HD DVD hacked. No surprises there

THE FIRST THING that should be said about the latest hacking-cracking-tweaking of the HD DVD copyright system is that it's no surprise. Not even a little bit. If there was a physical example of ‘the writing was on the wall' then the letters for this one would be a hundred feet tall.

If you were to look at the thousands of stories written, rehashed, rewritten or blatantly copied about this incident, you'd swear that something truly amazing had happened. But it hasn't. And worse, the idea tht rampant global piracy of HD movies is about to go into overdrive is just blatant lies and scare-mongering.

That AACS has been compromised - again - is just nature taking its course. If you put a billion-dollar digital rights management (DRM) system out there in the wild then you can officially expect the geek hordes to descend on it, with the kind of feeding frenzy reserved for shopping malls in zombie movies. And, when that DRM is protecting the first wave of eye-poppingly beautiful high-definition movies, you can't really expect anything less. This latest hack isn't even a hack, so to speak. The chap involved says he used no tools or reverse engineering, just managed to be tracking what was happening with his memory while running a HD movie. Is that a hack, or just good eyesight? Whatever he did though, it's definitely put another embarrassing dent in the tarnished reputation of the costly AACS protection system. So much so that the AACS camp has been strangely silent about its potential impact this week. They are, how can I put it, ‘looking into it'.

The sad fact, which is no surprise to anyone that has ever copied, er, backed-up, a [legitimately owned] CD or DVD, is that we've been here before and it's just HD's turn. It was inevitable. After all, what system, OS or otherwise, is truly secure? That's why I can't understand the furore. Anyway, what's someone going to do with a ripped 50GB movie?

There are damn-all drives capable of burning one of them and the discs are not exactly cheap. In fact, the blank discs are not that much cheaper than the retail HD movie itself. Even if people do get hold of a pirated one at the local car boot sale (highly unlikely), they'll need a HD DVD player to play them on. There are some notebooks with HD DVD drives and some standalone dedicated players from Toshiba, but not a lot. Too few, in fact, to even register on the threat-ometer.

So, if it's unfeasible for most of the planet to financially afford or technically burn copies of them onto blank HD media, what's left? That would leave storing them on a hard disk drive or external HDD. At 40-50GB a pop, how long until you filled up a 500GB disc drive? Exactly. And at what cost - say £120 for a 500GB disk drive averages out at around £10-12 per movie. The retail versions cost under £20. You know, the one that would come in the shiny official case, with a pretty booklet and that whiff of authenticity. The only other option would be to rip the HD movie then compress the crap out of it so that you could fit it on a smaller blank disk, or save space on your hard disk drive. This would result, however in a loss of resolution, leaving you with a Not-So-High Definition Movie. And that defeats the whole point of HD in the first place. Also, while storage might be getting cheaper, we are not yet at the stage where everyone can easily afford a few Terabytes under the desk.

There's also the issue of broadband speeds. Obviously, these DRM breakers are going to put whatever they rip on a torrent site for people to download but that doesn't means the planet is capable of downloading it. Unless you are very lucky indeed, you have a real-life broadband speed that's a fraction of what was advertised when you signed up. Thanks to high contention ratios and restrictive download limits, 40-50GB downloads are just not feasible.

So, while AACS has been kicked in the balls for the second or third time in as many months, there's really nothing most people can do with the content. There's not enough HD drives out there to burn content, the dedicated players are still expensive, the blank media is too expensive, the files are too big for most people to download and storing them on external HDDs is not the cheapest option. Does Hollyweird really have anything to worry about yet? µ