Engadget reported the news shortly after it first appeared in Twitter.  HDCP is configured in such a way that should any particular key be cracked it can be wiped and replaced.  What’s now been discovered apparently is a master key that can permanently unlock the content.

The key is described as being a  ”a forty times forty element matrix of fifty-six bit hexadecimal numbers” and so far, and quite understandably, nobody knows who has created the crack or how effective it will be, even if it works at all.

No doubt this will generate enormous interest over the next few weeks and caus great concern for the movie companies, who were banking on the enhanced security of Blu-Ray after the encryption of HD-DVD was cracked.

The upshot is that if the key is made public, and works, there will be little to stop people copying high definition content to play anywhere, and little to stop them except another costly format change the public might not accept so recently after Blu-Ray’s introduction.

That said there can be no doubt that with higher capacity Blu-Ray discs already on the way, the movie studios and technology companies behind the format will already be looking at ways of beefing up the security, and will no doubt have anticipated this news.

The race is now on as to who succeeds first.

Downloads are taken from sources like Apple Trailers, Yahoo or other websites that post high definition movie trailers. It is possible to download the trailers directly from the website but it surely is not as comfortable as downloading them automatically.

HD Trailers Downloader is a portable software to download All or only today’s movie trailer from HD Trailers. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework and will initiate downloads automatically after execution. It comes with a .config file that can be used to configure several of the key features of the software.

The config can be used to set the quality preference, download path and to select all or only today’s downloads. The quality preference may contain several different formats separated by comma. The first available format will be downloaded and the others skipped if multiple are available. If none are available the download will be skipped completely. It should also be noted that already downloaded movie trailers will be skipped on successive runs.

It is necessary to change the download path to a valid path on the computer system. All hd movie trailers will be downloaded into separate directories by default. HD Trailers Downloader can be configured to run once a day to grab all the new movie trailers from the site.

It was created as a reference tool and will display results seconds after execution. The results are divided into two categories. Basic Playback will check if the hardware of the computer is able to play Blu-Ray movies. The diagnostic tool will analyze the cpu, system memory, video card, disc drives but also the software players and video connection types available.

The detection is not overly accurate but should be sufficient on most occasions. It did detect 2 Gigabytes of computer memory on a system with 4 gigabytes installed. The Blu-Ray Disc Advisor will show if the items are Blu-Ray ready. A green icon means the hardware or software component can playback Blu-Ray movies while red means it is not capable of, yellow means an upgrade is required and brown means that the software cannot rate that item.

The second tab analyses the advanced Blu-Ray playback capabilities of the computer hardware. This includes special features that are included in some Blu-Ray movie titles like Internet interaction or picture-in-picture.

Items will be tested for dual-video decoding capabilities, network capabilities and player capabilities. It is possible to save the information in a log file and visit the Cyberlink website for additional information about items that are not Blu-Ray capable.

That seems to have been a major concern for the developers over at Dailymotion because they decided to develop and release a high quality option for users of their video portal. High quality videos look better than the default low definition videos but require less bandwidth and computing power than high definition videos. A compromise between quality and technical requirements so to speak.

The high quality option displays videos encoded with the H.264 codec which according to Dailymotion does not require additional bandwidth compared to the SD version of a video. It furthermore uses AAC 96 kbps audio encoding and a resolution of 512:384 and 30 frames per seconds.

Dailymotion created a website detailing the advantages of the high quality codec by displaying an standard definiton version next to the high quality version which gives a good impression of the quality differences.

The high quality version has to be enabled once by clicking on the Dailymotion Menu button and selecting the High Quality option.

The setting will be stored and the option will be enabled for all videos from then on. This is also the menu to change to other quality settings like high definition or back to the standard definition videos.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington have developed a software application that automatically enhances a video by using several photographs of the same scene. This takes the higher resolution and detail of photos in comparison to videos into account to deliver stunning enhanced videos.

Take a look at the original images in the upper row and the enhanced images in the lower row.

While it might be nice to see the differences on photos it is more interesting to see a video with moving pictures and a voice explaining the technique in greater detail.

The technique has a few limitations. It currently works only on static scenes, meaning scenes with no moving objects except for the camera and lighting. It furthermore takes roughly 5 minutes to compute one 800×600 frame.

A code dump of the project is available on the project’s website which might be useful as a reference for implementing the algorithm.

The problem is that it can be very frustrating for a broadband viewer. If you do have the bandwidth to spare and want high definition (HD) video, then Veetle is for you. It’s a Silicon Valley based firm who’s USP is to let the average viewer watch and broadcast HD quality video.

Veetle works a lot like popular video-sharing site Veoh. Before you can watch a video, you have to download and install the VeetleTV software on your computer. After that, you can watch the videos in your browser itself. VeetleTV works on Windows, Linux, and Mac so there are no OS compatibility problems here.

Rather than have individual videos displayed on the site, Veetle lists video channels. Depending on your preferences you can choose from action movies, the NBA, European football, etc. amongst the current crop of channels. They also had a few channels covering the Olympics but those have been taken off for copyright violations. If you want to broadcast your own videos, you need to have a computer with a minimum CPU of 2 GHz in addition to a broadband internet connection.

