The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war rages on, and I remain completely unaffected

[Steve]

Today, my boss revealed to me a couple of interesting facts about the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war that continues to bore me to death. (Yes, that sentence does somewhat contradict itself, I know.)

It looks like Blu-Ray has more partners on board. For example, word has it that Borders will be stocking Blu-Ray only; no HD-DVD from the bigarse bookstore.

Also, HD-DVD is region free, whereas Blu-Ray isn't. Now, I knew this already, but really, region encoding is the least of our worries.

See, with all that crappy DRM on those discs, how am I going to watch them? My TV supports HDCP, but my OS (Ubuntu) and graphics card (7300LE) do not. There's no technical reason for my system to play HD content... I've done it... it works. So, if anyone expects me to buy new hardware/software (save a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive) just to support some ultimately pointless encryption. Well, they can shove it.

So why no HDCP on Linux. Arse technica spell it out well: "HDCP has to be commercially licensed". That ain't good news for a GPL OS. The article, from 2005, goes on to say that somebody could come along and crack the system. We know that's already possible. The only problem with that is the DMCA. Corporations will (try to) sue the arse off creators of tools that let us do what we want with our HD discs.

It was easier to get away with DVDs and CSS, because, I believe, CSS pre-dates the DMCA.

So where does that leave me?

Well, I will definitely be trying out any on-demand HD download services that make themselves available to me... provided they work on Linux.

But if those don't materialise... I sure ain't subscribing to Sky/Virgin Media - I don't want to pay for a load of crap I'm not going to watch.

So I'm left with one choice: When I finally get an HD drive of some sort, get a tool that'll decrypt the discs and hope it all plays out nicely.

And to anyone wondering why I won't switch to Vista. Well, all you have to do is ask and I'll go off on another rant. Go on, I dare ya...

[Fabula]

Tools are available for both formats to remove protection, and let us watch what we paid for.

I also won't be investing in new HDDVD/Blu-ray/HDTV etc when I have no way of knowing if copy protection will stop me watching content in 2 years.

[directhex]

wake me when playing an hd-dvd or blu-ray disc how i want it played (no region protection, no idiotic forced intros, etc) is as easy as it is now with dvd

[Steve]

Originally Posted by directhex

wake me when playing an hd-dvd or blu-ray disc how i want it played (no region protection, no idiotic forced intros, etc) is as easy as it is now with dvd

My sentiment exactly, except I want HD in that way now... I don't want to sleep and wait for it to be created.