April's Fools - Leaked emails on Ultra HD Blu-ray format reveal very restrictive DRM features

As some of you already guessed correctly, this was our April's Fools joke. It may have been very mean, but you cannot imagine how much fun it was for us to prepare this joke. Thanks to everyone discussing this topic.

An anonymous source provided us with emails that were gathered during the Sony hack last year and contain information about DRM restrictions that the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is planning to apply on upcoming Ultra-HD Blu-ray discs and players. The mail was leaked from the mailbox of BDA chairman Victor Matsuda, who is also Vice President, Visual Entertainment Project Office, Sony Corporation of America (SCA).

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Blu_ray UHD 500px

According to this email, Ultra-HD Blu-ray will have some very rigorous DRM measures that have a significant impact on how you can use your legally purchased products:

  • Before you can play a disc on your Ultra-HD Blu-Ray player, it needs to be registered online and will then be permanently tied to your player. From that point on, your playback device must be permanently online to enjoy the UHD content. The disc cannot be watched on a different player, unless one of the following exceptions/scenarios applies to you.
  • Offline devices will still allow restricted playback of the disc in SD resolution.
  • There will be an online portal that allows you to "share" discs with friends for a small fee. The friend will need to register the disc for use on their own player, while the owner has to approve the lending and is not allowed to watch the disc for the duration of the "sharing" period.
  • There will also be an option to permanently change the registration of a disc to a different player. As with the "sharing" option, a fee will be required. The amount of re-registrations for a given disc will be restricted to one registration change every two years.
  • For payment, several methods like In-App purchase, gift cards, credit card, and Paypal will be available.
  • In addition to the audio watermark "Cinavia", Ultra-HD Blu-Rays will also embed a video watermarking technology called "Vidthenticity". So far we have not found any information about who is developing this technology or how it will work.
  • In order to prevent illegal copies, the format of the discs will also be different from current Blu-Ray discs. This results in a 20% increased capacity, but also means current drives will not be able to read Ultra-HD Blu-Ray discs. The new UHD BD players will be compatible with standard Blu-Ray discs, though compatibility with DVD or CD was not explicitly detailed in the email. (This is similar to early BD playback devices, and similar to the limitations of the PS4 at its launch).
  • Due to the declining optical drive market, we might not see compatible PC drives anytime soon. They will be using an enhanced version of AACS copy protection, BD-J will return as part of the specifications, and TV sets must support HDCP 2.2 or above to enable HD/UHD capabilities.

On the positive side, the leaked email again confirms that HEVC (H.265) video codec will be used and High Dynamic Range will be supported, allowing for even better video quality, however video resolution will be restricted to UHD (3840*2160), with support for real 4K resolution (4096*2160) left unspecified.

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Leaked-Email

The mail also contained a sample picture of a disc that contains a QR code for an app based registration of the disc as well as a 24 letter code to manually register the disc. Obviously this does not seem to be an actual disc but rather some photoshopped sample.

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