Barry Fox

The first blue-laser optical drives and players are limping onto the market.

Don’t be fooled by the happy absence of regional coding, Image Constraint Tokens (ICT) and Digital Only Tokens (DOT) that stop American discs playing in Europe and disable or downgrade the quality of analogue viewing.

The first players are being launched under an ‘interim’ licence from AACS-LA (Advanced Access Content System Licensing Authority), which controls the AACP (Advanced Access Content Protection) used by Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

The final licence, due next year, will enforce ICT and DOT.

The Blu-ray group says it will use regional coding as soon as possible. HD-DVD will have to follow suit.

There will be three numbered regions; 1 for America, Japan and Asia, excluding China; 2 for Europe and Africa; and 3 for China and Russia. It will be far tougher to hack than DVD’s flimsy regional coding system.

The blue-laser standards battle is not are-run of VHS versus Betamax. When that war was declared, everyone wanted a video recorder – it was just a question of which format won.

Blue laser is a re-run of DVD-Audio (DVD-A) versus Super Audio CD (SACD); or recordable DVD; or UMD (Universal Media Disc) movies for the Playstation Portable (PSP).

DVD-A and SACD were offered to people who were happy with CD and DVD. Most spent their money on Ipods instead, so Apple won that battle.

There were five recordable DVD formats, six if you add the fact that DVD-RW blanks can be formatted in two different ways; DVD-VR mode for editing but no playback on most DVD players and video mode with no editing and better compatibility. DVD recorders now handle four kinds of blank. Only DVD-Ram is usually left out.

The result is a pig’s ear, with headache-making instructions on using all the format, edit and finalise options depending on your media type. In practice, this means VHS is being replaced by hard disk recorders – a terabyte home recor der is due soon.

Sony dreamed up the UMD format, the non-standard read-only mini-DVD, as a way of pirate-proofing movie playback on a PSP. But although games are global, Hollywood regionally codes UMD movies.

It is easy to copy movies from DVD to Memory Stick and then play them on a PSP – with no regional coding. So UMD movies are flopping.

Sony already reads the writing on the wall. The company’s latest hard disk recorder grabs broadcast TV in mpeg2 and mpeg4 at the same time. An hour of mpeg4 then takes only two minutes to transfer to the PSP memory via USB.

Sony’s Location Free TV is a new ‘place-shifting’ system that lets a PSP with Wifi Internet access tap into your home TV and video recordings.

The control software is already available, ready for a summer launch of the base stations that connect a home TV to broadband.

I recently watched BBC TV in a Tokyo café; if I had paid Boeing for inflight Wifi I could have watched it on the plane. Students in digs should be able to watch Sky Sports recordings.

So who needs UMD movies? And who will choose one blue-laser format over the other and risk becoming the mug who bought Betamax?

There is already talk of a blue-laser deck that takes both formats; it will cost more and confuse users just like a multi-standard DVD recorder.

The computer companies tell us we need blue-laser drive for PCs. I’d certainly like a cheap removable disc that can run a full system backup, unattended overnight. But PC hard drives already far outstrip the 25GB coming from blue laser.

Both blue-laser systems use AACS copy protection. A player’s encryption is automatically updated to defeat hackers, by using hidden code on new movie discs. But if something goes wrong or a hacker gets in, the player is rendered useless.

AACS-LA has still not thrown AACS open to pre-launch challenge, as the music industry did with the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) protection systems.

Princeton University, you will recall, hacked this and SDMI admitted defeat. AACS-LA ducks comment and remains ‘not able to confirm who the appropriate contact is at this time’.

A terabyte home recorder, downloading HDTV movies from the Internet or by satellite, looks more attractive every day.

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