Tag: HD DVD

HD-DVD DRM Broken

This thread at Doom9.Org is simply beautiful in showing how a small number of determined individuals can so quickly dissect and disassemble the latest and greatest DRM, AACS. This follows a different assault on AACS back in December by another hacker.

You have to wonder how much the movie industry pays for these DRM systems that are hacked and easily routed around as soon as they become even halfway relevant.

All that money spent screwing over customers with technology that genuine pirates can easily circumvent. Probably the same people green lighting new Ben Affleck movies are sitting in the back thinking “and we’ll protect it from piracy with DRM.”

HD & Blu-Ray Media Making It to Market

In mid-August, Sony began shipping 50gb dual-layer Blu-Ray discs, while Memorex began shipping HD DVD-R discs. The Blu-Ray media retailed for about $48/disc and the HD DVD-R went for about $20.

At close to $1/gb, neither are much of a bargain when you can buy DVD+/-R media for about $.07/gb. Then again, if you need to back up 200gb of World of Warcraft screenshots like somebody I know does, then only needing 2-4 discs instead of swapping about 50 of them might be worth the price premium.

I’d like to think the HD DVD-R and Blu-Ray media prices might eventually come down, but since I think both technologies are very likely going to tank, I don’t have much confidence in that happening anytime soon.

Sources:

Memorex Begins Selling HD DVD Discs. Nate Mook, BetaNews, August 15, 2006.

Sony Shipping 50GB Blu-Ray Discs. Nate Mook, BetaNews, August 15, 2006.

Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Are (Finally) Coming

IDG’s Martyn Williams has the latest on planned rollouts of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs.

Both are likely to make summer launches, though the Quixotic quest to DRM movies could hold that off. According to Williams,

Sony will start selling 25GB BD-RE and BD-R discs in April for $20 and $25 respectively and 50GB capacity versions of the same discs later in the year for $48 and $60 respectively.

So at least Blu-Ray discs will launch at about four times the cost per gigabyte of DVD+-R. Since the only direction these prices can go is down, that’s pretty good.

The only likely problem is that the standards disagreement between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD could lower production of media, so prices don’t fall.

In a typical week I might archive 150-200gb of data, so having an alternative to store that on 4-8 Blu-Ray/HD-DVD discs would be a nice change from the 40-50 DVD+Rs I currently go through each week.

Source:

HD-DVD, Blu-ray Disc Drives Coming Soon. Martyn Williams, IDG, March 17, 2006