DVD Demystified

The World Before DVD
81
lawsuits in Connecticut and New York in a further attempt to stop the distribution
of DeCSS on Web sites in those states. These suits were based on
the DMCA and alleged circumvention of DeCSS. On January 24, Jon
Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who first distributed DeCSS, was
questioned by local police, who raided his house and confiscated his computer
equipment and cell phone.
This strengthened the viewpoint of many observers that Hollywood was
twisting the law to bully and intimidate the opposition in what was a losing
battle. By this time the DeCSS source code was widely available on hundreds
of Web sites, on thousands of T-shirts, and had even been made
publicly available by the DVD CCA itself in court records.
Around this time a new wrinkle appeared, under a confusingly familiar
name. A major drawback of attempting to copy DVDs was that they quickly
filled even huge hard drives and took literally a week to download using a
56K modem. Copies could be made on DVD-Rs, but blank discs cost more
than the original DVD. As a result, a new DVD redistribution technology
called DivX ;-) appeared. (Yes, the smiley face is part of the name.) DivX ;-)
was a simple hack of Microsoft’s MPEG-4 video codec, coupled with MP3
audio, allowing DeCSSed video to be re-encoded at a lower data rate (and
lower quality) so that it could be downloaded more easily and be played
using the Windows Media Player.
In another ironic twist, Sigma Designs, the leading producer of DVD
playback add-in cards, announced at the beginning of February that it
would add Linux support to its NetStream 2000 DVD playback card.
At the CES show in January, most DVD player manufacturers either
showed or talked about progressive-scan players, even though the number
of potential customers with the needed progressive-scan displays was
miniscule. DVD-Audio players were also on display, but few company representatives
were willing to guess as to when they might finally be for sale.
On February 14, Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, speaking of DeCSS and
other threats to Hollywood’s intellectual property, referred to the Internet,
“where some obscure person sitting in a basement can throw up on the
Internet a brand new motion picture, and with the click of a button have it
go with the speed of light to 6 billion people around the world, instantaneously.”
This led people to wonder where they could get these new ISL
modems 25 that 6 billion other people already had. This Chicken Little attitude,
shared by so many in the motion picture industry, painted digital
video as a dangerous new technology that opened the floodgates of piracy.
25 ISL = instantaneous speed of light, of course.