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Comments: 417 +- Your Rights Online: DRM Group Set To Phase Out "Analog Hole" on Friday June 12 2009, @09:16AM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday June 12 2009, @09:16AM
from the next-we-encrypt-the-output-of-your-optic-nerve dept.
from the next-we-encrypt-the-output-of-your-optic-nerve dept.
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eldavojohn writes "In yet another bid to make your life a little more annoying, our DRM overlords at the AACS Licensing Authority have released a new AACS Adopter Agreement. The riveting, 188-page PDF will inform you that — in the name of Digital Rights Management — there will be new limitations set on devices that decrypt Blu-Ray discs. HDMI already has the awesome encryption of HDCP between the device and the display unit. But Blu-Ray still has the Achilles heel of analog players that allow someone to merely re-encode the analog signal back to an unencrypted digital format. So if you have an analog HDTV, hang on to those analog decoders and hope they never break; by 2013 you won't be able to buy a new one. Ars points out the inherent stupidity in this charade: 'Particularly puzzling is the fact that plugging the so-called "analog hole" won't stop direct digital ripping, enabled by software such as AnyDVD HD. And even the MPAA itself recommends using a camcorder pointed at a TV as a way to make fair use copies, creating another analog hole.' And so the cat and mouse game continues. On that subject, DVD Jon's legit company just brought out a billboard ad for his product doubleTwist next to Apple's San Fransisco store. It reads, 'The Cure for iPhone Envy. Your iTunes library on any device. In seconds.' So while he's busy taunting Apple, I'm certain there are others who might have some free time to look at Blu-Ray and the 'uncrackable' AACS."
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DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
You are not a customer. You and everyone else who pays for their content is a potential criminal. The only thing keeping you from being a criminal is your regular payments to them for the content you watch, and you have to be careful only to keep and watch content that you have paid for.
The **AAs have a very difficult job of keeping these maybe criminals from becoming real criminals and all they get is flack and complaints from the people they serve; which just goes to show just how criminal those people really are.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's the problem.
When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
Since they are so late to the game at even thinking of providing legal downloads, and those downloads are still so amazingly technically inferior, they couldn't compete with piracy even if they were free, and they're not.
The sad thing is, it's trivially easy to compete with piracy, but so far, I don't see anyone besides Hulu even making a decent effort -- and even Hulu is questionable, as piracy is still a convenient way to break them out of that player and skip the ads.
Parent
Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Piracy. No, seriously. These people are creating new rights for themselves, by locking up their content in a way that was never intended by those who invented copyright. Copyright exists for one single purpose: to create an incentive for the creation of new content, and it was structured as a time-limited monopoly, not a perpetual one. As such, I have absolutely no qualms with breaking the laws they've bought over the past 50 years.
Now, if you do have problems with piracy, might I suggest this alternative: by the Blu-ray disc, thus paying the content creator for their work, and then download a pirated copy. At least then you can still avail yourself of the rights (such as format shifting) that they're trying to take away from you. Of course, this still rewards the content creators, thus encouraging further attempts to restrict your use of the material you bought with your hard-earned cash...
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Re:DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's not even that...
The fact is, none of these are so much the creator's rights, as their ability to restrict yours. Put in that context, it suddenly becomes very clear whose rights are being violated.
Parent
Re:DRM (Score:5, Informative)
I like to think of them as incentives. That's all they are, really. Copyright law when originated actually was based on the understanding that information, once made public, naturally becomes public domain... that this is GOOD, and to be encouraged... and they encouraged it by a temporary artificial monopoly with the end goal being MORE PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS.
The propaganda by the beneficiaries of this public largess has been so successful that most people now actually think that copyright violation is stealing, actually think that information in MY head can be someone else's property... actually think that this is natural and proper. Insane.
Copyright was an incentive. Like a government small business loan, enterprise zones, tax breaks, cheap hydro power for industry, taxpayer subsidized NFL stadiums, whatever.
Parent
Re:DVD's and blu-ray with digital copies (Score:4, Informative)
"Now available on DVD and blu-ray disc. Digital copy included"
This means there's a second disc containing an AVI, yes.
