Firefly

From Hdtvuk.tv :

First HD DVD appears on torrent web site

A month after a piece of ’backup’ software - BackupHDDVD - was released, an HD DVD movie - Serenity - has been seeded to a torrent site on the Internet. It’s 19.6GB in size in native EVO format and can be played on versions of PowerDVD and WinDVD that support HD DVD. It’s a 1080p movie encoded in VC-1.

I’m not an expert on torrent sites, but regardless of how many sources the file comes from, that’s likely to be a serious hit on any monthly broadband bandwidth allowance - and don’t even think about how long it would take to download on even an 8MB connection.

Hardly a surprising development, and unlikely to be the last film posted online.

From Securitypronews.com :

HD-DVD Cracked And Torrented

Hackers have found a way around the protection used for the next-generation HD-DVD format and enabled the distribution of the Firefly movie, Serenity, over the Internet.

A screenshot of the posting of the Serenity torrent file appeared on the HDTV Blogger website. "HD DVD rip. Straight from the disc in EVO format," reads the screenshot.

"We all knew this would happen sooner or later, looks it was ’sooner’," said the TorrentFreak blog.

Some enthusiastic hackers have figured out how to uncover the Volume Unique Keys on HD-DVD content. With those Keys, the content of a HD-DVD disc may be unlocked, and from there distributed and viewed by others.

A lot of the activity surrounding the HD-DVD format crack has been taking place on the Doom9 forum. Keys for King Kong and 12 Monkeys along with the one for Serenity have been posted there.

Not everyone has been excited about the public disclosure of the Keys, or the availability of Serenity via BitTorrent clients. The HDTV Blogger received complaints on his blog for noting Serenity could be found online.

The drama punctuates the continued battle between proponents of HD DVD and Blu-Ray formats for blue laser DVD content. These competing formats can hold a vast amount of content, necessary for storing high-definition movies.

Neither side of that battle has shown any willingness to back down, and that has led to a stalemate in the marketplace. People do not want to commit to buying one player or the other, only to see their choice immediately rendered obsolete with the adoption of the other format.