RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/117159662819871806
I'm not sure I agree with a lot of this. The high-level point is mostly correct but the details are a bit all over the place.
For example:
That's why DVD players are not DVD recorders: the consortium that developed the DVD embedded "hook IP" in the technology.
There are a lot of reasons for this. First, it ignores that there are several DVD players on the market that are also recorders (my stepfather bought one, long ago. It might even still work). Early on, there were three competing standards for rewriteable DVDs. And all of them were expensive. DVD+RW (not to be confused with DVD-RW) was probably the best for recording video. Like DVD, it recorded in a spiral, so seeking was slow but you didn't need to jump between tracks, whereas DVD-RAM recorded in concentric circles making seeking better and making it a better choice for for computers.
This lack of a single standard meant that it took ages for any of them to reach large enough economies of scale. By the time DVDs were cheap enough for me to consider them for backups, they were too small. I got a DVD writer at the same time I got three 2 TB disks for my NAS. A single rewriteable disk cost about £5, when the hard disk cost about £100. I never actually wrote a single DVD because I didn't have anything I wanted to back up that fitted on such a small medium.
And this was also the problem for DVD recorders: Single-layer disks could store less than a full film. Dual-layer disks were more expensive, could store about one full-length film in DVD (MPEG-2) format, as long as you didn't mind the layer transition.
But, hard disks were really cheap by then. A TiVo-like thing could store hundreds of hours of video on a machine with no need to manage a library of removable media. And this was much more useful for most users. Especially since these devices typically supported USB hard disks.
At the same time, MPEG-2 was really old. The two video CODECs in MPEG-4 were much more efficient. A 700 MB CD with MPEG-4 ASP could hold a similar quantity and quality of video data as an MPEG-2 single-layer DVD, with MPEG-4 AVC it could store more.
You could record AVC onto physical DVD media but then you couldn't play them in a generic DVD player. If you used a hard disk, this didn't matter: you were playing them back on the device that recorded them anyway.
but there were zero DVD player owners who wanted region coding.
This isn't actually true. The DVD region encoding allowed different pricing in different regions. The people in regions where the DVDs were sold much more cheaply. The region coding existed to allow two specific kinds of market segmentation (and also to keep the PRC censors happy, but that's unrelated):
The first was film distribution. Back when DVDs were launched, most cinemas still used cellulose films for projection (these days, they're mostly digital). These were quite expensive to produce. Most Hollywood films were first shown in the USA then the same physical film was transported to Europe and elsewhere. The region numbers actually correspond roughly to the order in which parts of the world got the film stock. DVDs launched in regions after the film had stopped being shown in cinemas.
This use case was not great for consumers. It meant that you couldn't buy a US DVD after the US cinema run, you had to wait until the end of your cinema's run.
But the other one was price segmentation. Richer countries paid more for DVDs and this subsidised the cheaper prices in the poorer countries. The region marking means that DVDs bought in poorer countries couldn't be sold in richer ones (they wouldn't work). Without this mechanism, Hollywood wouldn't have been able to offer the DVDs at a price that people in the poorer countries could afford. This actually was a desirable feature for a bunch of people who wanted to be able to afford DVDs.
Long after the price of read/write optical drives plummeted to pocket-change, there was still no such thing as a home DVD recorder that would let you stick a spindle full of discs next to the TV and use them to record all your favorite shows.
Single-disk recorders existed but they failed in the market for the above-mentioned reasons. The spindle version would have been far more fragile and expensive to build than something that used hard disks. If such a thing existed, it would have found no market.
The only thing the CSS license said you couldn't do of relevance here was copy existing pre-recorded DVDs to new DVDs.
The much more interesting thing that they did was prevent format shifting. The Betamax ruling made this explicitly legal. The DMCA made this legal unless an effective copy protection mechanism existed.
Audio CDs had a copy-protection scheme. This was a two-bit scheme where every CD had a 'is this copyrighted' flag and an 'is this a copy' flag. CD recorders were required to set the second flag and were allowed to copy anything unless both flags were set.
This was ruled not to be 'effective' because it's trivial to bypass by just skipping one flag.
This is what allowed iTunes and the iPod to exist. Apple was able to ship a portable music player and a user-friendly program that copied CDs into a format that they could put on the portable player. This was all legal under Betamax and the DMCA because the copy protection was not 'effective'.
They also had an early design for a video iPod along with a version of iTunes that would rip DVDs, let you watch them on a Mac, and put them on a video iPod for playing on a small screen or connecting to a video out and playing on a TV.
Apple approached the DVD consortium for a license to do this and it was rejected. The product never shipped. This probably cost the US economy more than the entire revenue from Hollywood in the same period.
The final argument is one Cory's made before and one I wholeheartedly agree with. The EU should also revisit the EUCD. In particular, the EUCD was pushed by the Blair government at the behest of the Bush government. Brexit has removed the EU's incentive to listen to British idiots, and Trump has removed the EU and Britain's incentive to listen to American idiots.
@david_chisnall
Region encoding isn’t a pre-requisite for differential pricing.