That AVI is DRM-protected, such that you need special plugins for WMP or iTunes (or a handful of other media applications) to be able to open them, which needs to be authenticated against an internet server every time you want to watch or transfer the copy.
My guess is so that they can say "Look, we gave you the video in a digital format, and still you download it for your iPod, all your claims are now null, and we own your soul"
Parent
Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it is different in the US than here, but I'm not sure why you expect rights like format-shifting and time-shifting - who granted those rights to you?
Because those rights always existed until the media cartels decided to try and take them away? Again, the VCR is a classic example. It embodies both format and time shifting, and was ruled entirely legal by the US legal system. To be specific, the right is called "fair use", and it's pretty well established in law. In fact, format- and time-shifting is *still* legal, and considered fair use, even in the wake of the DMCA. What's *not* legal is the distribution of a device who's purpose is to bypass DRM... and that's the case because the media cartels managed to by the DMCA.
A better question you should be asking is, why *don't* you expect rights like time- and format-shifting? How dare the owners of the copyright to these works attempt to dictate what you can and can't do with the copy you purchased with your hard-earned dollars? Who are they to decide if, for your own personal use, you should take a CD and rip it to an MP3? Or copy a DVD onto your media server so I can watch it without needing to pop in a disc?
I think the nerd community's expectations of digital rights is tainted by the availability of ripped downloads
And I think your expectations are coloured by the fact that you've just come to expect content to be restricted (heck, depending on your age, you've probably become fully indoctrinated in the idea). But, historically, it's a relatively new phenomenon, and it's one we shouldn't simply accept as not only inevitable, but moral, as it's neither.
Parent
Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
Well there is no DRM on an oil painting. Suppose I want to format shift it to acrylics. Assuming a device that could do it, would it be ethical?
If you owned the painting, yes, why not?
Would I have the "right" to sell the oil painting and keep the acrylic version?
No, as that would be distributing a copy of the work, a right you do not have (legally and, IMHO, morally).
It feels like petulant children who have been told that they are not entitled to the cookie after all.
Read again. I'm far more concerned with the robbing of the public domain, and the attempt by the media cartels to lock away large portions of our collective culture simply to enrich themselves.
See, your mistake, I think, is that you believe the copyright issue is a small one, unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and really just about people wanting to download things for free. But in that, you are wrong. What we're seeing the the progressive destruction of culture. I mean, imagine if Shakespeare's works had been protected under a DRM layer? The works would likely have been lost to us, and I think it's safe to say that that would've been disastrous.
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Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
The users of ThePirateBay may beg to differ. It is maddening, really. I can get everything there in wonderful quality, convenient and widely usable formats, and usually in a timely manner. Music in lossless quality, current episodes of US TV shows in HD quality and without any commercials, HD films with both original audio and translations - no regional discrimination, no formats that only Windows Mediaplayer can handle, no forced trailers, anti-piracy propaganda or "you may not do x, y and z with this film" nonsense, no annoying menus that take the better part of a minute to actually present me a button to watch the film, and I can freely convert all of it for my portable devices and take it with me. Plus the catalogue is huge! Even really obscure stuff that no retailer carries is available there. I have yet to see any commercial offering that even remotely comes close to this. The only feature I miss in the Bay is an option to directly send money to the artist(s).
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Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that would be nice. However, because you don't have that option, you /are/ paying for the original product before downloading in this super-convenient format, right? Because you think that you should be paying for products and services you enjoy?
But, by doing that, people would be discarding their ability to influence the market, thus causing the market to fail.
You see, if a producer is providing a product that isn't to your liking, what is supposed to happen is that you turn to the competitor instead, thereby informing the producer through your lack of purchasing their product that the product is not what you want. This, ideally, will influence the producer to change the product in order to compete.
If, however, the black market is the only competitor, and you try to "do the right thing" by buying the product and then getting its more convenient equivalent from the black market, you are telling the producer that their product is what you want, and therefore failing to influence the producer to change their product in order to compete.
So, most people see the choice as this: either buy the product as its offered and accept its limitations, or go to the black market to get what you want and send a message to the producer that their product is not acceptable.
What GP was saying is that he'd like to send the appropriate message to the producer, while still rewarding the creators for their effort (note: creators != producers).
