Science and technology news blog

In what could be considered as a massive blow to the momentum that Blu-ray was generating, both Paramount and Dreamworks have announced exclusive support for HD-DVD. In the following press release from Viacom, both Paramount and Dreamworks have officially announced that they will be releasing their high-def content on HD-DVD only:

Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B) and DreamWorks Animation SKG (NYSE: DWA), each announced today that they will exclusively support the next-generation HD DVD format on a worldwide basis. The exclusive HD DVD commitment will include all movies distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films, as well as movies from DreamWorks Animation, which are distributed exclusively by Paramount Home Entertainment.

This is definitely a major shock to the Blu-ray camp as until now, Paramount and DreamWorks were supporting both the formats.

The Compact Disc has crossed 25 years in its illustrious life. The format that revolutionized how we listen to music, watch movies and save data has come a long long way since it was born. It was August 17, 1982 and an assembly line in a suburb of Hanover, Germany began pumping out a modest collection of laser-encoded palm-sized discs, officially paving the path for what would later become the most popular album format.

According to Philips, the first CD was ABBA’s The Visitors, an album that is now available on iTunes.  CD players were brought to the market in Germany for the 1982 holiday season, by which time nearly 150 albums were already available.  The format made its way to the US the following spring.

And these days when we talk of next-gen tech that includes HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the underlying technology is still based on what was created 25 years ago by Sony and Philips.

It’s not hollywood, or even the video game industry setting the tone for the next generation format. Nope, its porn setting the tone.Reports from the adult industry exhibition in Las Vegas suggest that all the major adult movie studios are standardizing on HD-DVD, citing the lower costs of production as the primary driver.

Giving HD DVD a boast is a rumor that Sony is banning Blu-ray disc manufactures from accepting adult content.

If this is true, it’s Beta vs VHS all over again as Porn was a huge factor in VHS winning the VHS/Beta format wars even though many people don’t like to acknowledge it.

VHS might not have won with out the adult film industry adopting it, and it appears to be the same senario with the new HD DVD and Blu-ray war.

Time well tell.

Supporters of the two rival next-generation disc formats are slugging it out this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, with HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc predicting victory in the quest for a unified high-definition standard.

HD DVD is banking its prediction of success in large part on the arrival this year of low-priced players from China and other Asian countries. The Blu-ray camp, meanwhile, believes the PlayStation 3 rollout, together with overwhelming studio and consumer electronics support, will boost software sales to such a degree that HD DVD will have no choice but to throw in the towel.

“Game over,” quipped Buena Vista Worldwide Home Entertainment president Bob Chapek, a leading Blu-ray supporter.

Both camps held lavish news events at CES. At the HD DVD event Sunday, the North American HD DVD Promotional Group said that as of Friday, more than 175,000 HD DVD players had been sold in North America. That figure includes computers with HD DVD drives as well as Xbox 360 game consoles with the HD DVD add-on.

Toshiba, which so far is the only consumer electronics manufacturer to produce dedicated set-top HD DVD players, said it will ship this spring a new 1080p unit, the $599 HD-A20, that will offer consumers the highest resolution possible. Toshiba also said it has developed a triple-layer 51GB disc that can hold up to seven hours of high-definition content. The new disc is seen as a reaction to Blu-ray’s dual-layer 50GB disc.

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So LG has announced their dual-format HD DVD/Blu-ray player? Fantastic. Time Warner goes so far as to create dual-format discs? Pop open the bubbly. But you know something? It didn’t take long for my initial feeling of elation to give way to 100% certified organic bile.

Absolutely none of this was necessary. Remember DVD, the little media format that could (and turns ten in a few months)? It seems like ancient history now, but it took some time for the various companies to agree on a single format back then. While it’s something of a cliché to mention the Betamax/VHS videocassette format war these days, in the mid-1990s Sony had only just closed up the Betamax shop. I’d like to think that, with Sony still smarting, retailers unhappily clearing out excess Betamax stock and Betamax owners angrily trying to figure out what to do with their machines and tapes, the companies realized things go a lot smoother when everyone agrees at the outset.

It’s hard to argue with the result. The DVD format was adopted pretty quickly and has gone on to remake the movie and home video industries; and we’ve now gotten to the point where DVD utterly dominates the home video landscape.

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LG Electronics said it plans to release a next-gen DVD player that can handle both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats and perhaps finally bring an end to the debate and confusion over the dueling standards.The new player will be formally unveiled at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and will go on sale in the U.S. in early 2007, according to LG. It is expected to be the first commercially available player capable of handling discs in both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats.

