Entertainment: December 2006 Archives

Word around town was that the new content-scrambling system used by both Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, AACS, had been cracked.  Turns out the news was premature: only the decryption keys to a few specific AACS-encoded titles on HD-DVD had been cracked, no thanks to an insecurity in Cyberlink's PowerDVD product.

VideoBusiness has a nice discussion of the whole thing in some detail, and the ever-informative folks at The Digital Bits put it this way:

Here's the bad news... those select titles (which so far include Warner's Full Metal Jacket, The Last Samurai and The Fugative, Paramount's Tomb Raider, and Universal's Apollo 13 and Van Helsing) could now be considered open and unprotected. The studios involved COULD decide to revoke the title keys on those specific unprotected HD-DVD discs, rendering them unplayable on all HD-DVD players, both software and hardware. Doing so would mean that those of you who already own the discs would have to work with the studios somehow to obtain replacement discs with new (and still valid and protected) title keys. The market is certainly small enough that the studios could do this without TOO much problem, though I don't imagine anyone involved would relish the hassle. We're making inquiries now to see what happens next and hopefully, we'll know more next week.

So basically, what we're likely about to witness is the AACS system demonstrating its own deliberately built-in ability to take a bullet and self-heal for the very first time in a real world situation. Fascinating.

"Fascinating" isn't the word I had in mind.  If one of the major "attractions" of using HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc is being constantly pestered about having to trade in my "cracked" discs for "re-protected" ones, I think I'll skip a generation.  The whole problem is not that the studios want to protect their content, but that they have to treat the consumer like a criminal to do it.  That said, if the costs of HD content are comparable to standard-def content (and so far they have been, amazingly), there may be that much less of an incentive to crack-and-rip.

Remember a while back I reported that HD playback would only be possible on PCI Express systems due to AGP video cards not supporting HDCP?  Looks like I was partly wrong: HDCP-capable cards do exist in the AGP form factor; they're just not all that common.  They're also upwards of $150 or so -- which, along with the $650 for a Blu-ray Disc drive, is still pretty heavy sugar to shell out.

Once again, signs point to "wait".  Especially since my favorite video company, the Criterion Collection, isn't going to produce HD in either format anytime soon.

On a mildly related note, some folks over at the Blu-ray Forum posted a thread with screenshots from both the regular DVD and the BR edition of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (one of the first BR titles).  The images seem to have gone missing as of this writing, but they were seriously impressive -- not just for the resolution of the pictures, but the colors were more discrete and not as washed-out (although I suspect that may be more a product of the post-production and mastering than the format per se).