[mythtv-users] Time Warner & Firewire

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Wed May 18 19:31:42 UTC 2005


On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 11:40:33AM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Brad,
>    First, I'm sorry to have apparently upset you off so much with my
> observations and comments here. They are not intended to do that. All

Odd. What did I say to suggest I was upset at all?  Fear not.

> I am doing is relating some of the information I garnered from
> attending a number of meetings when 5C was released and the company I
> worked for at the time in the semiconductor industry asked me to go
> learn about it. I worked on 1394 for a number of years and helped in a

Right, that's why I want to learn more about what people's motivations
were.   I don't like it when the evidence points to hidden agendas, as
it does here, so it's better to try to really understand if people just
made an error visible only in hindsight, a bizarre blunder, or had some
other agends.  (Or hypothetically, were actually right while I'm wrong, but
naturally that's not possible in the real world.)

> 2) The view at the time was vendors in 3rd world nations selling DVDs
> on street corners. The movie industry understood (I think, again from
> the outside) that it would never eliminate bad copies (camcorder
> level) or ever completely eliminate apps like dvdrip from making a
> limited number of copies. It generally seemed to want to address the

This I want to be clearer on.  My perception was that street DVDs came
from only a small number of sources, perhaps even just one source.
Certainly once somebody generated a quality rip or camera-copy the other
underground street sellers would just copy that one (since there is
not typically CSS on street DVDs.)  Is this false?   If it's true,
what led to the perception that street DVDs would be hindred?

> 3) The use of encryption is not 'protection' from copying. It is
> simply a deterrent. If a new key is exchanged every 30 seconds (or so)
> then even if you have the encryption algorithm you'll have a very
> difficult time figuring out the keys and decrypting the stream. Since

Well, the change-every-30 system is just one of many approaches one can
take to improving security.  My own taste is that this is too complex
as a copy prevention scheme, a stronger cryptosystem in general is a
better approach.   "Change keys frequently" is more common, I thought,
for live systems (like satellite broadcast) where you are afraid people
might be quickly distributing new keys.   To make a copy, what matters
is the effort to break the whole system.   Changing keys frequently isn't
really so different from having a stronger system to start with, as far as
effort is concerned.

However, that's not that important.  As the working groups know, the
more likley threat comes from the "analog hole" since Moore's law is
going to give us analog capture at a modest price fairly soon, I suspect.
Certainly 1280x720 capture (with 1080i downscaled to that res.)

Again, the determined pirate will be able to afford this equipment sooner
than the consumer.

The tragedy is that all this effort over HD did nothing so far.  True
HD res material is quite rare on the nets right now, though HD sourced
SDTV recordings are becoming common.   Most people aren't judging HD to
be worth the extra download time, I suspect.   Why it's a tragedy is
I think that the arrival of sufficient bandwidth for people to download
HD from torrents and the cheaper analog encoders will not be that far
apart.   In other words, nothing was won.  All the DRM standards efforts
did was delay the adoption of the technology.

We had a standard for analog HD monitors decades ago in the VGA cable
and multisync computer monitor.   People could have had cheap HD CRTs
long ago, put the other stuff in the STB planning to throw it out as
newer and better standards were developed for players and tuners.


> less the encryption algorithms that Hitachi keeps under wraps, please
> do not mistake this for advocacy. It's just information. Like everyone

Understood.  But I still want to know what they were thinking, even
if you didn't agree with their thinking.

Hollywood walked in to the much larger CE companies and said,
"Hi, we want you to cripple your products and make them considerably
more complex, harder to use and harder to make interoperate.  If you
don't we'll pretend we won't release our movies and songs in a format
that plays on your equipment even though we've always done so in the
past without protection when it finally came down to it."

And the CE companies said, "Sure? Where can we sign?"

That's the thing I want to understand.
> then they will release far less of it. After all, when did Star Wars
> (the original) actually get released on DVD? ;-)

Indeed, Lucas was one of the companies that kept saying they would
not release on DVD.   In the end they did, and all they did was deprive
themselves of a lot of money -- probably literally billions.  Worse for
them, they held back during the era when CSS was not cracked and DVD
burners were expensive and bandwidth was expensive.  

Dumbest idea since Gredo shoots first.  :-)


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