WASH POST: Company Develops System To Thwart Movie Pirates

[TheWraith]

this is excellent. unfortunately a lot of the movies don't come from a simple camcorder in the movie theater. however, this is definitely going to have a big impact i believe. on the other hand, would movies already in digital form be easier to transfer to a computer?

[Goon]

Cinea's first product encrypts videos shown on airplanes and in hotels so that they can be played only on equipment sold by the company. If, for example, an airline employee tried to make a copy of a movie, the copy would not play on a normal DVD machine.

LOL. That isn't very useful. While I'm sure its happened airline employees and hotel maids are hardly a serious threat to the movie business.

"The company, funded by a $2 million investment from Monumental Venture Partners LLC of McLean, also developed a "lock-and-key" technology so that movies transmitted to theaters digitally can play only on approved machines at predetermined times. The system protects movies from being hijacked during satellite transmission, or downloaded from theater computers."

That however seems to be a good idea. Imagine having film quality digital footage being pirated on the net:eek:

As for camjam, those were horrible rips in the first place. While it certainly is a common form of piracy, the real threat to them are the ripped screener dvds and the normal release dvds that have near perfect compression. Camcorder vids of movies are hardly going to be incentive for anyone to become involved in internet piracy. Cool technology, but it seems a bit extravagent and wasteful.

[moovieboy]

The sheer lunacy of trying to stem it off at the exhibitor end is that you'd have to force EVERY theatre on the planet to purchase this digital equipment. All you need is one poor country that couldn't possibly afford all this new technology to get one film print and OOPS! it's all over the Internet.

I give digital experts one week to circumvent this Cinea's technology in all its forms.

Plus, I demand that you run a film with that "camcorder jamming" technology with a room full of editors and DPs and we'll see how "invisible" it is. :D

-Tom

P.S. Robert Schumann and anyone else associated with that damned DIVX (Digital Video Express) technology can go straight to hell for almost killing DVD in its infancy. I swear to you, I've never stepped into a Circuit City ever since they marketed that sadistic, money grubbing, pain in the ass sham on the public... Not that I'm still bitter about it all these years later (hee hee) The only thing that was ever good about DIVX was that it was officially killed on my 29th birthday! :D

[Pent]

this is a waste of money
I doubt china would update their movie theaters

[enygma]

Well, I can understand how the technology would work. Basically, have you ever taken a remote control and push buttons on it while looking at the IR led? You don't see a whole lot, but if you do it with a camcorder, the CCD senses the IR signal and to the camcorder, it looks like a flashlight. even if you point the remote at a wall, you can see the wall light upwhere you are pointing the remote. This is why sometimes, the channel will still change or the volume will still change even if you point away, because the IR receiver still detects the signal being projected onto something. Now, becasue most camcorders being used to bootleg a film from the theatres use CCDs, if the digital projector projected an infrared signal with everything else, the human eye wouldn't see any difference. But if you pointed the camcorder at the screen, it would just look bright white, rendering it unusable for even a screener. It is kinda hard to circumvent that unless you change the type of photo sensor is used inside camcorders.

[ndog]

Seems to me an optical bandpass filter would would work just fine, passing only the spectrum visible to humans and blocking IR and other non visible parts.

[KolbyJukes]

Originally posted by moovieboy
P.S. Robert Schumann and anyone else associated with that damned DIVX (Digital Video Express) technology can go straight to hell for almost killing DVD in its infancy. I swear to you, I've never stepped into a Circuit City ever since they marketed that sadistic, money grubbing, pain in the ass sham on the public... Not that I'm still bitter about it all these years later (hee hee) The only thing that was ever good about DIVX was that it was officially killed on my 29th birthday! :D

What the HECK are you talking about? :eek:

-Kol.

[Lunatique]

You can never stop the pirates. As long as there are insiders working at movie studios willing to smuggle out screening copies, there will always be pirates. Why don't the movie studios lockdown security at their own damn home base? THAT'S where the pirating is coming from.

[SheepFactory]

I agree with luna.

the movie pirating problem is from the screener rips rather than the low tech handheld camera recordings from the theatre. who wants to watch the movie like that anyway.

here is a simple effective system that would cost them much less:

why dont they add a couple frames in the screeners they give:

ie: this screener is the property of warner bros and is given to Jack Somebody\this company\etc for their eyes only.

put a couple frames like this throughout the movie and when\if a rip comes out they'll know who leaked it.

i think its more plausible than developing new projector technology most theatres wont adopt in the first place.

[mikrowave]

Originally posted by Sheep Factory


here is a simple effective system that would cost them much less:

why dont they add a couple frames in the screeners they give:

ie: this screener is the property of warner bros and is given to Jack Somebody\this company\etc for their eyes only.

put a couple frames like this throughout the movie and when\if a rip comes out they'll know who leaked it.

i think its more plausible than developing new projector technology most theatres wont adopt in the first place. '

They actually do this already, altho they use serial numbers to track leaks rather than names. However, pirate release groups just blur out the serial number when they release the screener.

[tasmanian]

Originally posted by KWAK
What the HECK are you talking about? :eek:

-Kol.

I can see your confusion, I think it's about the original DIVX sytem which was some sort of DVD renting scheme that only lasted a short while. Nothing to do with current DivX compression technology.

Hope that helped...:)

[Amyd]

The screeners will never ever be nominalized (and are not), for the simple reason that no studio will like the idea of going after say... Tom Cruise, just because he borrowed his preview DVD to his driver. The technology is very much in place to embedd invisible data within the image area that could survive even extensive re-encoding, but they simply will never use it on these screener-type discs, unfortunately.

And btw. what is on the other hand taking place right now is that film prints have watermarks on them that are used to track problematic theaters where camera recording sessions happen. This was developed originally by Kodak in 1982 as CAP Code for the MPAA, and has prooved to be quite effective, though the actual succes rate of catching the perpetrators was kept pretty low profile in the media.

Today there is another similar system in use for film releases, which again unfortunately is far more invasive than the original, using bigger dots and therefore degrading the quality of the film print up to the point where the customers have started complaining about it (the film projectionists have already been furious about this - because the system actually makes it look like the film print is dirty and blotched).

But as noted above, the main source of pirated movies has nothing to do with the film theaters, but with screening DVDs, stolen internal materials & other such security leaks taking place at the very beginning of the distribution chain.

Cheers,
Andrei

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