Personally I’m still not sold on the whole HD thing. Don’t get me wrong, it looks wonderful for certain. However, seen side by side while actually playing (still images are another matter all together), I’ve just not seen enough of an improvement from a properly set up dvd system to that of an HD system. An improvement… yes. Enough of an improvement for me to dish out the money to start upgrading everything? No.
One of the big reasons the studios push for the early adoption of the new HD technology was that it was going to be much much much harder to pirate. I remember reading press releases last year about the great victory over pirates that HD would provide. Yeah well… looks like the victory dance has been ground to a halt as the first pirated copy of an HD movie is now on Bittorrent. The good folks at ARS Technica give us this:
The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.
This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64.
Serenity huh? Good choice.
I will say this for the security of the HD format over that of DVD… at 19.6 Gigs for the movie, even if I was someone who would download films from the internet… there is no way in hell i would even bother with trying to get a file THAT big. Hell, the time alone would be worth it to me to just shell out the $6 to go rent the damn thing.
So out of curiosity… hypothetically… if you were someone who would download movies… would you bother getting a movie that was almost 20 Gigs large?
