HD DVD

Remember BackupHDDVD It Looks Like It May Soon Be Easier

info@santry.com — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

According to a user at Doom9 forums, it appears that AACS has been compromised and compromised in such a way that you may soon see HDDVD, and Blu-ray backup software in the market in the near future.

According to arnezami, the person who found the hole, the process was pretty simple:

"But I'm shocked! It doesn't appear to be anywhere near random as I expected it to be!! This could mean (just maybe) its guessable/computable... "

Will we see a slew of lawsuits coming out after software developers create simple GUIs to take advantage of the hole?

A Plea to Warner To Make HDDVDs

info@santry.com — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Over at avsforum.com, a popular site for HD enthusiasts, one member of the forum is asking for folks to petition Warner to produce HDDVDs. In December, Warner announced that they would release HDDVD titles at the same time as the Blu-ray titles, unfortunately there has been some development problems with Blu-ray that has caused a slow down on the releases.

This forum member is petitioning other members to write Warner to reconsider their policy and release HDDVDs independent of Blu-ray title's release.

Universal to Release More than 100 HD DVD Titles

info@santry.com — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Universal announced their clear support of HD DVD as a format. They confirm that will release more than 100 title in 2007 in HD DVD format, with no plans to support Blu-ray.

More than 90% of the titles coming out this year will be in dual format supporting both DVD and HD DVD on the same disk.

Source: DVDTown.com

AACS Confirms Hacks on HD DVD

info@santry.com — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

It's now official, we blogged about the BackupHDDVD hack a while back, now the official agency, the AACS has confirmed that indeed hackers have stolen the "title keys" and decrypted HD DVD titles.

Both Blu-ray and HD DVD are impacted by this.

A Win for HD DVD?

info@santry.com — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

The Adult Entertainment industry is known for leading the pack when it comes to multi-media formats and building a business around those formats. For example, one of the first industries to use streaming media as a revenue generator was the Adult Entertainment industry. It appears they are making another decision when it comes to media and that is HD DVD. As a recent article on TG Daily reports, all the companies at a recent conference for the industry are using HD DVD as their format:

"Blu-ray has superior quality, yes," said a spokesperson for porn studio Bangbros, "but HD DVD is easier to produce, cheaper to produce and there are more HD DVD players in homes than there are Blu-ray players, for example in the Xbox 360."

51GB HD DVDs?

info@santry.com — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

The HD DVD Promotion Group outlined a proposal for new HD DVDs that will provide 51GBs of storage. The new disk being developed by Toshiba will contain three layers instead of two, with each layer providing 17GBs of storage. The HD DVD Promotion Group expects the specification of the new format to be complete by forth quarter of 2007.

HD DVD vs. Blu-ray - Sales Figures

info@santry.com — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Here's an article at High-Def Digest on the sales figures between HD DVD and Blu-ray. According to the figures, there are more Blu-ray players out there than HD DVD players, but as High-Def Digest points out, this is mainly due to the fact that Sony is force feeding Blu-ray to gamers in their PS3.

This is opposed to the HD DVD numbers where people who purchase the players or the Xbox 360 add-on, actually are doing so to view HD DVDs.

Toshiba Announces Half-Height HD DVD Writer for PC

info@santry.com — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

The SD-H903A for creating HD DVDs on your PC which still provides legacy support for your CDs and DVDs. With dual layer discs, HD DVD provides 30GB of storage capacity, which can accommodate up to eight hours of HD DVD movie content with extended cuts and interactive features, up to five full-length standard DVD films, up to 7,500 MP3 songs or up to 30,000 high-quality images.

Volume shipments of the SD-H903A are scheduled to start in February with OEM sampling in January.

More On the BackupHDDVD and AACS Crack

info@santry.com — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

Over at Doom9 Forums, Muslix64; the one who posted a video and information on comprimising the AACS DRM for HDDVD using BackupHDDVD; made a follow up post and provided more insight into his techniques. Some items he points out in his post:

Affirmation 1: You did not break AACS, just the player

My comment: I did not break AACS, but I find a way to decrypt movies and I have bypassed all the revocation system.
Not that bad...

Affirmation 2: The BackupHDDVD circumvention tool won't last long

My comment: As long as insecure players will exist, it will last...
And insecure players will always exist, in fact you can extract keys from any player! Some players are just easier to extract the key from. Being lazy, I prefer to extract keys from an insecure player than a secure one.
And the AACS spec says "Device keys must be protected!" but they did not said that about volume key, fatal mistake!