Veetle reminds me of programs like Miro, Sopcast, TVU Player, etc. You install a client and then watch the videos. Since Veetle is relatively new, they don’t have too many channels just yet. Content seems to be okay. When I checked the site, one channel was showing a HD version of Blood Diamond while another one had the Japanese anime Hikaru No Go. The sports section looked nice as well.

What are you currently using to watch TV online? Would you like to try Veetle out or does the prospect of downloading the software put you off? How tempting is the idea of free HD video on your computer? Let me know in the comments.

Today should have been the day where Vreel goes live but unfortunately though this is not going to happen. The date has changed from May 6th to May 2008 and they have added a temporary forum and added several new questions to the FAQ.

And the information there make me doubt that the service will last long enough to become a serious competitor. In the forum thread “Why aren’t you launched yet” three answers are given why Vreel has not launched yet.

Firstly, our (previous) lead programmer liked to keep us guessing by vanishing for days at a time – making it near impossible to communicate any changes to him. I’m not sure if he’s even aware that we’ve switched to Vreel.net. We’re currently working with a highly regarded coder team, in order to avoid any further delays and disappointment.

So they switched from one coder to a coding team. It does look however make them look relatively amateurish.

Secondly, this thing has literally exploded since we started up – following the green light we got from DivX, we got a huge amount of attention – and a couple of servers based in the US just wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Limelight Networks approached us with a contract with thousands of servers all over the world at 1.8TB/s+ connectivity – which we just couldn’t turn down. This does add on a small workload, and will slightly lengthen the testing process – but we shouldn’t be looking at any sort of dramatic time increase here.

That’s an understandable reason. Adding new servers, or a cluster of servers from another network should take a while.

And finally, we’re in the process of speaking with advertisement partners. As any videophile in the world can tell you, streaming HD video eats bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow – and rather than collapse under our own debt within a month, we’d prefer to find a solution which will allow us to run freely, without having to shut down most of our servers, or forcing a paid subscription.

This reason is the one I’m worried about most. They do not have a monetization concept yet which should be one of the first concerns when planning a high definition video portal. The Divx creators were not able to monetize their portal properly and decided to shut it down because of bandwidth and maintenance costs. What makes you think they will succeed where a company with huge ties in the Industry could not ?

The videos on Stage6 have a far better quality than everything that you can find at Youtube for instance. It became apparently that popular that the company did not have the resources to continue the portal on their own. Unfortunately they did not succeed in finding a buyer for the portal which left them only with the option to shut it down completely.

The major problem for the users was that they had to install a plugin so that they could play the videos at Stage6. Not a huge problem but it could have turned many away from the service.

I’m really wondering why a company like Microsoft would not take advantage of such a great video portal and make a bid for it. It’s a sad thing to see this portal being shut down. My advice, head over there now and watch / download all the nice stuff that you can find there. Lots of nice documentaries, music videos in high quality and the like.

It’s really worth it. The portal will shut down on February 29th 2008.

I’m not a huge fan of Sony and have still hopes but it looks pretty sad for the HD DVD supporters. Those consumers who have bought a HD DVD player will face a huge problem much like the Betamax users faced back in the days when VHS did win that race. It occured to me that the consumer is always loosing in this kind of wars.

If you pick the wrong player you will have to purchase another one to be able to view high definition videos, if you pick the right player you contributed to a monopoly, and it’s Sony this time – it will be awful, it’s a Sony after all.

Two studios, Paramount and Universal are still backing up HD DVD and press releases suggest that they have no intention to change their stance in the near future. Movie fans are still facing the problem that a choice can’t be made if they wanted to watch movies from all studios unless they would purchase a more expensive dual player that would play Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies.

Many Blu-Ray and HD DVD movies are currently offered at Amazon for 50% off and player prices have been reduced as well. You can purchase a HD DVD player for $149.99 and get five HD DVDs free as a bonus which is an attractive offer.

My stance on this matter remains unchanged. I will boycott both formats and won’t purchase a remaining format as well if there should be a winning format in the near future. I do so mainly because of DRM and all the crap that is loaded into those players. I also have no intention to update my player’s firmware regularly because the manufacturer published a new firmware to fix some security holes.

That’s not what I want and I’m pretty confident that this is something that most consumers do not want as well – if they would know that is.

The german computer magazine CT apparently found a way to copy Blue-Ray and HD-DVD movies. The first movie players on Windows XP that are capable of running those protected movies allow the print screen key to work which saves a hd image of the current frame to the computer. Automating that screenshot function to take 24 / 25 / 30 was the logical next step.

The mag calculated that it would not be a problem for todays high end computers to save all images in real time. All that was left to do is join all images. The result ? A high definition movie of course.

The mag tested this exploit with Sonys first Blue-Ray Pc Vaio VGC-RC 204 and with Toshibas HD-DVD-Notebook Qosmio G30. Both were running a special OEM version of WinDVD.

Upcoming versions of WinDVD will most likely be patched.