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Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:DRM (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean "downgrade". But don't worry, if you get the pirated version, it won't have this restriction (and you will be able to start the feature immediately, without all the unskippable warnings, advertisements, and menu animations).
Parent
I, for one, welcome our new DRM overlords. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I guess it's time to upgrade (Score:5, Funny)
Not-so-awesome encryption (Score:5, Informative)
HDMI already has the awesome encryption of HDCP between the device and the display unit
As usual, an encryption system that (likely) cost millions to develop, can be defeated with a simple device.
http://www.hdfury.com/ [hdfury.com]
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this company in any way; this is not an endorsement, only a link to a potentially useful resource.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For varying levels of "defeated" at least. That's just an HDMI to VGA converter, apparently one that has a valid HDCP handshake, but none the less one that's ultimately only useful for taking advantage of the analog hole. A HDMI->HDMI/DVI HDCP stripper would be far more useful, and much more impressive. Who even has a RGB input on their TV these days?
Re:Not-so-awesome encryption (Score:4, Informative)
Um, anyone with an HDTV has an RGB input. They call it component video, and it's been available on every HDTV ever shipped, and some newer SDTVs. HDMI and DVI are quite new in comparison. The HDFury claims to be able to take HDMI/HDCP and output component 1080p. That's a damn handy device when paired with older non-HDCP displays and things like the HD-PVR that can record component and output h264 digital streams.
Irritating as hell that one would have to spend a couple hundred on something like that when we have perfectly capable component video inputs and outputs though.
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Re:Not-so-awesome encryption (Score:4, Informative)
Component is not RGB in spite of the color scheme they have chosen for the connectors. It is split as luma (brightness) and two chroma channels where the third color channel is derived from subtracting the two sent from the brightness. RGB explicitly sends a red, green, and blue color signal, with sync sent either separately or muxed into green.
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Re:Not-so-awesome encryption (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Not-so-awesome encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
this is another reason to boycott drm that is part of bd.
the 'disable' list.
do you want your video card, tv (etc) marked as 'do not run' ?
its RISKY to even mount a BD disc, given that it has unknown malicious (truly, if you think about it) code.
"a virus with every movie. for no extra charge."
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Sound Familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Any techology that relies on a device sold and physically owned by a consumer denying access to said consumer is doomed to failure. Rinse and repeat.
It's one of the reasons, but certanly not the main one, why I am totally non-plussed by so-called 'High Definition' and BluRay. I did try setting up a theatre system once for someone with a receiver box relaying video through HDMI to a TV. HDCP refused to play ball because the BluRay player didn't like the arrangement. Hmmmmm. Not only do I get to not watch something because of a DRM system, I also have to buy completely new content that is currently a lot more expensive. Bound to be a success.
Re:Sound Familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
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Blu-Ray vs. Online Content (Score:4, Interesting)
The content industry has not made a compelling case for me to ditch my DVD collection. My upscaling DVD player makes most of my DVDs look great on my HDTV. Why should I subject myself to DRM and an incomplete spec by upgrading?
What's more, if Apple succeeds in making HD downloads seamless and reasonably fast with their new compression technologies (and/or internet bandwidth improves significantly in North America), then it's game over for Blu-Ray. Why should I invest in Blu-Ray and bother driving to a brick-and-mortar store when I might not have to?
Apple left out Blu-Ray from Macs for a reason.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ignore them? (Score:5, Insightful)
> "I'm certain there are others who might have some free time to look at Blu-Ray and the
> 'uncrackable' AACS."
On the other hand, one could simply ignore BlueRay altogether. Believe it or not, you almost certainly can live without it.
Re:Ignore them? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that we will see the same thing with video that we did with music.
The normal consumer when presented with the choice between "quality" and "convenience"
will choose convenience. The ability to have the bulk of your DVD collection in the
palm of you hand where ever you go will probably be considered more desirable than
image quality on a large screen that you many not have or may not percieve or may
not care about.
Give a kid the complete Ben 10 in the palm of his hand and he
won't even realize that there is a much bigger TV in the room.
Parent
If they do this, I will have no choice... (Score:3, Interesting)
..but to rip them a new a-hole.
Seriously, how do you stop the analog hole? Stop the laws of physics? The Human sensory organs are analog. At some point, you are going to have an analog signal traversing the gap from the output device to the human.