The Korean-based consumer electronics giant said more details, including pricing and availability, will be released at the show.

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Copyrighted content on High-Definition DVD may be available for illegal copying despite the supposedly ‘bullet-proof’ encryption code that goes with it. A hacker known only as Muslix64 posted details showing how to crack the Advanced Access Content System on HD DVDs. The AACS is meant to restrict new HD DVDs from playing only on some devices in order to prevent piracy.

The Doom9 Forum user explained how he decrypted some titles after getting past the security code. He also made a Java-based program called BackupHDDVD and a video that he posted on YouTube to show how anyone can crack the AACS code.

Hollywood studios and disconcerted makers of encryption code are now looking into the claim made by Muslix64. If true, the code decryption could mean a financial threat to movie studios Warner Bros, Universal Studios and Walt Disney, among others. DVD sales accounted for $24 billion of the movie industry’s revenues for last year.

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In what music and movie industry leaders say is a significant blow to the nation’s piracy market, police on Thursday raided an office and a garage, confiscating 208 CD and DVD burners and about 40,000 bootlegged discs.

What they uncovered was the second-largest CD burning lab in the United States and one of the largest movie pirating labs in the country, said the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, whose staffs helped local police.

Among the films being illegally reproduced were some not yet officially released on DVD, including “Snakes on a Plane” and “World Trade Center.” The music ranged from Latin to gospel.

The first warrant was executed Thursday morning at a Bronx garage, where police found 23 duplicator towers, containing the burners. The second search warrant was served hours later at a Manhattan office. At that location, investigators found the 40,000 discs, about 40 percent of which were DVDs, the MPAA said.

Only one person had been arrested in connection to the group that ran the copying outlets, which the RIAA’s staff investigators said they began uncovering in March. The suspect, 19-year-old Abdouraitamance Diallo, of the Bronx, faces a charge of trademark counterfeiting, police said. Diallo is a major player in the group, the RIAA said. A phone listing for Diallo could not be found Thursday night.

The group, which did not have a formal name, essentially acted as a wholesaler, capable of producing more than 6,000 CDs an hour and selling the discs to people who would then peddle them in flea markets. It frequently changed its production locations and distribution centers, authorities said.

“The more we can minimize the availability of pirate product, the more we help protect artists, record labels and everyone else involved in making music and ensure a positive, high-quality experience for fans,” said Brad Buckles, executive vice president overseeing RIAA anti-piracy efforts.

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Sony and Toshiba are fighting to set the industry standard for the next generation of DVD players, but the spoils may go to makers of memory chips, like Samsung Electronics.

The home theater industry’s biggest format war in two decades, pitting Sony’s Blu-ray system against Toshiba’s HD DVD technology, will increase demand for dynamic random access memory semiconductors, or DRAMs, which until now have been mainly used in personal computers. The new DVD players use about 16 times as much memory as current machines.

Shipments of high-definition players will climb to 6.2 million next year from 800,000 this year, according to the research firm Isuppli, creating a new income stream for Samsung and Hynix Semiconductor, both of South Korea, and Micron Technology, of Boise, Idaho. That may set the stage for a stock rally in the $26 billion DRAM industry, once consumers choose a victor in the format fight, said Yoo Jung Sang of PCA Investment Trust Management in Seoul.

“DVDs are definitely a promising market,” said Yoo, who is PCA’s chief investment officer. “But issues regarding the standard need to get resolved first.”

Yoo, who owns Samsung and Hynix shares, said that he was bullish on memory-chip stocks, even though the DVD format battle might retard growth in DRAM sales for the machines by as long as three years.

Rising prices of semiconductors have helped shares of memory chip makers rebound from a second-quarter slump. Samsung, the world’s biggest maker of DRAMs, has risen 18 percent in the past three months. Hynix is up 34 percent, while Micron has risen 18 percent. In the same time, the Bloomberg World Semiconductor Index rose 11 percent.

DRAMs, the most widely used type of memory chip, accept and return information in less time than it takes to access a disk. In DVD players, the chips act as a buffer between the disk and the screen to ensure that movie images are delivered smoothly, without the picture’s freezing or becoming distorted.

The Blu-ray disc can store at least five times as much data as a standard DVD, and Toshiba’s HD DVD can contain at least three times as much content, making pictures crisper and sharper.

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Major film studios announced Thursday in Berlin they would have action movies on new Blu-ray discs, a successor to the DVD, coming on sale in November in European and Australian shops.

