What happens when the HD-DVD folk win the key revocation war? That would mean that people stop being able to crack the HD-DVD encryption, which is something they very much want to do, mostly in order to (a) back up their discs or (b) play their legitimate discs on their legitimate players. The only way it will stop is if people don't want to crack HD-DVD encryption anymore. If people stop wanting to crack your encryption, you've lost, because nobody cares about your format any more.
This is what happened with the Playstation Portable. People figured out how to run their own software, so Sony started a firmware patch race against the cracks. In the end, they won: nobody bothers running their own software on PSP any more. In fact, nobody bothers running much of *anything* on a PSP any more. So was it worthwhile? What were they even achieving? At least the HD-DVD key hoarders are "stopping teh PYRATES!!!1!".
My main point is this: the copy protection doesn't work, because it has been cracked. Then the coping mechanism - revoking the key - doesn't work, because that was broken before it could even come into effect. If they "win" this one, nobody will buy or watch HD-DVDs.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - I'm not bothering with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet.
PPS - I don't need them.
4 comments:
Another thing is that there are two standards to begin with. So it's not enough that everyone has to do another slow and costly conversion of their media from one format to another, but they have to do it and risk the one they chose going obsolete.
I haven't looked into the new formats much either, but with HDTVs becoming more common we will soon have to convert.
True. The last thing consumers want is to end up with the modern equivalent of a Betamax video recorder, so the format war is bad on both sides.
And in the end, you might not have to choose at all. Chances are good that our set top media devices will connect to a hard drive based house library or the Internet anyway. HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray could be the last home entertainment format war we ever see.
They had an interesting discussion about this on today's Sarcastic Gamer podcast, and basically concluded that downloading via services like Live Marketplace is the way to go, except there are still many problems holding it back. Download times and tying up of bandwidth being the largest issues.
If bandwidth is the only problem, just give it time. The network is always getting faster.
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