We talked about DRM as it applies to audio.  What about video?

Video is far trickier to deal with in terms of DRM.  There is no established DRM-free format for video like the audio CD is for music.  DVDs come with an encryption scheme called CSS, which was cracked years ago.  This is good and bad.

Now, with the advent of software for your PC that can get around CSS, users can rip video off of their DVDs to do with as they please.  This should be the way things are, and indeed this was perfectly legal (and sort of still is, from a perspective) before the appearance of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).  Now, making copies, for your own personal use, of DVDs that you bought and paid for, for whatever reason, is illegal.  Forget that you have kids that like to destroy things in their everyday use.  Nope, if your copy of Shrek gets scratched, you have to buy the whole DVD all over again.

As well, there is a great opportunity in the personal video-playing industry to allow people to take their movies with them wherever they go.  Personal Video Players (PVPs), or Personal Media Players (PMPs), are becoming very popular.  Even the iPod has versions that will play video (if you didn’t know that, then you just aren’t paying attention).

I personally have an 80GB Archos 504 and an 80GB Video iPod.  A full-length feature film, encoded properly, will take about 1GB of drive space, plus or minus, so I have the potential for carrying 160 movies with me.  Basically, I can carry the bulk of my DVD collection with me and watch whatever I want whenever the mood strikes me.  Could you imagine trying to carry 160 DVDs, plus the DVD player, onto a plane?

In any case, the problem comes in trying to get movies onto these devices.  Where do you get them, if you don’t want to break the law?

Well, if you have an iPod, you can purchase them from the ITMS.  It’s very handy and very easy to do.  But here’s the problem: you have to pay for it again!  That’s right, even if you own the DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean, you are not legally allowed to transfer that video to your iPod.  But at least there’s an option; you can buy it again if you choose to.

But then how do you get movies onto a player such as the Archos?  Or the Cowon?  Or any of the other players out there?  The answer is you have to break the law.  And remember, this is to do something that, before the DMCA, was perfectly legal.

Now, we are stepping into the realm of high-definition (HD) video content.  HDTVs are being sold at alarming rates, despite their far higher cost over their old standard-def brethren.  As such, people are wanting to see more and more high-def content.  Two technologies have arisen, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, that are looking to fill the need for portable high-definition content.

But the lessons that the MPAA have learned over piracy of DVDs once CSS was cracked are ringing louder than ever.  The motion picture industry is putting heavy leverage on content deliverers and makers of high-def playing hardware to ensure that these movies are never stolen.

Here’s the rub: if you have been paying attention to tech news, you’d know that the DRM for both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have been cracked.

And here’s the evil: the PC is no longer your machine, that sits on your desk, checking email and editing spreadsheets and word-processing documents.  Nope, it is now a high-def content delivery and piracy system.

Oh, didn’t you know?

Didn’t you know that your PC, yes YOUR PC, is a piracy device?  That it plays HD content as well?  That’s correct.  And even if it isn’t, the MPAA is muscling pretty much every PC hardware manufacturer, as well as Microsoft, to treat it as such.

That’s right!  With the advent of Windows Vista (just bought my first copy of it… just wanted to see what the fuss was all about), great care has been placed into the OS to disallow high-def video piracy.  I am not going to go into all the details (since they’re about 30,000 feet over my head), but the result is that your computer hardware will become slower and more expensive as it all spends some of its processing time making sure that you aren’t trying to grab protected content!

So now, we are all paying the price for piracy, whether we are pirates or not.  Is this right?  Is this just?  Did I mention that the real pirates already have ways of cracking the DRM on these videos?  So, the high price is for nought!

So, what can we do?  I know that I, for one, am not buying a single high-definition video of any format.  I will also not buy a player.  I will probably not buy Vista, except for the one copy I got for educational purposes.  I hope the general consensus is the same as mine, that people won’t stand for higher prices for the same processing power!  And perhaps we can all send a message to the content guardians: go find and stop the REAL pirates and let us be!

What I would really love to see is the offering of low-definition content for free on media that contains the higher-definition movies.  Portable players such as the iPod and Archos do not have screens with high-def resolutions.  The standard is like 320×240 or so.  They are getting better, but that seems to be about where they’re at right now.

As well, the MPAA has not tried to stop consumers from recording content at lower definitions, to use as they wish.  They’re position seems to be that it’s lower quality, so pirating it isn’t such a great loss to them.  In fact, a big part of the high-def standards for DRM is that if the content appears to be being copied, then it reduces the resolution of the output to degrade the quality.

Okay, so if the lower definition versions of the content aren’t worth defending, then why not place low-def DRM-free files on the high-def discs?  Why not make DVDs double-sided and have the second side contain copies of the movie in iPod-ready or standard MP4 (which most portable players can play these days) formats?

The HD-DVD standards team has come up with the idea of placing double-sided discs in their offerings, where the other side has the standard DVD version of the movie.  I think this is the best idea ever.  It allows people to still buy the standard DVD versions of movies without having to purchase them again once they decide to upgrade to high-definition.  This is a two-for-one deal that is very progressive-minded for the likes of these providers.  So, why not also embrace the portable player market and give us versions for that as well?

I think it’s about time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 9:37 am and is filed under DRM, Gadget, Microsoft, Vista, iPod.