DVD Recap

Lucky Green, a well-known cryptographer, has written another account of the DVD hearing on Wednesday. Green's account is really good; he lays out the situation, and, more importantly, what needs to be done.

If its money we need.....

[Zaffle]

....then we may just fail.

I cannot recall any time where the Open Source or Free Software community has come together to provide money. Yes, donations are made to various organisations related to this, but as far as I'm aware, nothing big.

This will be an interesting test. The article claims we need money to put together a good case. If we do manage to get together enough money, I really suspect that it will be due to only a few peoples/companies contribution (eg: A recently very rich person who may own some stock in some little linux company ;) (No, I'm not saying he should donate money, nor am I asking, but I wouldn't be surprised if he did. It could certainly start the ball rolling.)

I guess it *COULD* happen. But geeks are lazy, if the EFF was to put up a page where you could enter your credit card #, and an ammount (and state everywhere on the page that ANY ammount (even $5) will do. Then maybe...

But personally, I probably won't unless I can see it will do good. So we need something to start the ball rolling. A slashdot article would help, but I suspect a large number of people will visit, but not many will donate.

But then again, maybe they will. As I said, geeks are lazy, but if all it requires is our credit card number, an ammount, and press the "submit" button, then maybe I will, and maybe others will donate.

One thing I would suggest for the page would, once (or if) things start rolling, put an indicator indicating the ammount pledged so far. (And maybe a $/hit ratio on the page). But I wouldn't put it on immediatly, it would be rather dissapointing to come to the page and see "$22.50 has been donated. 4000 people have visited this page"

mmm, *shrug*, thats my thoughts on the matter. You can probably ignore all that ramblings, but put up the page anyway. I wanna max out my credit card. :)

No DVD on Linux except what we create ourselves

[heroine]

Theoretically you can still make movies on Linux and create your own DVDs. This brings up the same problem that the suits who generate encrypted DVDs point out every time. There aren't enough people using Linux to justify offering a legal solution and the people using it are getting younger. When I started, the average user was a college senior who had a reasonable amount of money to throw at DVDs. Today the average user is a highschool sophomore who isn't going to throw any money at DVD sales or have the resources to create their own footage. It's pretty expensive to pay someone to get a closed decryption engine on Linux. Even if today's Linux user had enough money, there isn't the multimedia market in Linux users that there was before BeOS came out. Even VALinux and RedHat brush off the slightest idea of Linux as a multimedia platform.

New URL

[Phaed42]

The post got moved out of "current". It's here now:
http:// www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.1999.12.27-2000.0 1.02/msg00064.html [inet-one.com]

Hardware DVD decoding on Linux?

[ErfC]

Forgive my ignorance, but what about video cards that handle DVD? Can't they (or the DVD drives themselves) decode the DVD's without the legal issues surrounding cracking the encryption?

New URL for this excellent summary

[Senior Frac]

That URL is now out of date and the article has been archived here. [inet-one.com]

Re:Hardware DVD decoding on Linux?

[UpInTheClouds]

The video cards/dvd decoding cards themselves do nothing more than aid in mpeg2 decoding (cpu-intensive, in case you didn't know). To watch a DVD movie, software that includes CSS decryption code must be used. No corporation that has liscenced CSS has developed software for Linux. This is why DVDs can not be played in linux without using a program like DeCSS to rip the movie. This is because most programs for linux are open source, and no one would actually pay for a linux dvd player. Not to mention that, at this point, linux is not a very viable multimedia platform. Hopefully this will not be true forever...