Industry Insiders Q&A Thread: only Questions to insiders please - Page 18  

Great points John. I couldn't agree with them more. Indeed, I have not challenged counters to my posts from other insiders, unless asked by someone else. Even though I don’t agree with the responses, I think it is better to let them go.

And along those lines, I am also not answering questions from other insiders on competitive things related to their business. Answering them either brings on more arguments or provides them other data which is not what this thread is about.

Net, net, what has worked greatly in this thread, is you all asking a clear question and giving back a brief answer. We deviated from this some in the last two days and would be wonderful to get back on that cadence.

Depends on which direct you are looking at it. Without MMC in AACS, it would not be in either format, which is the point I was making. However, if you look at the whole system, getting managed copy to work in BD is more complicated because the bitstream coming out AACS, is still protected by BD+. There have been other concerns also around governance of BD+ and how it impacts MMC which at high level, have been sorted out.

The above is not to say that MMC will not work in BD. But that those barriers need to be broken in real products for it to work. For HD DVD, neither barrier is there by design.

It is certainly possible although the HD DVD players do not keep track of the above. So the studio would have no way of knowing what you bought and how many times you watched.

However, if you take advantage of the managed copy feature, you will be connecting to their servers and they would know at that time, which disc(s) you own and can make additional offers to you (free and otherwise). This is one of the key aspects of managed copy that is not talked about. Namely, managed copy lets you bridge an optical product to the world of video on demand. You don't even need to be interested in making a copy for these scenarios to work. The disc has unique ID, allowing the studio to know you have their product, and go on from there. With today's DVD, and rampant copy/lack of ID, you can't do this.

It is a creative choice by Warner's creative department. That is, when you activate IME, they feel that you don't want to be thrown in the middle of it, and that you need to go and listen from the beginning. Yes, I know :). Others want to have the choice and we have communicate this to Warner. But we know our place in this and is not to teach the Creative people what to do with the platform :D.

Note that once IME is on, you can trun it off and continue to watch the movie without it.

So no, there is no technology limitation whatsoever.

So Disney's "Register your DVD" sections would have a bit more teeth to it at last.

Why is there so much interest in managed copy? Why do you need to copy the disc, if you can play it on hd-dvd drives that eventually will be widely available for computers and players? Plus will the copy be at a lower quality? I figured HD exists for the purpose of having highest quality video experience.

The only thing I can tell you to reduce your worry, is to not worry about milk yet not spilled:). As one of my bosses used to say, “worry as an abuse of imagination :).â€

With our competitors looking on, I can not give you a specific answer. But I can tell you that we have the closest relationship to a studio publishing content in Europe than anyone. And we are videophiles too and we are going to do our best to make sure these titles are great. We have a lot of motivation here as some of these titles are BD titles in US! (distribution rights in EU is not aligned along the studio boundaries in US).

You have a choice on the quality. You can have the same bits on disc, or downsample them to take less space/make them portable so that you could take it with you.

Can the toshiba copy? Can the titles currently available be copied? What's the procedure?

And keep up those methods as I am smart enough to decide for myself what to believe. And for those things that are over my head, I will either look up on the net or read addition comments here and as a last resort, ask the question here and try to not look the fool. :p

amirm

Once the XBox360 HD-DVD attachment comes out, will they not be able to track your movie watching habit just like your gaming habit. Maybe you end up getting points for watching all the extras or coming attractions. Or maybe they will put commercials on there that when you hit the link it takes you to the site and you can get points that way. Has anyone brought something like that up?

Also. the same could be true for the PS3.

I imagine people watching porn could be embarrassed coming home and getting a message letting them know about the latest release from some porn distributor. Especially if the parents were not the one who was watching the movies. :D

Amir...

We know that BD right now are not using the best technology available on their discs, e.g. Mpeg-2.


Are HD DVDs currently using the best available technology, or are there aspects that can be improved in the future?

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...&&#post8028710

Amir,

What's your take on Chris' comments? This is the first we've heard about Sony doing all the replication and not selling replicators thus Universal going with HD DVD as one of the reasons?

Thanks,
Robert.

Sony is a competitor to the other replicators. So while they may be motivated to help them somewhat to build a format, they are in a pickle from that point of view. Further, if there are price protections from Sony on discs, you can imagine that protection would not apply to other replicators doing the work. Otherwise, the thrid-party could claim each disc costs $10, and get Sony to pay the difference between that and the price cap :).

