squiggleslash @ Nov 17th 2008 9:46AM

The ironic thing about this is that Hollywood would point at what's happening and say it's a success for their anti-piracy technologies, not a failure.

Blu-ray is "protected" by a variety of technologies. Some of these, such as BD+ and the encrypted part of AACS, are intended to prevent unauthorized players from having access to the material. Of course, this is all BS, both systems are cracked and it's improbable they'll have any long term affect preventing people from ripping the streams. But these are two of the weapons, anyway.

The other "protection" is provided by preventing authorized players from having access to unauthorized material. This is also provided by AACS, plus ROM Mark. AACS factors into this by its mere presence - you need to buy a key to get a disc encrypted by AACS, and an authorized Blu-ray player cannot play an unencrypted pressed Blu-ray disc. So there's a clear audit trail for every pressed Blu-ray disc back to the AACS LA. And ROM Mark is a key that's unique to each duplicator that needs to be pressed onto each disc that duplicator makes. Again this leaves an audit trail between every disc and the outfit that pressed it. ROM Mark prevents Blu-ray replicators from making bit-for-bit copies of legitimate Blu-ray discs.

Now, combined, these technologies make it more difficult for someone to produce knock-off versions of regular Blu-ray discs, as they did DVDs and CDs. Which is why you're seeing these lower resolution pirate versions. The 720p limitation has nothing to do with AVCHD, it has to do with the fact the movie has to fit on an inexpensive DVD5 or DVD9. Encoded at 1080p, with a single soundtrack, you probably can get a good transfer into a DVD9, but I'm going to suggest here that all of these discs are probably DVD5s, given DVD-Rs are dirt cheap compared to DVD-R DLs. 720p with H.264 or VC-1 encoding allows a reasonable, mostly artifact-free, encoding of around 2-3G per hour, which makes it perfect for 4.7Gb DVD-Rs.

To Hollywood, the fact that the pirates are unable to mass distribute their HD content without significant recompression is a win.

In the longer term, it's possible BD-R prices will come down to something reasonable which may counter all of the above. On the other hand, it's seriously questionable whether this will come within the next two years or so, after which Blu-ray's relevance as an HD distribution format may well have come and gone.