High-definition discs are expected to push aside the DVD, just as the DVD replaced video-cassettes six years ago. But consumers face a choice between two incompatible successors, the HD-DVD and the Blu-ray disc. The first video recordings went on US sale this summer.

The releases were flagged on the eve of the September 1-6 IFA trade fair, one of the world’s main consumer-electronics shows, although top manufacturers such as Philips said in Berlin they would not launch set-top Blu-ray movie-players till the start of next year.

Sony said it would release its Play Station 3, a game console which can also play back Blu-ray video recordings, on November 17 in Europe and Australia. The two models would be priced at 499 and 599 euros (650 and 780 dollars), with 2 million sets available at launch.

Among studios announcing their outside-the-US releases were Twentieth Century Fox, with eight titles due out November 10 in Japan and November 14 in Europe and Australia. Sony Pictures signalled an October rollout, but gave no total.

Warner said it would release “more than 10” in “late 2006.”

Paramount plans one main release at the end of November, Mission Impossible 3. In an indication that even the initial 25-gigabyte Blu-ray discs may not be big enough for the studios, Paramount is to release that film with extra material in a two-disc pack.

Chris Dunn of Twentieth Century Fox said studios preferred Blu-ray because it offered a way to put 50 gigabytes of data on a disc.

That is twice the capacity of the rival HD-DVD technology promoted by Toshiba.

Hollywood is expected to continue releasing most of its movies for home viewing on DVD as well, but the resolution of images from DVD is grainier, since those discs can only hold a quarter as much data. Blu-ray is designed for new high-definition television screens.

The Blu-ray Disc Association meanwhile announced that Sun Microsystems of the United States, which provides Java software for the new technology, had joined the trade group’s board of directors.

The battle between two hyped formats for high-definition DVD will confuse shoppers and turn many of them off the whole technology, a London-based research firm predicted on Friday.

Market research analyst Screen Digest also forecast that only $11 billion (5.8 billion pounds) of the total $39 billion expected to be spent on video discs by 2010 in the United States, Europe and Japan will be generated by the competing high-definition formats, Sony Corp.-backed Blu-ray and Toshiba-supported HD-DVD.

“The net result of the format war and the publicity it has generated will be to dampen consumer appetite for the whole high definition disc category,” Screen Digest analyst Ben Keen said.

The DVD format exploded into a multi-billion-dollar global industry for movie and TV studios in large part because the largely universal format delivered a more convenient way to own movies than its predecessor, the VHS videotape.

“This time both formats support similar features,” said Graham Sharpless, who wrote the report.

The new formats are being introduced just as DVD sales level off, after consumers built up libraries of their favourite movies and TV shows at deeply discounted prices.

Electronics retailers, such as Best Buy and CompUSA are frustrated by the raging format war, fearful of another decade-long tussle similar to the one between VHS and Betamax. They have been predicting a lacklustre Christmas selling season, expecting consumers to wait for one format to win out.

Screen Digest predicts that the two formats will co-exist until a combined solution becomes cost-effective, rather than taking the view that one will emerge victorious or that both will flop so badly as to be driven into extinction. (more…)

The DVD Copy Control Association, a movie industry party, plans to soon cut back some of the copy restrictions that have hindered the legitimate “burning” of digital films to blank DVDsa move that represents big Hollywood studios increasing willingness to sell downloadable films that can be legally transferred to discs, the Associated Press reports via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The modifications to the current rules are expected to be made official in the near future, and they would enable movie sellers to employ “jukebox kiosks” that could be used to select films and burn them directly to DVDs at stores, according to the AP.

The DVD Copy Control Associations Content Scramble System (CSS) is currently used by producers of DVD players, DVDs and other electronic devices to encrypt content and help prevent piracy, the AP reports. Technical and policy modifications in relation to the CSS are expected, and the association said it will soon begin to license the technology to firms that sell films for download instead of just traditional DVD retailers, the AP reports.

The association also hopes to work in conjunction with blank DVD makers to offer discs that are compatible with the CSS, according to the AP.

In the past, major Hollywood studios have been hesitant to offer films for download due to concerns over piracy and the cannibalization of traditional DVD sales. The DVD Copy Control Associations decision to cut back some copy restrictions and work with film download sellers represents the industrys latest move toward acceptance of the online sales medium.

In July, CinemaNow became the first retailer to offer legal film downloads that can be burned to DVD, and such heavies as Walt Disneys Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have already inked deals with the firm to provide content.

Another video-download firm called Movielink also recently announced plans to offer burnable films for download, though it did not set a time frame for when the service would be operational.