blu-ray
Week in review: post-Christmas edition
Hope that Santa was good to all of you. This week, we’re wrapping the top stories from all across Ars into a single, tidy package. Enjoy! From Cinepak to H.265: a brief history of video compression .
Continue reading »Managed Copy on Blu-ray little more than serial nos., prayer
“I started panicking about a month ago,” says Jason Rosenfeld, the founder of Scenic Labs . The company makes Blu-ray 1080p “ambient discs” that include titles like “The Classic Fireplace,” “Coral Reef Aquarium,” and “Journey Through Space,” and Rosenfeld was trying to figure out how to enable Blu-ray’s forthcoming “managed copy” feature for his discs. As one of the first companies to turn out discs with the “managed copy” logo on the back, though, Rosenfeld soon learned the pitfalls of being an early adopter—especially when no test hardware exists.
Continue reading »Indie Movie Explodes on BitTorrent, Makers Bless Piracy
Written and directed by Jamin Winans, Ink is the story of a brutal mercenary who appears in the dreamscape of a comatose 8 year old called Emma. Like virtually every movie nowadays, the film ended up being ripped and put on BitTorrent just a few days ago. In this short time span it was downloaded by more than 400,000 people on BitTorrent alone, earning it a spot in TorrentFreak’s chart of top 10 most pirated movies this week.
Continue reading »Blu-ray discs get Managed Copy; hardware support nonexistent
“Managed copy” has been slouching its way toward our living rooms for years now, but the technology that can make backup copies of films will finally come to all Blu-ray discs on December 4, 2009 . Unfortunately, no Blu-ray player yet has the ability to make one of these copies, rendering the whole scheme pretty pointless until consumers purchase the new players (available at some point in 2010) that are capable of contacting an authorization server over the Internet, verifying that this particular disc is allowed to make a copy, making the copy, then slathering the whole thing in a heavy marinade of DRM. Oh, and no one said that these managed copies have to be free, either.
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