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Schematic of the BD Plus system
BD Plus now available to help prevent Blu-ray piracy

Blu-ray Disc is getting another layer of content protection with the availability of BD Plus (BD+). The system, from BD+ Technologies LLC, is now complete and available to all Hollywood movie studios and content developers for implementation in Blu-ray Disc media.

Issued by BD+ Technologies are system specifications, key management rules, test specifications and various agreements. Also launched are a key issuing center, testing centers for players, and testing facilities for disc playability.

With the recent compromises to the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), BD Plus represents a new DRM scheme in hopes to thwart piracy. The BD+ system is believed to play a part in several Hollywood movie studios’ choice of which high-definition optical format to support. As the HD DVD specification does not account for BD+, movie studios such as Fox may have sided exclusively with Blu-ray Disc for its extra levels of protection.

The attacks on the AACS have also had a noticeable effect on the release of movies from Blu-ray-exclusive studios. Neither Fox (which holds the Star Wars movies) nor MGM (has the entire 007 catalog) have released any Blu-ray movies since April. The release of the new BD+ system, however, may soon change that.

BD+ differs from AACS in its complexity. Effectively an embedded virtual machine inside player hardware, BD+ allows content providers to include executables on Blu-ray Discs to perform specific, content protecting functions. For example, the BD+ virtual machine could run diagnostics on the host environment to see if the disc player has been modified, or to verify that the keys have not been changed.

As part of the BD+ scheme, video may be deliberately corrupted or modified to prevent the ripping of the data stream for piracy purposes. The BD+ environment, once verified, will correct and descramble the content to render it viewable.

“BD+ will be the proverbial thorn in the side of Blu-ray movie rippers,” said optical storage analyst Wesley Novack. “With AACS and BD+ switching up encryption keys and methods routinely (BD+), it might become too much work to determine how to rip every Blu-ray Disc title out there.”

BD+ is a system made for Blu-ray Disc, but not all implementations of the media are required to support the system. In fact, support for BD+ is less that for AACS. Of all categories of BD-ROM, only game consoles, movie players and BD PC software are required to work with BD+ encoded media.

Although an entire generation of Blu-ray Disc (and HD DVD) titles were cracked by a single AACS processing key, the extra layer of BD+ should make it much more challenging for hackers. Unlike AACS, BD+ can protect each Blu-ray Disc with a title-specific code, making the circumvention of the scheme much more involved than finding a single “silver bullet” processing key. Crackers would need to reverse-engineer each title individually to bypass the protection. While that task may be difficult, it may not be impossible as PC software with virtual machine-based protections, such as StarForce, are still being circumvented.

“Only time will tell and there is no guarantee that BD+ will be effective against the persistence and tenacity of the talented online community,” added Novack.

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BD+
By mdogs444 on 6/21/2007 3:46:47 PM , Rating: 5
If they can code it, someone can crack it. Its just common sense.

Make it as difficult as they wish, but I really think hackers get off on that. The harder it is, the more gratification they get from overcoming the protection.

And in the online DVD piracy communities defense....until we see BD/HDDVD Burners on the market for an affordable price, I could really care less whether it is or is not possible to copy Blue Ray.




RE: BD+
By Terberculosis on 6/21/2007 3:50:02 PM , Rating: 5
The best defense against piracy would be to make the disks completly unreadable. Just burn whitenoise on the whole disk. Then the damn hackers could never get the video off of the disk. Foolproof!


RE: BD+
By mdogs444 on 6/21/2007 3:52:41 PM , Rating: 4
And the crazy white noise ghosts will haunt them in their computer monitors!


RE: BD+
By Webreviews on 6/22/07, Rating: 0
RE: BD+
By splint on 6/21/2007 8:29:48 PM , Rating: 5
Did anyone notice how carefully those quotes were constructed so as not to inadvertently taunt the crackers? I remember how the hubris of the CSS developers lit a fire under the collective ass of the cracking community many years ago. It seems the DRM guys learned their lesson.


RE: BD+
By Duraz0rz on 6/21/2007 3:53:09 PM , Rating: 2
So true about the cracking thing.

I'll admit to ripping movies, but I would rather have them run off the hard drive of my computer (where it's relatively quieter) than in the DVD drive. It's less of a distraction when I'm watching movies on my PC.

And with my plans to use my PC not only as a gaming machine, but also my movie watching machine, I'll be ripping more movies that I own onto the hard drive.


RE: BD+
By mdogs444 on 6/21/2007 3:54:40 PM , Rating: 1
Divx/H.264 -> 700MB vs 4.7GB on my HD, ill gladly take the compressed codec :-)


RE: BD+
By Duraz0rz on 6/21/2007 3:55:51 PM , Rating: 3
I hate compression, though. Even though DVDs are already compressed, it's not as compressed, and the visual quality is usually lacking, too.

