Disney agrees to allow Legal DVD Copies

[Sarangel]

SAN FRANCISCO - A group of media and technology companies including Microsoft Corp. and Walt Disney Co. have agreed in principle to allow consumers to make legal backup copies of next-generation video discs and share their content on portable devices.

The group, which also includes International Business Machines Corp., Intel Corp., Matsu****a Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. and Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros., will not have any technology to license until the end of the year.

But the announcement, released late Tuesday, marks a shift in the way the movie industry has reacted to the threat of online piracy of its films.

Current DVDs are protected by a system called CSS, for content scrambling system, which prevents copying. The computer and consumer electronics industry have pushed to allow less-encumbered sharing of media between TVs, computers, and portable players.

The new alliance has named its yet-to-be-developed content protection technology “Advanced Access Content System.” The system will be available to be licensed later this year.

Next-generation DVDs are expected to deliver superior video and audio, although technology and media companies have yet to reach a consensus on which of the competing DVD formats will prevail as the industry standard.

Does this mean we have to buy the whole film library *again*?

Sarangel

 

[Bstanley]

Sorry Sara, but if you want "true" High Definition versions you will have to buy them all over again :-(

 

[Razor Roman]

What news service did that story come from? It got rid of "profanity" in the middle of the name of Panasonic's Japanese name!

 

[RoyalCanadian]

That would be the Disboards censor -- it certainly helped as a spell-checker when I spelled the word "Peninsula" incorrectly earlier today.

 

[petula]

Originally posted by Bstanley
Sorry Sara, but if you want "true" High Definition versions you will have to buy them all over again :-(

But until Sara and I have high definition TVs (I'm assuming we don't), will it really make any difference?

Just trying to put it off. I'm still busy handing down my VHS library.

 

[Bstanley]

will it really make any difference?

Shouldn't.

If you have your DVD player hooked up to your TV using SVideo you are getting just about all the capability of a standard TV.

Also there are a lot of present day "HD" monitors that will be left in the dust by the new "HD" DVDs. HD-TV is not equal to HD-DVD.

Waiting for some of the smoke to clear may be a very wise choice.

Having said that - watching a DVD today on a proper HD-TV is still a thing of beauty - worth every penny? It's like arguing about whether the price of the Polynesian is worth it