Did anyone read this on DVDFile?

[greath]

This guy to me sounds a bit mad. How can he classify people who want to back up their own discs and to be able to watch HD content that they've bought but don't have HDMI monitors as Terrorists. One thinks he needs to get his priorities straight.

http://www.dvdfile.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5932&Itemid=11

[prOnorama]

juvenile delinquent
the thief
a cowardly attempt to hide
The miscreant
in an uncontrollable fit of self-aggrandizement and anarchistic zeal
irresponsible miscreant and his ilk
the criminals
incredible, self-serving nonsense
anarchist
sociopath
They are no better than terrorists

Wow, so much anger. And a real class act of objective journalism.... :rolleyes:

[sillKotscha]

and of course he seems to be a reliable investigative journalist too :D

So he set about to break the copy protection...

no one broke anything... or is reading = breaking :sly:

[jeffy]

Well, I have read the mentioned article and I will quote this:

(The article is dated February 12, 2006 but at that time the cards were described as HDCP and HDMI compliant.)

We’ve been able to confirm that none of the Built-by-ATI Radeons support HDCP. If you’ve just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080 resolution in the future, you’ve just wasted your money.

NVIDIA, being a GPU manufacturer was unable to discuss the plans of board manufacturers. We contacted all six of NVIDIA’s Tier-1 board partners. None of the GeForce 6 or 7 video cards available on the market, including the most recently released GeForce 7800GS, have HDCP support. So if you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you’ve just wasted your money.

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/page2.asp

Turns out, we were all deceived. (http://firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/)

The annual membership fee for HDCP is a saucy $15000 and if you don't pay it up you can simply forget about calling your product HDCP compliant. Intel also gets the money for a physical key necessary for HDCP and the manufacturer has to spend only $0.5 cent (half cent) to get it.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35326

Any comments? I know that we have Vista and fully HDCP compliant cards today, but what is this then? How would the author of the abovementioned article call this practice? A fair customer ABuse?

[noclip]

He's right, you know. How dare we actually insist on watching content we purchase?

[Doom9]

This is so much over the top that I'd almost consider it to be satire. Then again, DVDFile falls right in line with other DVD related resource to eat out of Sony's PR hand (nobody wonders about missing hard data on HD disc and player sales? use Sony's numbers without asking so much as a single question? not considering that a game console is unlikely to be the perfect centerpiece of a several thousand dollar home theater - it's noisy and doesn't go well with other home theater equipment - now considering the ratio of sold players versus sold discs (80% of PS3 owners buy Blu-ray discs... yeah right, unless you drop the difference between PS3 games and Blu-ray movies) so I'm afraid they might just be serious (well, as serious as somebody sputtering all that crap can be.. I'm tempted to demand a drug test).

[linx05]

The first thing I thought of after I read it was, "wow, they really went crazy with the thesaurus on Word!"

[HyperHacker]

The annual membership fee for HDCP is a saucy $15000 and if you don't pay it up you can simply forget about calling your product HDCP compliant.
LMAO.

[dragongodz]

What this irresponsible miscreant and his ilk don’t seem to understand is that when they violate digital copy protection, they risk provoking the studios to cease releasing content in high definition.
of course. everybody knows the studios dont want to make money. :sly:

Claiming that the user has the right to make backup copies is totally disingenuous; the cost of backing up a library of HD discs far exceeds the cost of replacing the rare failed disc.
it costs more to backup than buying another original ? wheres this person been living, under a rock ?
as for rare failed discs .... i would love to let my son at this idiots dvd collection for a while and then see what he thinks. especially with ones over a year or more old that may not be even available to buy anymore.

Such criminals threaten to destroy the home theater technical progress that can bring pleasure to millions. The mentality of such a sociopath is equivalent to those who release computer viruses and Trojan horses into the wild to wreak random havoc. They are anarchists intent on destruction. They are no better than terrorists.
someone went off his medication too soon methinks.

[greath]

Another thing I find funny about this guy's opinion though is how he seems to fall for the corporate marketing rubbish. For a good year he was all for Blu-Ray and saying that HD-DVD was a waste of space. Then HD-DVD came out and he saw the picture quality and then changed his mind, given that he had no Blu-Ray sources. Then when Blu-Ray trickled onto the market he fell back in with the Marketing people and switched back to the Blu-Ray camp. So here's a guy who can't make up his mind.

But, when you look at the list of equipment that he owns, it's clear that he is not short of a few dollars. He's given discs to review so for him it's no problem if one of his discs gets scratched. He just rings up his mates in the studios and they send him another copy. Doesn't matter that he could assert his fair-use rights as he has no necessity to do so.

[Doom9]

@greath: do you have a list of editorials to give us the timeline?
Also, if you walk the ledge between safe land and the rule 15 abyss with your last paragraph, at least one of your legs has just left safe ground so tread very carefully.

[greath]

[QUOTE=Doom9;962558]@greath: do you have a list of editorials to give us the timeline?QUOTE]

It's hard to say who is writing it, as DVDFile is the author of the initial article posted. But some other comments, like this one below, are more neutral. Or at least try to be, but the last paragraph indicates that other readers of DVDFile believe that he also has a leaning towards BluRay and that there is a subtle-but-obvious pre-text.

http://www.dvdfile.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5920&Itemid=11

For example:-

"So is high definition taking off? I respectfully suggest that the answer is a definitive yes. And is Blu-ray Disc taking the lead in the format war? Once again, I would have to suggest a definitive yes."

and

"If we add the Xbox 360 drives to the desktop HD DVD players sold we have a total of about 267,000 devices capable of playing HD DVDs. And as we ignore BD desktop players, we still have over a million PS3s capable of Blu-ray Disc playback with 80% of the ownership cited as having intentions of buying Blu-ray Discs, or about 800,000."

So most of the editorials posted are no where near as vociferous as the one at the head of this post.

[Doom9]

If we add the Xbox 360 drives to the desktop HD DVD players sold we have a total of about 267,000 devices capable of playing HD DVDs. And as we ignore BD desktop players, we still have over a million PS3s capable of Blu-ray Disc playback with 80% of the ownership cited as having intentions of buying Blu-ray Discs, or about 800,000.Isn't it more PS3s by now? Either way.. let's just crush the PR right here:
Let's assume the numbers are correct (I suspect they come from Sony's PR department but that's another story)..

So 800'000 Blu-ray buyers versus 267'000 HD DVD Buyers.
Now, we don't have any solid disc sale numbers, just a ratio (now that you think about breaking down the number to discs per player owner the lack of actual numbers should make you extremely suspicious) of 2:1. In terms of players let's reduce to 3:1 for simplicity. So, if we keep it in relative, in relation to the number of players out there, for every Blu-ray disc sold, 1.5 HD DVD discs are being sold or in other words, HD DVD backers put more money into their chosen format.
And if it's just "intentions of buying", then the ratio will go up.
Most Blu-ray player owners are owners by accident, not intention. The average console player is probably not the same consumer that drives high tech consumer electronics, so it'll fall onto the regular Blu-ray early adopters (those that buy standalone players) to push the format.

Moreover, the PS3 launched just for Christmas season and anybody in retail can tell you that during that time sales will go up. After Christmas, you have the additional "I need content" rush. In the end though, people buy the PS3 to play games - not to play Blu-ray discs. BD comes as a bonus that might initially be used (anybody recall the failed PSP movie experiment?), but only time will tell if people aren't rather going to buy games for their PS3.

[Inventive Software]

Can I chuck something else in? What's Microsofts view on their HD-DVD add-ons being used in the AACS decryption process?