Petteri Pyyny
9 Nov 2002 9:22
NewScientist has an article, which makes us all video and DVD freaks cry because of its misuse of technical terms, but it has some interesting details about Macrovision usage in new DVD discs.
Several movie studios seem to push new DVD series out, dubbed as SuperBit, which seems to be rather ridiculous marketing method. Basically these discs are regular DVDs, just without all the goodies, such as extras, etc. Instead of the extras, discs were encoded using slightly higher bitrate, generally ranging between 4 and 8 MBit/sec (maximum videostream bitrate allowed on DVD specs is around 9.8MBit/sec). And how does this differ from regular DVD releases that generally speaking have average bitrate of 5-6MBit/sec? I have absolutely no idea.
But anyway, the point in here is the fact that these "SuperBit" discs don't have Macrovision copy protection. Macrovision is basically a dummy analog copy-protection that prevents VCR recording of the movie. All discs still contain all the other copy-protection methods, including the CSS (and those other copy-protection methods cannot be copied by normal humans, but they do require hackers -- according to the article ;-)).
Obviously Macrovision isn't very happy about this, since they make their money from licensing the protection method to movie studios.
Source: New Scientist