hd-dvd

BD / HD DVDハイブリッドメディア "THD"(Total Hi Def)Discを正式に発表 / THDはBlu-rayとHD DVDそれぞれ二層を一枚のディスクに納める → Blu-ray の層と HD DVD の層を用意する方式のハイブリッド

HDDVD Cracked!

Quoted: BackupHDDVD, a tool to decrypt AACS protected movies Decrypting

Very broad coverage of yesterday's crazy Digg chaos. Got picked up by all the top tech news outlets, and blog mentions on other top-tier news sites.

Not bad ... if it had PC compatibility (a future possibility), it'd be a much nicer deal. They really need to announce a digital video adapter in the meantime ...

Quoted: The drive will also be bundled with Peter Jackson's King Kong and the Xbox 360 Universal Remote.

Wired's 2007 predictions. Funny that I'm getting a Blu-ray ad on a page predicting its demise. Still not sure why people are assuming that either format will win. Who won, SACD or DVD-A? Hehe, thought so.

Well, not quite ... I took a look at this, and it's not really that groundbreaking. Here's my Digg comment:

AACS has not been "hacked". The author's source code simply implements the decryption algorithm (documented, no black magic here).

The only thing of interest is the fact that he extracted the title keys, which he almost certainly obtained by poking around in PowerDVD's memory space.

The proper title for this post is (probably) "AACS Title Keys Extractable from PowerDVD".

Now, if the title keys can be obtained and distributed en masse (100,000 titles would require only a few megabytes even with title metadata), then AACS is certainly ineffective, but it's incorrect to say that it is "cracked" or "hacked". Nothing here will lead to a libdeaacs.so that could operate in the absence of a key database.

Angry but often insightful post on piracy vs. DRM-infected "legitimacy".

Quoted: Then came the PC makers, the dumb sheep that they are. There seems to be a race to see who can pass the buck quickest ...

Filling out my "2 + 2 = 4" tag ...

Quoted: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disappointing So Far -- article related to Hardware, Movies, and Media.

Looks like the HD-DVD drive in the Xbox 360 is a pure software renderer (even for VC-1) ... rendered to GDI at that. Yes, you heard right -- the Xbox 360 is using GDI. Wow.

Quoted: What takes 4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft, and millions of dollars to create? The Xbox 360 system software? Nope. This is just the HD DVD player. The Xbox platform team (us) is experiencing its own emergence day as of