. Mordrid

nobody does that since DeCSS has been 'discovered'. (and even before that, there were better solutions, like using DVD directshow playback filters to transcode completely digitally).

[Gurm]

Not to mention that this is a walking recipe for epilepsy. This is similar to the "Storm" technology used by PGP for a while (still?) to make e-mail unreadable on a PC running Outlook. It basically modulates the pixels so that cameras can't get a clear picture of it, but a person sitting dead-on to the screen can.

The downside? It hurts to look at. A lot. After two hours of this in a movie theater, the most stalwart would be in serious cranial pain. And those who went into seizures watching "Pokemon" in its original Japanese run would be dead long before that.

- Gurm

[Joel]

First the recording industry claiming they are losing money when showing profits before starting their bullshit now the movie industry. Who's next??? Oh and I guess they will claim also that the quaility of these pirated flims are just as good as the original. Kind of like the record industry claiming that MP3s were as good as the original CDs.

Joel

[Dr Mordrid]

People mainly rip 'em off because the stuff isn't worth buying

They need to worry more about the actual quality of their content and performers more than any low quality audio or video swapping done by computer geeks.

Dr. Mordrid

[az]

Abnsolutely! This goes for both movies and music. And with DVDs there's the import restriction: I can't legally import my own US country-code DVDs. WTF! So where's the alternative to DLing them?

The industry make it sound like every copied/dl'ed movie/mp3 is one movie/record less sold... If stuff is really good, I go buy it. It's just that there isn't much quality content anymore.

The music industry here is blaming piracy for their 10% lower profits this year. Hell, we're in a recession, EVERYONE makes lower profits this year! And where do they think should teenagers get the money to buy CDs, when there's much more other stuff teenagers "need" nowadays than ten years ago (cellphones for example)?

And crippling CDs so they won't play in your car stereo, forcing people to copy them to be able to play their legally bought CDs isn't helping either. And then they come crying that people burn CDs so much!

AZ