BD phone home!
Andrew Everard Mon, Jan 26 2009, 3:25PM
You know that endless wait while a Blu-ray Disc title loads into your player before the first menu screen appears? And those discs that either refuse point blank to load, or load then stall?
Well, it seems it might not just be that the players themselves are really slow: research from a company involved in the development of multimedia back-up software suggests that some discs are firing up BD-Live functionality, and effectively using their Ethernet ports and your internet connection to 'call home' to the studio that made them.
And that could have real implications for the amount of data those studios could be gathering about how and where discs are being watched.
Investigations by SlySoft, which makes the popular AnyDVD software to back up DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc content onto a computer hard drive, has revealed that some BD players don't offer the user the choice of turning off BD-Live functionality.
And it says that many consumers won't have a clue that BD-Live is actually a two-way street.
"Absolutely dumbfounded"
As the company's head of development, Peer van Heuen, says, when SlySoft looked at some BD-Live-enabled discs "we were absolutely dumbfounded. Sometimes the films actually contacted the manufacturer and did so with the user not knowing about it or even being in a position to recognize that a download connection was taking place.
"I assume that a significant percentage of these film buyers don't know what to make of the little BD-Live logo on the package or even recognize what that logo implies.
"In other words, hardly anyone expects that a Blu-ray disc makes a `telephone call home' while it’s being played. The circumstances and manner whereby unwitting consumers are maliciously and insidiously eavesdropped upon might get the attention of data, security and/or personal privacy experts in some countries eventually."
Enough disc-space for extra content
The company, whose software is able to disable BD-Live and also bypass Blu-ray Disc's regional coding, contends that while the manufacturers of software and hardware are promoting BD-Live as a means of delivering extra content to buyers of discs, there's actually more than enough space on a 50GB disc to store all that extra stuff, without the need to download it from the internet.
So next time you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for your new disc to load, could just be that the movie is busy telling its maker where you live, and just who's watching...
- Andrew Everard's blog
- Login to post comments
Comments
Hmmmm...Does this mean that if you unplug the ethernet port if you don't care about BD live functionality, that the disk will load quicker.
Nope - the reverse may be true: the software is likely to continue hunting for a connection, even repeatedly.
You can see this already with BD Live-heavy discs that can spin for an age in Profile 1.1 BD players that aren't internet-enabled....
Wow...that sounds like bad coding to me if it can't even detect that an network connection is not available.
...Or that user-convenience comes a long way behind trying to protect the content, maybe?
Clare, this is almost putting me off getting a Blu-ray player, do the Sony BDP-S550/S350 and Panasonic BD35/55s of this world require an ethernet connection to play discs?
Bandwidth is expensive in my country and I cannot have every nasty pot, kettle and toaster connecting to the internet.
Nothings Sacred ...A case of Spooks..24 Jacks on the
case..all is LOST.. Time will tell?
I've got a SONY BDPS350 - it isn't connected by Ethernet but bluray discs take an absolute age to load and some crash easily for no apparent reason - I'm now wondering if this is why?
It is faultless with DVDs and does an amazing job of upscaling.
I am getting sick of companys like SONY short changing customers like this.
manicm - dont think any player neds an internet connection for basic functionality, as such. at least i certainly hope not...
Slow Loading times are what's putting me off physical media where Blu-Ray is concerned...
manicm - neither the Sonys or Panas have to be connected to play discs.
xsf - it's not the hardware manufacturers causing this issue, but the studios.
Are there any disc's in particular that show this?
I have a profile 1.1 player and so I've not had any problems, also my player can not connect to the internet.
So this is why the film studios chose Blu-ray over HD-DVD, the better format in my eyes
cable1210 - probably unlikely. they would have found a way to do it if they wanted, even with hddvd, imo...
I'm currently using a PS3 to play Blu-rays, and only turn my router on when I'm online on my PC, or want to play games online.
The PS3 loads Blu-rays very quickly, and I have had no problems with BD-Live discs with the internet connection turned off.
cable1210 - I remember a presentation in Japan a good while back, when we still had a format war, where much was made of how much more secure BD was than HD DVD. Seems they were right...
At least with HD DVD you had the option to cancel the connection. with a Yes No menu.
You have just stoped me buying a Panasonic blue ray untill I find out more?.
cable1210 you just read my cynical mind
Sounds like an opportunity for some spoofing SW that runs on your home network and pretends to be the studio server. Shouldn't be too difficult.
As PS3s are quick to load, it can be concluded that it's the player's firmware that's holding them up. This means that if the manufacturers chose to, they could speed up the load times and reduce the amount of prying the studios can do. At least give us an option in the set-up menu to choose whether to upload data to the studios. If Microsoft have to ask, even for anonymous data, then the studios should have to. They must be breaching data protection laws by not requiring user authorisation to steal or eavesdrop.
After reading this, I checked my Panasonic DMP BD35 and in the setup menu under "Disc" there's an option to select "Prohibit" under BD-Live Internet Access. In other words, I just disabled the BD-Live capability of my player.
This all smacks of he issue Sony created several years ago when they provided CD's which installed software of peoples pc's. The only hope is that people in the States get up in arms and take the companies to court using the invasion of privacy issue. It is unfortunate that the corporates never take notice of complaints from UK citizens, only from our litigious cousins across the pond!
I can do the same on my Sony s350. Just set"BD internet connection" to "Do not allow".
If the PS3 can be set to ask if you want to access the internet when using a "BD Live" title then there's no reason other players can't. Also if internet access is disabled on the PS3 there appears to be no noticeable delay in loading time with the BD Live titles.
Sounds like a storm in a teacup that is either an excuse for poor operational performance due to specific manufcaturers hardware or firmware.
My Sony BDP-S350 has not seen an ethernet cable since I got it. I've upgraded the firmware twice but did that by downloading the ISO file onto my PC and burning it to a CD-RW.
Aside from my router being on the other side of the house to my Blu-ray player, the BD Live functionality simply doesn't interest me.
Hmmm.... this answers a lot of questions. I wonder how getting a player modified (to play from any region, for example) might be effected by this? They certainly would be able to determine if the player was modified, I imagine. This, of course, is one of the reasons why Studios will love this. They can maintain their control over regional releases (and pricing).
And of course this website doesn't use cookies or any kind of statistics collection etc to tell how many unique hits it gets to help sell space to advertisers? That would of course be malicious and insidious, and I'd have every right to be dumbfounded should you be reported to be using such devilish practices? Now where was that coppery... I'm sure I left it next to, what was it? Ah yes, irony.
Not at all malicious and insidious - just about every commercial website uses such strategies to measure usership and so on, and everyone knows it happens.
But the fact that players may be sending information without the user actually doing anything at all is surely of some interest to users - especially when many on this website report problems with discs loading (or not) or taking for ever to fire up.
I wasn't putting forward any grand conspiracy theory: rather I was reporting what a third party had found out, and that third party's interpretation of its discovery, as I thought it might be of some interest to readers.