£9.99 incl delivery Blu-Ray Titles

gromituk

Totoriko wrote:

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management

AKA Digital Restrictions management. :rolleyes:

It's to prevent people from pirating or duplicating music/video.

Preventing piracy is a noble aim, but preventing duplication isn't necessarily so - why shouldn't you be able to listen to your music or watch your films on a portable player instead of a DVD player or a home computer? Why shouldn't you be able to burn a CD of your music to listen to in the car?

DRM may be touted as a system to prevent piracy, but a side-effect is that it can be used as a mechanism to lock you into one particular manufacturer's products. Because Apple refuses to license its "Fairplay" DRM to anyone else, anything you buy from the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) will only play on Apple music or video players. Is it fair that the music you buy can't be played on another manufacturer's MP3 player? After all, you wouldn't be happy if a CD you buy only played in one company's CD player. Norway agrees, as does France, Germany and The Netherlands. It is well known that ITMS does not make a profit for Apple, but is merely a vehicle to sell and lock you into iPods. If you want to use something else, your music collection disappears and you have to buy it all again.

Even worse, any music/video files you have bought that are restricted by Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" DRM will not even play on Microsoft's own forthcoming Zune portable player! "Plays for sure" indeed.

A particular issue with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is the ability to play the material on your computer without shelling out large sums of money to Microsoft. Why shouldn't I be able to play a disc I have legitimately bought on, say, my Linux box instead? It is illegal in the US even to play standard DVDs using open source software, because of the draconian laws brought in by the film companies to prevent reverse engineering (cracking) the trivial anti-copying system used by them.

Oh, and DRM will always be defeated - it's a flawed concept from the start. It just causes great inconvenience.

I still don't understand why spantramily is telling people not to buy BluRay movies.

Perhaps that helps a little. But although it's great to take a stand like this, I don't think it'll get very far.

dbonbon

I'll stick with Betamax thankyou very much.

telsco

Blu-ray players won't cost £900 soon. You'll be able to pick one up for £425 in March. It's called the PS3!
Blu-ray discs already outsell HDDVD at a ratio of 2:1 worldwide. I'd expect that figure to increase when the PS3 is launched in Europe.
with more film studios exclusively putting their films onto Blu-ray, I can't see HDDVD being more than just a format for XBOX360 or PC cover discs two years from now.

Mal27

DRM takes away fair-use rights you used to have as a consumer. With DRM the manufacturer/distributor technically owns the product and you simply purchase a license to use it in a certain way specified by them. It's similar to how software is sold but physically more restrictive.

Blu-ray comes with a particularly bad form of DRM that will allow them to render an individual license/disc useless if they want to, whilst with both systems (HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc) they can switch off old discs in a blanket fashion, as well as switch off the licenses for HD player models that break the rules.

All that said, I suspect the protection around both formats will be broken by a couple of years.

simate

telsco wrote:

Blu-ray players won't cost £900 soon. You'll be able to pick one up for £425 in March. It's called the PS3!
Blu-ray discs already outsell HDDVD at a ratio of 2:1 worldwide. I'd expect that figure to increase when the PS3 is launched in Europe.
with more film studios exclusively putting their films onto Blu-ray, I can't see HDDVD being more than just a format for XBOX360 or PC cover discs two years from now.

HD DVD copy protection has been cracked recently so lots of people won't be buying them anyway.

Baz_2

telsco wrote:

Blu-ray players won't cost £900 soon. You'll be able to pick one up for £425 in March. It's called the PS3!
Blu-ray discs already outsell HDDVD at a ratio of 2:1 worldwide. I'd expect that figure to increase when the PS3 is launched in Europe.
with more film studios exclusively putting their films onto Blu-ray, I can't see HDDVD being more than just a format for XBOX360 or PC cover discs two years from now.

You sound like a playstation fanboy. Hows about a source for your claims? The last time I checked HD DVD's were outselling Blu ray by quite a margin.

Dixons will be selling the Toshiba HD DVD players for £270 next month. Sony wont allow the !!!!!! industry to use blu ray apparantly so that will help the cause for HD DVD.

Plus the XBox addon will be a success at that price £120 and there will be dual players from LG shortly.

Its far from over to be honest. And the PS3 is far from a guaranteed success at that price.

simate

Baz wrote:

You sound like a playstation fanboy. Hows about a source for your claims? The last time I checked HD DVD's were outselling Blu ray by quite a margin.

Dixons will be selling the Toshiba HD DVD players for £270 next month. Sony wont allow the !!!!!! industry to use blu ray apparantly so that will help the cause for HD DVD.

Plus the XBox addon will be a success at that price £120 and there will be dual players from LG shortly.

Its far from over to be honest. And the PS3 is far from a guaranteed success at that price.

Blu Ray is outselling HD DVD, I just checked a few sites myself.

http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/

http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/01/18/where-are-the-official-hd-dvd-vs-blu-ray-sales-numbers/

Mal27

simate wrote:

HD DVD copy protection has been cracked recently so lots of people won't be buying them anyway.

That's not technically true. The protective 'bubble' around HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc is currently broken for certain titles where the public have access to 'keys'. The source of those 'keys' will be disabled for future titles. Like I say, give it a few years and I bet someone will have cracked them permanently.

A cracked format is a good thing because it gives consumers the freedom to watch the discs however they want. For example, until one of them is cracked there will be no way of watching the discs on minority desktops such as Linux.

Baz_2

simate wrote:

Blu Ray is outselling HD DVD, I just checked a few sites myself.

http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/

http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/01/18/where-are-the-official-hd-dvd-vs-blu-ray-sales-numbers/

Neither of those links actually proves anything though? And even if thoses claims are true its only just for the last month though, which is obviously due to the new PS3. Go back over the last year then HD DVD is doing very nicely overall.

A lot of the surge in sales for blu ray is people testing there new PS3's capabilities. It wont last at that level for long.

And to say that thats a case for HD DVD failing is silly and sounds fanboyish tbh.

simate

Mal27 wrote:

That's not technically true. The protective 'bubble' around HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc is currently broken for certain titles where the public have access to 'keys'. The source of those 'keys' will be disabled for future titles. Like I say, give it a few years and I bet someone will have cracked them permanently.

A cracked format is a good thing because it gives consumers the freedom to watch the discs however they want. For example, until one of them is cracked there will be no way of watching the discs on minority desktops such as Linux.

There's quite a few that I know of...

Swordfish
The Thing
Hulk
Mission Impossible
MI3
Men In Black 2
The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift
V for Vendetta
Superman II
Miami Vice
The Island
Huo Yuan Jia
Equilibrium
The Mummy
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Pitch Black
Serenity
Superman Returns

Add King Kong, Batman Begins and Serenity to that.

I don't think it'll take 'years' for someone to crack them permanently, more like a couple of months at most.