[mythtv-users] The death blow to DRM has arrived

Eric Sharkey eric at lisaneric.org
Wed Jan 7 17:48:40 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Tom Dexter <digitalaudiorock at gmail.com> wrote:
> Boy you're not kidding.  The whole design of Blu-Ray really reached
> new heights in anti-consumerism.
>
> [] When I found out that the Blu-Ray output to non-protected outputs
> could be limited to 480p at the movie makers discretion I vowed to
> never go within 1000 miles of the whole thing.

I don't see it as significantly different from DVDs, though.  Staying
away from BluRay seems kind of silly to me, if the alternative is to
purchase DVDs from the same publishers.

Today, with all of the work that went into DeCSS and such, we can
forget the days of the late 90s when there was no way to play DVDs on
Linux.  If you wanted to watch the movie, you had to run Windows or
have a hardware player, hope that the region code matched, and wait
through the stupid warnings/advertisements/menu fluff which you
weren't allowed to fast forward or skip.

BluRay is in much the same position, but there hasn't been enough time
to crack things as thoroughly as has been done with DVD, but it's
happening.

If you have a HD set and a reasonably fast MythTV box, the quality
difference of BluRay is definitely worth the extra hassle.  BD-ROM
drives are now available for less than $80, and once the disc is
properly ripped and decrypted all that "limited to 480p" nonsense is
no longer relevant.

Eric Sharkey


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