So what is the AACS revocation system good at? It is good for that scenario:

Someone post on the net, a tool that do the complete decryption automatically. Off course the program use stolen device keys from an Official player. They (AACS and friends) will eventually get their hands on this program, look at the device keys and revoke them. Making that player unable to play new titles. But the author of this program can pre-extract a bunch of devices keys from different players and release them, one at the time, when the previous one have been blacklisted. The AACS spec says "Device keys must be protected!" so I suppose they put more effort in protecting these keys then the volume key in memory.

Affirmation 3: The keys can easily be revoked.

My comment: What keys are you talking about? As I stated before, there is no such thing as "title key revocation" and "volume key revocation". If someone publishes only volume keys, there is no way to know from which player these keys where extracted from, making the revocation system useless. They can do content revocation, but to revoke what? All movies before 2007? They can do player revocation, so I will just change the player I'm using, big deal...

Affirmation 4: BackupHDDVD is nothing, only one person out of a million have the technical skills to extract keys.

My comment: BackupHDDVD is a proof of concept.

Picture this:
Few skilled persons can do massive volume key extraction, and send the keys to a central server on the internet. Then, they create an easy to use decryption program, with a nice GUI that do online key recovery. That way, my father and your father can backup movies.
Or they can send the keydb.cfg file on P2P networks (BitTorrent, E-Mule, etc..)

See the problem now?

Affirmation 5: You can extract keys from software player on personal computer but not on hardware player.

My comment: It's easier to extract keys from software player, but it also possible to extract keys from hardware player (the set-top box in your living room!)

He goes on to say that this is only a proof of concept and he plans on releasing a version for the masses.

LG Announces Dual-format Blu-ray / HD-DVD Player

info@santry.com — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

No doubt that eventually someone would release a dual-format player capable of playing both Blu-ray and HD-DVD disks. PC World is reporting that LG Electronics is the first company to announce the availability of the player to be launched early in 2007.

More information is expected to become available at the CES next week.

Toshiba to Release Cheaper HD DVDs Next Week

info@santry.com — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Toshiba is expected to announce the release of cheaper HD DVD players at CES next week in Las Vegas. Yoshihide Fujii said recently:

"At first I thought the price threshold is $499. Maybe coming next is $399 and after that is $299."

This leads speculation that lower prices will be announced at CES. Currently Toshiba players like the HD-A2 can be purchased at $399. Once prices go down to $299 we should see a larger demand by consumers.

First to the News?

info@santry.com — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 05:00:00 GMT

The New York Times, being a leader in media is reporting today that the HD DVD encryption scheme was cracked using BackupHDDVD.

In the blogging world this is old news as we reported on last week. The main point here is not all live in the blogging world and this is new news to them. We can only wait to see what the impact of this is going to be. Will studios be reluctant to produce their films in HD DVD format? Is their some other impact that we can't see? Will people (techies) be more inclined to purchase HD DVDs knowing they can create backups and place them on central media server (as with DVDs)?

IGN.com Best Gaming Award for 2006 - Best Gaming Peripheral

info@santry.com — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Best Gaming Peripheral for 2006 according to IGN.com was the Xbox HD-DVD Add-on. Why you may ask?

"...for gamers that already own a 360 it is one of the best ways to get into next-gen DVD."

Has AACS DRM Been Cracked Using BackupHDDVD?

info@santry.com — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 06:00:00 GMT

The latest on the 'Net is that AACS DRM used by both Blu-ray and HD DVD has been cracked using BackupHDDVD tool.

Below is the video posted to YouTube.com showing the process:

We don't condone piracy here at RedmondGadgets.com, but if this is true it's definitely news. According to engadget.com, you can use BackupHDDVD to decrypt and dismantle the AACS using a Windows PC. Once that's done you can store the video on your hard drive for playback on any HD DVD player.

UPDATE: Chris Lanier has some input into this issue. According to Chris, the key issued to Cyberlink was compromised, and most likely will be revoked to correct the issue.

UPDATE: This story is making rounds all over the 'NET. CNET has a story that continues this topic and how companies are investigating this more.

Additional coverage is also available at ZDNet.

The entire topic is still somewhat confusing, it appears to be on a per title basis that the keys were compromised. If this is so, then it still makes it a complex process.

