squiggleslash @ May 16th 2008 1:51PM

BD+ is simple in concept only. The VM provides access to the machine's internals, which vary from player to player. The idea is to make it difficult for a hacker to emulate a "real" BD+ enabled player by making the process so impossibly complex that every assumption made can be undone by the next disc.

And that's why it's screwed up. What we have here is the DVD equivalent of 1980s home computer game protection schemes, where games would poll memory locations and run carefully timed loops in order to determine whether they were running on an unmodified Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum, and fail if the machine was modified in any way. The systems didn't work then - oh sure, they made it slightly harder for people to make copies of games, providing some level of complexity that delayed cracked versions, but it didn't work in terms of false positives. Simple motherboard improvements caused swathes of games to stop working.

BD+ lives in a far worse environment. How, exactly, is a BD+ runtime supposed to deal with potentially thousands of variations on a theme in terms of Blu-ray players? The answer, of course, is that it will not. For every BD+ runtime that detects a "real" compromised player, it'll knock out a dozen legitimate ones.

BD+ is flawed. Saying "Yeah, well AACS is bad because it doesn't protect Blu-ray or HD DVD discs strongly enough" doesn't really cut it because it doesn't address the damage BD+ does to the Blu-ray platform. The damage it causes is enough to compromise Blu-ray's ability to be a viable format for the future.

The choice really is "more piracy" or virtually no hard copy sales whatsoever. With BD+, the result is the latter. Indeed, with BD+, it may not be a choice whatsoever: if there are no legitimate routes (and without Blu-ray being viable, there aren't), then piracy may end up being the only winner.