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Following the release of an Ultra HD (3840×2160 resolution) copy of Smurfs 2 last month, two new Ultra HD Blu-ray films have been released. Ultra HD Blu-ray discs can store 50-100 GB of H.265 encoded content, with 10-bit color depth, high dynamic range, and a wider color gamut. While the AACS 2 encryption protecting these discs may not have been cracked, it seems to be ineffective:
There's quite a buzz among movie pirates who have an eye for high-quality video. After the first Ultra HD Blu-Ray disc leaked last month, two more releases have now followed. While some have rumored that AACS 2 encryption may have been cracked, a bypass is just as likely. And with the leakers themselves staying quiet, the mystery remains.
Up until a few weeks ago, full copies of UHD Blu-Ray Discs were impossible to find on pirate sites. Protected with strong AACS 2 encryption, it has long been one of the last bastions movie pirates had to breach.
While the encryption may still be as strong as before, it's clear that some pirates have found a way through. After the first pirated Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disc leaked early last month, two new ones have appeared in recent days.
Following the historic "Smurfs 2" release, a full UHD copy of "Patriots Day" surfaced online little over a week ago, followed by a similar copy of "Inferno" this past weekend. The latter two were both released by the scene group TERMiNAL and leaked to various torrent sites.
First there was Smurfs 2. Now there are three.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Celestial on Thursday June 15 2017, @04:37PM
Rumor on the street is that Disney (so far the last remaining 4K Ultra HD hold out), is about to enter the fray with a 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray release of "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" in a couple of months. I wonder if they'll force some changes to deal with this.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday June 15 2017, @04:48PM (2 children)
"Historic" Smurfs 2, Patriots' day, Inferno ... Those pirates are going after the most successful blockbusters of all time, of all time!
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:06PM (1 child)
It might be intentional. If they aren't cracking a major blockbuster, the heat they get from doing this is probably lower.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday June 16 2017, @12:02PM
think through this problem, these keys may not be shared, but the cracking algorithm *is*.
Imagine it became possible to crack a given key for $X using cloud resources....
Not sure that's what happens, but it might explain the "lite" menu...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @05:46PM (4 children)
If you want 100 GB of sh*t, just smear it on your phone lens and record.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 15 2017, @05:52PM (2 children)
Yes, these are all movies that I was wanting to see so badly. /sarc
Maybe they only use the strong copyright protection on good movies. Are there very many good movies anymore?
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:34PM (1 child)
Why would anyone want to watch Smurfs in 4k??
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday June 15 2017, @08:24PM
I already answered this last time. [soylentnews.org]
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(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:48PM
I think you need to see a doctor. When I take a shit, it's maybe 3-4GB, and that's with a lot of fiber going down the pipe.
Feeling sorry for your interface.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 15 2017, @07:19PM (20 children)
On one hand, I'm impressed with these pirate groups figuring out how to copy the data off these UHD BR discs, somehow bypassing the AACS2 encryption measures. I guess they're keeping their techniques a secret for now, but I'm highly curious as to how they pulled this off. It sounds like a very interesting technical feat.
On the other hand, I fail to see the ultimate utility, because these movies are total garbage. Why would anyone want to download 50-100GB of that trash? That's a lot of bandwidth and a good chunk of HD space which could be used for something better than Smurfs 2, and whatever the hell these other two movies are. UHD BR sounds like an impressive format technically; are the studios going to release any actually good movies on it? 2001: A Space Odyssey (originally released in 70mm) would be amazing, as would any 70mm IMAX movie. How about the BBC Planet Earth or Life series?
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Thursday June 15 2017, @07:38PM (2 children)
Arrival came out on 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray a few months ago. The Fifth Element and Close Encounters of the Third Kind come out next month. Those are all great science-fiction films, IMO.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday June 16 2017, @12:17AM (1 child)
But wait, They weren't shot in 4k originally. So they are essentially packaging "film grain" at this point.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday June 16 2017, @06:04AM
You can see which UHD Blu-ray films were shot in native 4K here: http://referencehometheater.com/ultrahd-blu-ray-title-info/ [referencehometheater.com]
Inferno
Smurfs 2
Nothing for Patriots Day on that page. Here is the IMDB for it. [imdb.com]
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday June 15 2017, @08:24PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 16 2017, @06:06AM
With HDMI you would have to recompress and get new artifacts. Something else is done if it's the raw video.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday June 15 2017, @11:48PM (13 children)
At first glance the 50-100GB for a movie is a bit of a turnoff, or a form of protection on its own. That said if you sit on a nice connection and have a couple of TB worth of drivespace then this is nothing. There are always people that are going to feel like this is totally worth it and that they can totally see or hear the difference. Just the normal 1080p releases of movies are in the 10-20GB+ range, so this just scales up. That said I'm not sure the Smurfs are worth a 100GB download really, that have to be some serious hardcore smurfin' to make that worth it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @01:01AM (8 children)
That was a commonly-held opinion about MP3s encoded much higher than 128kbps at first, too. Give it time. People will start h.265 encoding them (or using a yet-to-be-devised even better codec) and the size/quality ratio, available local storage capacity, and broadband speed & caps will all improve.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 16 2017, @04:18AM (7 children)
People will start h.265 encoding them
That 50-100GB number includes h.265 encoding. 4k UHD Blu-Ray uses h.265 encoding. You're not going to get them any smaller until someone comes up with an even better codec, and like JPEG, I suspect we've hit a point now where we're just not going to get any more significant gains in compression. You can only compress stuff so much without losing too much information.
