Oscar race sees DVD screeners leaked, players phased out

It looks like the movie industry's reliance on DRM has hit a few stumbling blocks in this year's Oscar race, with a number of DVD screeners leaked onto BitTorrent and the movie industry's oft-despised DRM-friendly DVD player now getting phased out after just a few years of service. The player, the S-View, was developed by Dolby subsidiary Cinea in the hope of preventing those aforementioned screeners from leaking out, but it's been met with virtually nothing but complaints since its introduction, with its large size and lack of user-friendliness the main points of contention. That apparently leaves good 'ol watermarking as the main means of protecting DVD screeners which, as mentioned earlier, certainly doesn't keep them from leaking out altogether, but at least lets studios track 'em back to the source.

[DJWhiplash2001 @ Dec 27th 2007 4:38PM]

Oscar season is what gets most of us downloaders through the winter :).

[Elliott @ Dec 27th 2007 5:00PM]

Cheers to that, and kudos on the Ariel Atom Top Gear avatar.

[Miles @ Dec 27th 2007 4:46PM]

Hopefully the screeners will get HD-DVD and Blu-Ray now.

[wickedpheonix @ Dec 27th 2007 9:12PM]

+1 comment of the day

and I sincerely hope they do.

[Adrian Williams @ Dec 27th 2007 4:48PM]

It's a shame the Stargate new movie is already leaked and it don't come out till march

[OneLove @ Dec 28th 2007 11:10AM]

stargate movie!? where!?

[Adrian Williams @ Dec 28th 2007 12:09PM]

I would get banned if i tell you so email me [e-mail]

[mcatrage @ Dec 27th 2007 5:09PM]

They weren't leaked onto bittorrent they were leaked onto the internet. First not everyone uses it and second the release didn't even start there.

[Ishimaru @ Dec 28th 2007 9:43AM]

Sigh, thus the reason I hate Bit Torrent. Seriously gives release groups and The Scene a bad name :(

[Sergio @ Dec 27th 2007 5:24PM]

I worked for Cinea Support. The players weren't the only ones phased out... :0(

[jivetrky @ Dec 27th 2007 5:28PM]

Those watermarks don't stop anything as, if you have seen any of these leaked screeners (not that I have or anything), the person/people that have released them blurred the watermarks.

[Josh @ Dec 27th 2007 5:46PM]

I'm sure the industry could come up with better than just visual watermarks

[HarrytheHood @ Dec 27th 2007 6:04PM]

The watermarking system uses a noise pattern that is superimposed on the picture, it's pretty much invisible unless you are comparing it side by side with the original. the watermark can be detected by running it through software that looks for specific patterns. most broadcasters are using these systems now.

[Salsa Shark @ Dec 27th 2007 8:13PM]

I bet running it through After Effects or Super will munge things up so that any embedded watermarks can't be read. Those types of watermarks haven't historically worked well in static images, so I don't see them working in video...

[earthling @ Dec 28th 2007 9:32AM]

The watermarks are not the visual watermarking that has been mentioned, the watermarking is a pattern of bits spread out over many, many frames. Think of a single luminance bit (brightness) modified in an uknown area of the frame, and it is modified in such a way as to not be noticeable. The bit modifications can happen to one or more components (mainly luma) and are encoded with error correction. The bit pattern and error correction are again spread out over many frames, think 'thousands' or more frames for a single bit pattern. Then consider that the watermarking can have sevearal layers (patterns) each of which can overlap the other and can co-exist. The watermarked patterns can withstand geometric distortion (skew, reversal, flipping, etc) as well as spatial distortion (scaling to a different size). Because the pattern exists in the low frequency domain, it also can withstand massive amounts of compression (which affects mostly high frequency content). I have posted this before but the watermarking being used (primarily from philips
http://www.business-sites.philips.com/contentidentification/Section-14117/Index.html)
was tested by the key people (DOPs, directors,producers, colorists) in the industry. The test was showing a pristine digital projection, split screen with watermark content on one side and non-watermark content on the other. This was shown on a full size theater screen. Remember this is the same content on both sides of the screen. Industry veterans and film fanatics were asked to find which side contained the watermark. Not one person could and this is on a full size theater screen not your dinky monitor. They then recorded the screen with a hand held, MPEG4 baseline keyfob (gogear) video recorder. They were able to recover the watermark from the crappy video on this hand held recorder. http://www.amazon.com/Philips-GoGear-Wearable-Digital-Camcorder/dp/B0001K58YC

Yes it works, no you are not going to remove this with any combination of after effects or other processing and yes it will survive being turned into a divx file or any other compressed file (no matter how many passes you put it through). The person who leaks this content should be very worried.

[jivetrky @ Dec 28th 2007 9:56AM]

As I mentioned....have you seen any of these leaked screeners? apparently the person that leaked them was smart enough to figure out where the watermark was located and blurred that section of the film. Here is a link to a screenshot of the leaked No Country For Old Men screener

So I can only assume that in those blurred sections is where there was a watermark and it is now masked by the blurring effect, so it would seem that the person that leaked this file (and several other's I've seen) probably won't need to be worried.

[jivetrky @ Dec 28th 2007 9:58AM]

Hmmmm, I guess we can't post links as text, here is the link to that screenshot I tried posting:
http://static.toptorrents.org/images/206763/86855.jpg

[Corey Walker @ Dec 27th 2007 6:01PM]

What the heck is a 'screener'?

[Elliott @ Dec 27th 2007 6:03PM]

...n00b

[theDude @ Dec 27th 2007 6:06PM]

'...n00b'

LOL! Thanks geek :>)

[Dave @ Dec 27th 2007 6:38PM]

for the help of the "n00b" it's a copy of a movie sent out to critics and reviewers to 'screen' because they're too cheap and lazy to go see the movie in theaters, or the movie is not released yet/limited release. Being Oscar season, a lot of movies find their way on the internet.

[Elliott @ Dec 27th 2007 7:00PM]

Sorry...habit from back when I used to use IRC.

[UKNigel @ Dec 27th 2007 10:24PM]

What's IRC?

jk ;)

[ssuk @ Dec 28th 2007 5:22AM]

Stupid fucker.

Oops, bad habit back when I used to give a shit.

[audiocronic @ Dec 27th 2007 10:56PM]

What's a n00b?

[Abdullah Manzoor @ Dec 27th 2007 11:49PM]

>What is IRC
>What is a noob

Not funny, retards.

[Mike @ Dec 28th 2007 1:45AM]

WAIT... You mean DRM DOESN'T WORK!?

Gorsh....

[John @ Dec 28th 2007 8:35AM]

I actually got some decent screeners this year; Pirates, Kite Runner, No Country for Old Men, 310 to Yuma, There Will Be Blood, Into The Wild, etc.

Haven't watched any of them, but also not inclined to upload them and lose this most valuable of industry perks.

[gaymoomin @ Jan 2nd 2008 2:55PM]

Hi John, would you consider selling a copy of your screeners to me? ;-)

[palehorse @ Dec 28th 2007 11:01AM]

mmmm.. screeners! We lub Osca season!

[srussia @ Dec 28th 2007 12:38PM]

Looks suspisciously like the old KISS Technologies (now Linksys) DP-558, which BTW runs Linux.

http://www.kiss-technology.com/?p=558_sp&v=user