<story><title>The Blu-Ray Reauthoring Project</title><url>http://temporary.directory/blog/10-23-2018.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>superflyguy</author><text>YouTube and Netflix stream for me just fine. Are you on 4g&amp;#x2F;fibre?</text></item><item><author>pathartl</author><text>I find this deeply amusing. I see how this could have worked in the DVD era, but these days with all of the options we have it&amp;#x27;s no surprise why most people don&amp;#x27;t have bluray players. It is kinda sad though because as much as streaming gives us options, the quality is always terrible.</text></item><item><author>hlandau</author><text>The Blu-Ray video format is pretty cancerous in terms of DRM; there&amp;#x27;s not really any salvaging it.&lt;p&gt;One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren&amp;#x27;t even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don&amp;#x27;t have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you&amp;#x27;re out of luck: AACS is &lt;i&gt;mandatory&lt;/i&gt;. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.&lt;p&gt;You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don&amp;#x27;t apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.&lt;p&gt;So I don&amp;#x27;t think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jaruzel</author><text>Theoretically, UHD (4k) blu-rays can go from 80 mb&amp;#x2F;s to 120 mb&amp;#x2F;s depending on the authoring of the disc, compared to Netflix&amp;#x27;s maximum of 25 mb&amp;#x2F;s that&amp;#x27;s a massive difference.&lt;p&gt;However... unless you have a UHD projector, or VERY large TV (60&amp;quot;+) then you are unlikely to see the difference under normal viewing.&lt;p&gt;Where I feel streaming typically fails, is in the audio. They may &amp;#x27;say&amp;#x27; it&amp;#x27;s a 5.1 surround sound mix, but if so, why does it sound _so_ flat compared to the same film on blu-ray ?  All I can think is that the audio is compression is also 4x as compressed which to our ears is quite significant.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Blu-Ray Reauthoring Project</title><url>http://temporary.directory/blog/10-23-2018.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>superflyguy</author><text>YouTube and Netflix stream for me just fine. Are you on 4g&amp;#x2F;fibre?</text></item><item><author>pathartl</author><text>I find this deeply amusing. I see how this could have worked in the DVD era, but these days with all of the options we have it&amp;#x27;s no surprise why most people don&amp;#x27;t have bluray players. It is kinda sad though because as much as streaming gives us options, the quality is always terrible.</text></item><item><author>hlandau</author><text>The Blu-Ray video format is pretty cancerous in terms of DRM; there&amp;#x27;s not really any salvaging it.&lt;p&gt;One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren&amp;#x27;t even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don&amp;#x27;t have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you&amp;#x27;re out of luck: AACS is &lt;i&gt;mandatory&lt;/i&gt;. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.&lt;p&gt;You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don&amp;#x27;t apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.&lt;p&gt;So I don&amp;#x27;t think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>move-on-by</author><text>Comcast’s gigabyte internet still has a 1TB data cap. So while the bandwidth might be available, you’ll quickly cap out and the overage charges can get as high as $200 a month. the ‘unlimited’ data plan is very expensive as well</text></comment>