Just wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
And even the MPAA itself recommends using a camcorder pointed at a TV as a way to make fair use copies, creating another analog hole.
Just wait for MPAA to get a wind of watermarking and demand camcorder makers to embed watermark recognition to disable video capture of the oh-so-precious intellectual property of theirs.
I'm gonna tell them to... (Score:3, Funny)
Kiss my analog hole.
Ther's no TV in Star Trek (Score:5, Funny)
Now I know why TV died in the era of Star Trek. People just got tired of all the DRM.
On the up side, they did invent warp drive and transporters...
So, maybe DRM isn't all bad.
opting out (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't own a Blu Ray player. I briefly owned an HDTV but went back to the old analog TV. Sorry, but I'm opting out. The digital entertainment revolution today isn't selling anything that I'm buying. If that means I miss out on things, so be it.
When it was easy to back up a DVD, I legitimately purchased over 600 movies. As the copy protections became increasingly difficult to work around, I simply stopped buying. Hollywood stopped getting my money. I took all that money that I was spending on DVD's and bought a motorcycle instead. Now instead of sitting on the couch wasting 90-120 minutes of my life at a time, I'm spending that time enjoying getting around (rain or shine) like never before.
It's been a year since I ditched the HDTV and maybe 2 years since I stopped buying DVD's. I don't miss it.
Don't like the terms they are giving you? OPT OUT!
Re:opting out (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a very important point. Far too many people nowadays complain about some service or technology but hand over their money anyway. It reminds me of this idiot post I read recently where people were complaining about a game developer. This guy actually posts that he was going to buy this particular game anyway, but he was going to give them the finger on the way out the door.
Congratulations, what this guy has accomplished is the equivalent of being kicked in the nuts and giving the attacker a back rub in response.
The clearest message a consumer can make is to not buy products from companies they're not happy with. And this means not pirating as well, because by pirating you're merely saying that the demand exists and thus justifying the constant push for DRM. These companies are obviously convinced that some day they're going to develop totally effective DRM.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. Especially considering that none of this is really a necessity for living. There are other, potentially more fulfilling, ways to entertain yourself.
Parent
will blu ray succeed? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the DVD did not have netflix streaming. The DVD did not have online instant download purchase and rental. The DVD did not have the legacy of broken promised that the DVD delivered. Who believes that producers are going to invest in fully utilizing the Blu Ray features.
It seems to me that given the increases in bandwidth and processing power, in five years the movie industry will be at the place that music industry was a few years ago. Desperately trying to protect content, adding increasing layers of copy protection to the media, and losing sales because they made the purchase product so much less attractive than the alternatively acquired product. The reality is that the DVD is easy to crack, but sales are still very strong. Back in the VHS days, the copy protection did little to stop the coping of tapes.
If the copy protection is done right it will be transparent. More than likely no one will care. But I suspect that the copy protection will add costs to the products, which will make them less attractive. I suspect we will see DVDs for a long time, and when they are gone, people will just download the content. I can't imagine that Blu Ray will ever be a major player in the average household. It will be like plasma tv. An interesting plaything for people who can afford it.
Permanence (Score:5, Interesting)
And so we move another step towards the future described in Karl Schroeder's novel Permanence, where even the military has to pay microtransaction fees continually to keep their equipment running... even when they're chasing down people who refuse to take part in the "Rights Economy".
Maybe You Should Read the Article (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, that ad for DoubleTwist was pulled down a week ago:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/06/vdouble_twists_ad_ripped_down_by_bart_before_wwdc_too_dark_really.html
Seriously, Slashdot is becoming great lately for re-reading old news that I read on other tech sites days earlier.
Yeah, I realize this but if you read the Wired article that I linked:
Johansen wanted the ad displayed Monday, the first day of the Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. That's when the Cupertino, California-based company unveiled a host of new products and prices. But it was taken down, Johansen said, because he was told the ad did not allow enough light through the subway station window.
The entrepreneur said he submitted the same ad to Titan Worldwide with a white background instead of a black one. He said Titan rejected that one, too.
Finally, the ad with a transparent background was approved and displayed Wednesday afternoon, Johansen said. Pending another brouhaha, the ad will remain there for months, he said.
