|
|
Posted by slugbug on 11/07/06 17:39
After reading a lot of different articles about the two formats, I
decided to stay far, far away from Sony's Blu-Ray technology. I want to
be able to archive my own disks to my computer, so that I can watch the
movie over my network whenever I want, without constantly having to get
the actual disk down from the shelf.
With Blu-Ray, that would be virtually impossible. Why?
Well, with all lf the Blu-Ray players, there is a "back door" built in.
This back door lets hollywood deactivate your player if anyone in the
world with the same hardware happens to break their encryption. They do
this by essentially writing in a "denial of service" message on the
disks themselves, specifically telling it not to work properly on your
player. It won't work again until you download a firmware upgrade, and
update your machine. It is yet another step towards giving hollywood
control over your machine.
Remember DIVX, anyone? No, I'm not talking about the video compression
codec. I'm talking about the players that let you watch the disks once,
and made your machine call in to a database regularly. It was a
competitor to DVD that came out about 8 years ago. Blu-Ray is a lot
like that.
There is a huge hacking community out there that will dedicate itself
to breaking the encryption, just like they did with DVD's. Heck, they
could break the new encryption on certain machines ever 3 weeks if they
really worked at it. How would you like to be one of the folks owning
that certain player? Or what if your Grandma, who might not have an
Internet connection, had that player? She would get the headache of
having her system stop working properly with rental disks every few
weeks. Considering that Sony did the infamous rootkit thing, I'm not
all that surprised that they are behind the Blu Ray disks.
HD DVD doesn't incorporate this "back door" hollywood control
mechanism. This means that the control over the player rests with you,
and not hollywood.
Sure, Sony and its affiliated studios are spending 4 times as much
advertising how "great" Blu-Ray is. They are also hoping that if they
only release their movies on Blu-Ray, you will decide to buy one of
their players, thus ensuring that they win the format war, and further
the cause of "eSlavery".
So, you want to become an "eSlave"? Buy Blu-Ray. Want to keep your
rights, and not have to mess with updating your player's firmware every
month? Buy HD DVD.
Add to that the fact that HD DVD disks are easier to manufacture and
will cost less, and it is really a no-brainer to see why HD DVD is the
smart choice.
Navigation:
[Reply to this message]
|