I'm also doubtful about local storage and broadband speeds getting significantly better anytime soon: what's going to drive those changes and create demand for them? With most users just using streaming services now for everything, including listening to music, there isn't that much demand for local storage. And existing broadband service already has more than enough bandwidth for several simultaneous high-quality Netflix streams (if you get the largest-bandwidth options from your ISP). The main driver for increased storage is on the server end now, not for consumers. From what I can tell, typical laptop HD sizes haven't gone up much if any in the last 5 years or so, and the trend on phones is to just stream everything.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 16 2017, @05:52AM
I don't think most of these films are maxing out the UHD Blu-ray standard by reaching 100 GB. Also, the 50 GB discs appear to be identical to regular 50 GB Blu-ray discs (both are dual-layer), so they should not be too expensive to make. The other two UHD Blu-ray capacities store ~33 GB per layer instead of 25 GB.
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(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday June 16 2017, @08:20AM (3 children)
Disagree. Video compression algorithms have been steadily improving for years, and are showing no sign of slowing down. H.265 is way better than H.264, for instance. Why assume we're already at the point of diminishing returns?
I believe we're at that point when it comes to audio (Opus is better than Vorbis, but not that much better), but not video.
But it's not like JPEG. There exist lossy still-image compression algorithms which are far superior to JPEG. The problem isn't that we can't beat JPEG - we already have - it's that no-one really cares enough to roll out the new algorithms. Even sites like Flickr, which could [github.io] use JavaScript to implement better-than-JPEG compression, just don't bother.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 16 2017, @02:43PM (2 children)
There exist lossy still-image compression algorithms which are far superior to JPEG.
Really? Which ones? I know there's JPEG2000, but that didn't seem like it was that much of an improvement over JPEG. It was better, of course, but like you noted with Opus vis-a-vis Vorbis, not *that* much better, and with JPEG not enough to get people to switch because JPEG is so entrenched in everything. JPEG is really quite ancient, it goes back to the early 90s; it's too bad it's so hard to supplant an entrenched de facto standard.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday June 16 2017, @03:07PM (1 child)
I linked to one already: FLIF supports both lossy and lossless compression. Their web demo [github.io] takes a couple seconds to load, but it's clearly superior to JPEG (assuming of course that their demo is honest).
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday June 16 2017, @03:14PM
On second thoughts, maybe something's up with that web demo. That, or JPEG really does look better half the time (try the 'Compare against same size JPEG' mode). The main page on their lossy compression [flif.info] makes their stuff look far superior to JPEG.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @02:33PM (1 child)
You don't need a better codec, you just need to be willing to cut quality to save space. Some people do download YIFY and similar bit-starved HD releases, after all; while applying such extreme compression to 4k sources is just silly (doesn't mean it won't happen!), you could certainly compress these enough to fit on a dual-layer BD-R without losing enough quality to bother most pirates.
To throw some actual numbers around:
Glancing at Inferno (2016) on thepiratebay, the full bluray release appears to be about 24GB, but you can find 1080p versions reencoded to pretty much any size from 16GB down to 1.5GB (!); if one assumes similar bitrate requirement per pixel, 4k reencodes might range from 64GB (well, not quite; the original rip is only 57GB) down to 6GB. Hey, I won't be surprised if we see DVD5-sized 4k releases. Of course they'll look pretty crappy, but that doesn't mean groups won't release them, or that a bunch of people won't download them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 16 2017, @02:47PM
Some people do download YIFY and similar bit-starved HD releases, after all
Are YIFY's "bit-starved" HD releases really that bad when you compare to the alternatives, which are streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime Video?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 16 2017, @03:56AM
I would download a 16K resolution Zapruder film.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 16 2017, @04:21AM (2 children)
That said if you sit on a nice connection and have a couple of TB worth of drivespace then this is nothing.
That's not true. I have a nice 4TB backup drive sitting in front of me, however that would only hold 40 movies of 100GB each (up to 80 if they're only 50GB). That's a decent little movie library I guess, but it'd be easy to fill that up with movies this size. Even a casual movie collector could easily build a library larger than 40-60 movies. So I wouldn't call it "nothing". For a single movie, it's not *that* much space, but for a bunch of movies it really is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @01:58PM (1 child)
How expensive is a 4TB drive compared to 40 or 60 Ultra HD Bluray disc's though?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 16 2017, @02:50PM
Yeah, I agree, I'm just taking issue with the idea that 100GB is "nothing". If your movie collection won't fit on a single drive, now you're having to either juggle drives, or if you want to have your whole collection online and accessible any time from your media player, you're going to need a multi-drive NAS or something. That's a different matter of being able to just keep everything on a single drive.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 16 2017, @06:10AM
Someone got a chip workstation to grab the bits right of?