I usually rip to straight ISOs and mount them via Daemon Tools.


RE: BD+
By mdogs444 on 6/21/2007 3:58:31 PM , Rating: 1
Ill have to try that. I only have two 250gb HD's, so that isn't going to go very far!


RE: BD+
By Tmansport on 6/21/2007 4:03:47 PM , Rating: 2
Try x264 and I'll be damned if you can tell the difference between a 1.4GB encode and the original DVD. It will take more resources to play than xvid/divx, but the quality is indistinguishable (to me) and you save ~3-5GB per movie. I really wish there was a method of retaining the special features other than using Divx 6 though.


RE: BD+
By Duraz0rz on 6/21/2007 4:11:57 PM , Rating: 4
How's the audio quality? Special features don't matter to me anyway...I buy DVDs for the movie haha.


RE: BD+
By alifbaa on 6/21/2007 4:31:29 PM , Rating: 2
I use Nero recode, and you can select a HE audio codec with whatever bit rate you want. I know it can recode Dolby 5.1. I can't remember if it can do 6.1 or not. It can't do DTS (or at least doesn't recognize DTS audio when I rip a DVD). Sound quality is every bit as good as the video quality -- you will never notice the difference unless you have an excellent system (nothing you can buy in a store), are listening to the same track back to back, and really know what to listen for and how to hear it.

I've tried a few freeware transcoders, but unless you want to make a career of learning the finer points of transcoding, I don't recommend them. Those who are motivated enough to get them to work seem to say you can get even better quality than Nero, which is hard to imagine. I think we're probably talking about different degrees of "damn good" quality levels. If you are hard up for DTS decoding, you probably have to look for one of the freeware transcoders though.


RE: BD+
By bhieb on 6/21/2007 5:02:21 PM , Rating: 2
I personally use AnyDVD and Clone2DVD and leave it uncompressed (6.8TB server in Raid6 just like to brag a little), they work great.

< Soap Box here I come >
It really chaps my arsh that this is even illegal. I certainly understand copying stuff you don't own, but if I want an online move catalog of all the stuff I do own why the hell do I have to resort to cracking stuff. I don't care if it has DRM just give me away to store it on a central server in my home, and use it throughout my house as I see fit. Obviously if I am spending $9,000+ on the server space to store it, the extra $19 to own the DVD is not that big of a deal. IMHO the cost to store the data is deterent enough with HD.


RE: BD+
By elpresidente2075 on 6/21/2007 7:54:55 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
IMHO the cost to store the data is deterent enough with HD.


As much as I'd like to agree with you, think of how many DVD's you can put on a $120, 500gb hd right now: 100+. Now, certainly HD content is much more space intensive, but 25-30TB drives are only a couple years off, and that would quickly invalidate your argument.

Why is it illegal? Protection of an outdated business model. I'm sure the issues will work themselves out in 10 years, and we'll all have content we can use however we want (legally obtained, of course) without any fear of legal repercussions. Until then, and even long after, don't distribute any rips you make, and you'll be fine. Noone's gonna arrest you for making backups of your content and doing it solely for backup purposes. They'll go after those who rip the ISO then distribute it over the internet or burn it to 1,000,000 disks and distribute them for $3 in Hong Kong or Taiwan or some other known pirating place.


RE: BD+
By Tmansport on 6/21/2007 9:38:23 PM , Rating: 2
As much as I'd like it to happend, I don't think hard drives are going to get 30x more storage in just 2-3 years. They're beggining to hit a wall with current technology and would need a technology with amazing density storage to achieve 25TB on one drive, let alone four or five.


RE: BD+
By Xavian on 6/22/2007 12:08:01 AM , Rating: 2
Holographic Storage says Hi.

Sure it may not be 2-3 years but in 5 years max, Holographic storage will mature to a point where 20-30TB Hard Drives will be possible.


RE: BD+
By ZoZo on 6/22/2007 6:09:19 AM , Rating: 2
25TB on 5 HDDs will be possible in 2 years using current technology. Samsung just released their 3-platter 1TB HDD which means 334GB per platter. Hitachi has 1TB with 5 platters. If Samsung made a 5-platter HDD it would have 1.66TB of storage space. In 2 years we can assume that the density will have trippled, and that 1TB per platter will be possible, and so 5TB HDDs will.


RE: BD+
By spluurfg on 6/24/2007 7:07:12 AM , Rating: 2
I take issue with your assumption that in 2 years, we can assume density will triple. The superparamagnetic effect will probably limit us before this -- the new drive platter densities already take advantage of perpendicular magnetic bit storage technology... I doubt we can achieve significant jumps in density until we move to three dimensional storage.

You can't simply plot growth ad infinum. Using your rationale, I could predict that the Earth is capable of growing an amount of corn equivalent to its own mass every year, given enough time, and using the current 1.4% growth rate in grain production (quoted in this week's Economist).


RE: BD+