Whether or not the reports are true or to what extent the crack is, there is no doubt that sometime down the road AACS will be cracked and the process of extracting the video files from both Blu-ray and HD-DVD is inevitable. As long as the disks can be played on a PC, there will no doubt folks who will figure out to break the encryption and make the process available to the masses. It happened with DVDs, it will happen again. Studios are going to have understand and deal with this.

UPDATE: A follow up has been posted by the developer of this technique.

Follow Up To Cymfony Research

info@santry.com — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:00:00 GMT

In a previous post we discussed Cymfony's research on the perceptions of the Blu-ray versus the HD DVD. In the research, Cymfony concluded that HD DVD has more positive perceptions over Blu-ray when it comes to the Internet.

Cymfony has replied to some negative feedback they received from this research paper via the company's weblog.

HD DVD More Positive Perceptions Over Blu-ray

info@santry.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 06:00:00 GMT

According to a recent market analytical survey by Cymfony, based on information obtained by conducting searching on the Web, 46% more of discussions centering around HD DVD are more positives than discussions of Blu-ray. Over twice as many authors were "impressed with HD DVD" than of Blu-ray. Few posts discuss the higher storage capacity of Blu-ray and advanced interactivity.

Again the discussions on the Web refer to Sony's past problems with Betamax and MiniDisc (UMD). In addition, gamers did not like the included Blu-ray in the PS3 which increased costs of the console, thereby providing no choice or power over the cost of the console.

The analysis is in PDF and can be downloaded from their site.

For one thing, my spell checker keeps wanting to change Blu-ray to Blue-ray.

Blu-ray and HD DVD the Battle Continues

info@santry.com — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Here's a write up on the Blu-ray versus HD DVD battle that is currently brewing. As I wrote previously, make no doubt about it, this is a war, for the next media player that is going to be sitting on your entertainment center in the years to come.

This article points out that Sony released the Blu-ray support in their PS3 as part of the console. Microsoft on the other hand released an add-on to the Xbox 360 that provides HD DVD support. And that 200,000 consumers purchased the PS3 versus the 42,000 that purchased the HD DVD add-on. The writer makes the point that all though this would appear to be good news for Blu-ray, the Blu-ray movies to go along with it aren't selling as well as the HD DVD movies. Which makes sense since the folks who are buying the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 are doing so in order to view the movies, many consumers who purchased the PS3 may not be aware of what Blu-ray is and purchased it for gaming.

Read the article...

The Blu-Ray vs HD DVD Saga Continues

info@santry.com — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 06:00:00 GMT

Yesterday at a press conference Microsoft and HP announced their collaborative effort on People-Ready Business Building. This covers many aspects of enterprise solutions from CMS, messaging, infrastructure, and other areas. This signifies a major partnership between the two companies.

Some History

About 5 years ago, Dell quickly rose to prominence in the server arena, before that the leader was Compaq (now owned by HP). Dell had offered an extensive and successful laptop line. But recently over the past three years Dell has been reluctant to expand into other areas like the Table PC market, and a small effort into the PDA market. Most recently Dell has made the decision to offer Blu-ray drives in their laptops starting with the M1710. Microsoft has made a big investment in HD DVD with the Xbox, and other areas.

Bring in HP

HP announced last year that they plan on supporting HD DVD in their laptops. Most recently HP is offering the hd 100 External HD DVD ROM drive. Historically HP has been gadget friendly and willing to offer Microsoft products that Dell did not, HP has the successful Ipaq (which was acquired when they purchased Compaq), they were also early out of the gate to offer Tablet PCs.

Dell has a huge portion of the consumer and enterprise markets in the PC and laptop sectors, but HP is making inroads on gaining some of that back. With Dell offering Blu-ray drives in their laptops, you can bet that HP will be rushing to offer HD DVD drives in theirs very soon. Make no doubt about it, HD DVD versus Blu-ray is a battle, kind of like Betamax versus VHS, but even bigger. And with Dell computers in the mix it should be an interesting one to watch in 2007.

Another area of interest is this budding relationship between HP and Microsoft, and the waning between Microsoft and Dell. Where will this go in 2007?

HD DVD versus Blu-Ray - Oh, Which One to Buy?

info@santry.com — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 06:00:00 GMT

The Washington Times ran an article today covering Blu-Ray versus HD DVD. Xbox users can purchase an add-on to get HD DVD support and Blu-Ray is Sony's version of high definition discs.

When considering my choice, for some reason Beta-Max and UMDs come to mind.

Read the article...