Given the above logic, one would imagine that Sony would be the dominant producer of discs and yes, a competitor to the other studios. As such, studios using their replication fascility will also lose the marketing advantage of their competitors not knowing their movie release plans (not a big deal now, but an issue longer term).

Those sound like implementation issues. Strictly looking at it from a consumer standpoint, will I be able to get MMC with BD just like with HD DVD since they are both under AACS? Or are you saying that BD+ can and/or will keep me from getting actual use of a managed copy?

--Darin

Sure. We will surely see much improved tools in the future to produce interactivity content/better menus. We will see better encoders to produce even better quality. And we will have better tools in "multiplexing" (mixing) the different streams together.

These will be incremental in nature though so I would say there is not as big of a "step function" as there will be with BD using something like VC-1. But better technology is definitely in our future.

It is both implemenation and governance (policy wrt to how the copy may work and what governs the user rights to it potentially).

No. There is no such "feature." No one will know what movie you are watching.

Not that I have heard of. But if there is a market for it, there may be an opt-in program when you would choose this kind of monitoring for the pay off you get (ala watch adds that google feeds you when you search on them). But again, I have NOT heard of any discussions on tracking what you watch.

On the link thing, that is already there on a lot of CDs and DVDs when you put them in a PC. I have not seen it applied to HD DVDs. But I guess it is possible.

Going by all of that, Sony must have put on one hell of a smoke and mirrors show to get the studios to basically hand all the reigns over to Sony.

I'm certainly shocked with all that's been transpiring that none of the blu ray exclusive studios have deflected/announced dual format support. What's keeping their faith in Blu Ray over the long run?

Does this mean that the AACS committee has access to the BD+ specs?


From the studio perspective it is another potential source of income, while from the consumer perspective it is a legal way to get movies onto computers/portable devices.

First off this thread is amazing! Thanks to everyone staying civil in here! Thanks to all the insiders with all their great info as well! It has taken me 3 full days to read through this thread in increments at work, but I keep coming back!

More specifically Amir,

Maybe I am reading waaaaay too far into this... but are you insinuating taking some of these titles for US release on HD DVD?

If that wasn't the intent... What is?

No he meant they are being released over in Europe. Since you can not buy them here, you can always import them as HD-DVD is not yet region locked

I didn't think so. Thanks for the clarification!

I am assuming that at some point they will region code the discs and then try to force a firmware update so you can not play these discs from other regions. It could be put on a region 1 disc here and simply say to play this disc you must update your firmware. Then it would disregard any other similar type message for updating from another region. I would hope there would be a way around this.

For anyone-

Is there a chance we will ever see an 'audio pass-through' mode on either format? From what I understand, because of advanced profile stuff on the disks, audio mixing occurs which forces decoding (or LPCM in the case of BD) in the player, which means HDMI 1.3 to AVR isn't something more people will end up using in the real world? Would this be a player thing (firmware) a format thing or a disk (studio option) thing?

And a wealth of demographic information. Imagine what useful info can be mined from the target device, city, etc. for MC events.

Gary

I am dying to know the answer for this too.

It's possible, but the big trend is moving decoding from recievers into players, so we can let the movies control the audio in cool ways. It's a big perspective change for a lot of folks on the high-end, but it's well worth doing. And since decoders are well-specified, there shouldn't be any quality difference in the PCM audio out of an inexpensive HD DVD player or a very high end reciever.

The future of audio interconnect is PCM. And it's a good thing.

Every indication is that Blu-ray allows it but for HD DVD it depends on who you ask. I have seen Roger Dressler give an explanation for why it can't be done and yet I have also seen sspears give an explanation for why it can be done.

Belated thanks! :)

Every once in a while I feel there is something that I truly feel qualified to state/answer and to show supportive assistance to the insiders:

Can you copy HD DVD's or BD's today? NO

That is one of the main purposes behind the format change(s) to re-establish a format that isn't easy to copy. I am considering the print-screen feature something that is funnier to think about then functional.

If I'm wrong about this, I will admit it and leave AVS forever (that's the benifit for you to prove me wrong). Someday? Maybe but it's not the goal of the insiders or those they represent imo. Today? No.

(Respecting the guidelines I won't make another thread as we want it to be Question/Answer. Were those asking the quesitong talking about Managed Copies or just plain old copies? We don't have enough info finalized yet on managed copies.)