I may have been this-side-up blitzed last night when I submitted this and I may have no recollection of submitting it but that ad is still on display!
... Sweet Spaghetti Monster my head hurts.
Funny how it is you who are the one that is out of date
Re:BluRay? (Score:4, Informative)
"When they wise up and replace LCD/plasma with viable technology,"
The screen technology isn't the issue - its all the digital decoding that goes in inside the TV. The days of LCD screens having noticable lag are long gone though I'll admit they're still not as good as the best CRT. However , LED screens will be along in (hopefully) 5 or so years and it will leave LCD and plasma as a footnote in the techno history books as its way better than either picture wise plus it uses less power.
Parent
Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed while the Samsung LED TVs are not true LED TVs [wikipedia.org], I noticed that they are using free software in them. Page 91 of the fine manual [samsung.com] reads...
GPL software: Linux Kernel, Busybox, Binutils
LGPL software: Glibc, ffmpeg, smpeg, libgphoto, libusb, SDL
Kinda neat, though I wonder what kind of VD they have in mind for their software manager...
-l
Parent
Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Insightful)
I got a nice 50" plasma and decided it was time to upgrade to blu-ray to make sure I'm geting the most out of my set. So I went out and bought myself a nice Sony Blu-ray player and set out for an adventure. At first I was a little dissapointed, I needed a flash drive to get BD-LIVE to work, but none the less I was determined to get everything out of my $300 that I just plopped down. I plugged in my USB drive and started up BD-Live, only to find out it's literally just trailers for other movies. Why is this a feature? There are other "BD-Live" apps, which if I recall correctly, are written in Java. I always thought the idea of Java really opened up the doors for the platform, but it turns out nobody cares, nobody's trying for anything revolutionary. There's a program to Re-Edit a movie with your own notes and captions, and there's this trailer app. And you need the disc in to use them.
To keep this short, I'll say this, the BD-Live features seemed like something the studios should be paying me for. I really don't understand why a new venue for advertising to me is a feature I should be excited about.
Anyway, the picture quality itself was good, but rewind, fast foward and similar features responded so slowly, that they were useless. It felt like the remote just wasn't connecting- but if you pressed the button once and waited five minutes, it would eventually pause/rewind/fast foward.
I decided I didn't like it, and returned it for a samsung with netflix and pandora- oh what a mistake that was. The features were minimal. No animated menus, clunky browsing, impossibly slow, same issues as the last- but this one had tracking off on both digital and analog audio signals. I can't make my audio receiver make the audio faster- only delay. The TV, unfortunately, don't have any such feature for the delay. How annoying.
TLDR; Blu-Ray has been aroung long enough that it should be a stable technology. They're selling shit for big prices trying to convince people it's better, but it's worse than DVD (and dvds and players are cheap). There's no reason to upgrade. Even if the picture is nicer, I don't care.
P.S. I'm returning my last Blu-Ray and not buying a new one.
Parent
Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good plan. You were lucky. If AACS thinks that stopping an analogue hole is going to help anything at all they are seriously stupid, people are breaking copy protection on blu-rays all the time just to watch their discs:
I recently built a new computer and decided that while I was upgrading hardware I would buy a blu-ray drive and see the latest and greatest. So I went to Target and first was completely shocked at the prices of new blu-ray. That's okay, even since the winter holidays the blu-ray discs have been on sale fairly often (e.g. buy two get the third free) so that at least brings the price down to DVD levels. I bought a few movies I thought would look good in Blu-ray like the newest version of Bladerunner and pop it into my drive and VLC won't run the blu-ray movies because of the DRM. No problem, I boot windows and start up the powerdvd that came with the drive and low and behold, I get a helpful message that my widescreen monitor is not HDCP compliant so I can't watch the movie in high resolution. So I head over to doom9 and download dumpHD, but no dice, my drive has had its firmware updated and that blocked the access key dumpHD was using. Okay, well, I thought, I'll get anyDVD and strip that copy protection right out. So I do that and now the movie plays at full resolution, except that the powerDVD that came with my drive is a crippled copy and won't play surround sound, only stereo. No problem, I go back to vlc which now helpfully plays the un-DRMed m2ts files and play the individual movie files (just not the virtual machine). Only problem is now I have surround sound, except if the disc has DTS, the channels are mixed up so the center channel is the surround and the surround left is the center and the surround right has nothing. What I'm left with is having to boot into windows to run AnyDVD, then run eac3to.exe to strip the DTS sound file to an AC3, then run tsmuxer to remux the sound and video files, and then watch that using VLC (not to mention the amount of hard drive space I need for these movies is huge).
