Mac, DRM, and HD-DVD Blu-ray?

Sunnz

Sunnz

Who wants a stylus?
Steve Jobs has made it pretty clear in his open letter that Apple is against DRM and has worked to take some DRM out of iTMS.

However, Mac being 'the multimedia platform', it is gotta to support HD-DVD & Blu-Ray some time in the future right?

I have been wondering, how is Apple going to work with it in their Macs?

As far as I heard of, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are really DRM-driven, it is not just region code and CSS encryption on DVD, but there is a whole lot more to it.

From what I have read from the Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, it is very Open Source unfriendly, and even Vista-Ready & HD-Ready hardware may not work well with it!!! And of course, Vista itself has heaps of DRM built-in for it, one of the thing it can do is to disable HD-DVD & Blu-ray entirely if it thinks one of your hardware may be able to bypass the DRM!!!

So how would Apple support it without DRM?

As far as I know of, Linux has some work done with it and is able to get some HD-DVD Blu-ray content with totally Open Source code, and of course, no DRM, though it is still immature, but I think it is possible for Linux to become 'the premium content platform' if others are buried under the hell of DRM.
 
You misunderstood that open letter, quite probably. They primarily want DRM-free _music_, and EMI's recent news shows that Apple's probably going to get it.
Steve Jobs was asked about video in a Q&A afterwards and he said that with video it was different. Audio is already released without DRM on Audio CDs, so DRM online simply doesn't make much sense. With video, it's different. All your DVDs are DRM'd already. So are Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disks, as you've stated. But it's no problem for Apple to support playback of those DRM'd media. They've never said they're going to remove all DRM-support in Mac OS X or anything like it.
 
No. Unless you want Apple to remove DVD Player or its ability to play commercial DVDs, for example. I think the important thing is that Apple clearly recognises that DRM is a bad idea in the first place. Where it has been implemented in the past and out of Apple's control (example again: DVDs), Apple has to support it technically in order to allow us to play such content. Where it _does_ have a say, however, Apple is obviously working to set media free, and if it _is_ set free, they embrace the DRM-free versions.

I don't think all DRM will be gone anytime soon. But if the music market shows that piracy is not directly related to DRM/DRM-free media (because it only takes _one_ hacker to "free" a medium in order for everybody to share and copy it "freely"), we might see a change in other industries like the movie-business.

The question, at the end of the day, is what users think in their minds. Do they think "I want that movie so I'll go buy it/download it on iTunes/rent it somewhere" or do they think "I want that movie so I'll illegally download it somewhere". Those minds, in my humble opinion, are not really changed by DRM/no-DRM. Rather, they're changed by enhanced content that people actively enjoy paying for.
 
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