Hollywood is doing everything they can to stop pirates from stealing their revenues and now it has proposed a new type of copy protection. The new technology uses sound signals as a water mark, an invisible branding, or in this case inaudible. The primary goal is to prevent copying from cinemas, which is Hollywood’s major source of income. All big movies that are released to cinemas will get a modified soundtrack where speech and music will be a little distorted. Inaudible for the human ear but this will create a digital sound code that all HD DVD-players are aware of. If your HD DVD-player detects this sound code it means someone has copied the movie from a cinema, and the player refuses to play the disc.
“If a DVD player detects the telltale code, the disc must be an illegal copy made by copying a film print to video, or pointing a camcorder and microphone at a cinema screen. So the player refuses to play the disc”
Also consumer media will be water marked which will keep the pirates at bay, but for this to work all players have to support the technology. Something that has to be decided before determining the HD DVD standard at its launch early next year.