All of this crap just to watch my legally purchased blu-ray movies on my legally purchased blu-ray player on my legally purchased computer. What a load of horse shit, I hope Sony goes completely completely out of business and blu-ray goes extinct.
Parent
Re:BluRay? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget, While Dvds will look ok at 720 vs 1080, Dvds themselves are 480, while bluray is 1080. Even on a 720, a bluray should be considerably better than a dvd.
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Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought about this too, but I realized something: movies shot with analog film have a much better resolution than the DVDs they were later transferred to. Unfortunately I can't find a nice link right now for it, but ultimately the resolution of an analog film is determined by the size of the light sensitive crystals used on the film roll when it was shot. Regardless of what that is, it's much better than the 720×480 (for NTSC) that DVDs are. A blu-ray is getting closer to the resolution of the original film that was lost with the DVD that followed television standards. E.g., when I watched full metal jacket on blu-ray on a big monitor, you could actually see the graininess of the film. I don't remember seeing the last time I watched the movie on DVD. Maybe it's because they needed to do a restoration and re-master before they cut the blu-ray, but I was impressed.
Parent
Re:BluRay? (Score:5, Interesting)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video [wikipedia.org]
Most major motion pictures are shot on film. Film is a very high resolving medium, with resolution measured by testing its ability to resolve pairs of black and white lines, the unit of measurement is cycles/mm - one "cycle" consists of a pair of lines and is equivalent to two pixels, one black and one white. Film by itself can commonly resolve from 50 c/mm to 400 c/mm (100 pixels/mm to 800 pixels/mm) depending on emulsion stock. However, since the image on film is formed by exposing it through a lens and this lens also has its own resolution limits, the final resolution on the photographed negative is always less than each component's individual resolution.
Depending on the year and format a movie was filmed in, the exposed image can vary greatly in size. Sizes range from as big as 24 mm × 36 mm for VistaVision/Technirama 8 perforation cameras (same as 35 mm still photo film) going down through 18 mm × 24 mm for Silent Films or Full Frame 4 perforations cameras to as small as 9 mm × 21 mm in Academy Sound Aperture cameras modified for the Techniscope 2 perforation format. Movies are also produced using other film gauges, including 70 mm films (22 mm × 48 mm) or the rarely used 55 mm and CINERAMA.
The four major film formats provide pixel resolutions (calculated from pixels per millimeter) roughly as follows:
Academy Sound (Sound movies before 1955): 15 mm × 21 mm (1.375) = 2160 × 2970
Academy camera US Widescreen: 11 mm × 21 mm (1.85) = 1605 × 2970
Current Anamorphic Panavision ("Scope"): 17.5 mm × 21 mm (2.39) = 2485 × 2970
Super-35 for Anamorphic prints: 10 mm × 24 mm (2.39) = 1420 × 3390
In the process of making prints for exhibition, this negative is copied onto other film (negative interpositive internegative print) causing the resolution to be reduced with each emulsion copying step and when the image passes through a lens (for example, on a projector). In many cases, the resolution can be reduced down to 1/6th of the original negative's resolution (or worse). Note that resolution values for 70 mm film are higher than those listed above.
Typical high-definition home video uses the following resolutions:
1280 × 720
1920 × 1080
Usually when studios master movies for home video release they use assets in high resolution and then master them to 1920 × 1080 and/or 1280 × 720. For standard definition applications (e.g., DVD or SDTV), they are also anamorphically compressed and mastered to 720 × 576 (PAL) and 720 × 480 (NTSC).
So yeah. Even those really old movies will look much better in HD since the original films from even 1955 exceed 1920x1080 resolution. Quite a few old movies I see that weren't recorded in digital film are 'grainy'. That is, you can see the grains from the film.
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