Opinion: High-def players won't copy

PC World - Imagine Olympic skaters lined up at the starting line, but the ice ahead of them isn't ready for the race -- not a pretty sight. Yet backers of Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD are in a similar situation.

And consumers are in even worse shape. If they want to enjoy any of the cool, futuristic copying and sharing features that the next-generation formats were expected to support, they still have to wait.

Vendors of the two high-definition optical disc formats poised to succeed DVD have been champing at the bit to release players for prerecorded high-definition content in both formats. But they've been forced to change their product launch plans because of delays in finalizing the content protection specification that both formats will use -- and that neither format's proponents control.

Welcome to the world of next-generation DVD. Public relations wars, misinformation (no, these players won't track what you're watching via an Internet connection), and repeated delays (some in the industry recall when AACS -- Advanced Access Content System -- was supposed to be finished by December 2004) have created a messy state of affairs that's only going to get more complicated when products arrive this spring.

AACS: The interim solution

After the apparent ease with which the Content Scrambling System copy protection on standard-definition DVD was broken years back, it's not at all surprising that Hollywood and the technology community would want to take their time to work out the details on the AACS and get it right from the get-go.

However, some of those details just weren't ready in time for consumer electronic companies' product release schedules. In fact, Toshiba -- which later this month expects its first HD-DVD players to be the first next-generation products on store shelves -- was manufacturing the players before the interim AACS spec was reached. The company expected to add whatever updates were necessary via firmware before the products shipped.

To accommodate Toshiba and other companies that wanted to start shipping their high-def products, the AACS Licensing Association came up with a somewhat bizarre solution: It released an interim spec that enables Hollywood studios to securely encode and distribute their content and supports playback of that content on players. But the interim version of AACS has limitations, most conspicuously the lack of support for managed copy.

"Managed copy" is industry jargon for the technology that lets content providers offer legal free or fee-based ways for you to move content around on a home server, make a physical copy of content for backup purposes, or transfer it to another device such as a portable media player.