Here another theory of mine...feel free to debunk it but this seems to be something I'd be concerned about on both sides of the fence.

We all know that the excryption on the discs will be cracked. It's absolutely a matter of time, once the discs and the drives come out. Since the blanks and burners will also be coming out, here's my question:

If someone were to crack the encryption on, say, The Bourne Supremacy (universal HD DVD only title), what's stopping them from burning those same files onto a BD blank disc and playing it in their BD player?

I'm obviously not advocating this practice but since BD is talking about one of their major positive points being studio support, it would definitely be interesting.

Just curious what you all think of this.

There is nothing to stop them currently. But the price of blank BR disks are the same cost of the movie. I guess you are talking about HD-DVDs not released on BR.

And vice versa.

Exactly.

I was actually pondering the same thing about BR media files being burned as HDDVDs.

Interesting....

Give it a few years and this will all be possible, I'm hoping PC will have a drive that will play/burn both

in a few years 1 will be the leader....
I wonder what the line is in Vegas... they bet on everything!!!!

Or you just crack the dvd, and play the files on your HTPC.

I'm not sure it will be cracked fast enough for it to be an issue in the war. And piracy isn't mainstream enough to win the war one way or another. But it could certainly be an option if universal players never happen.

You'd have to have a HD-DVD reader drive in order to rip the files in the first place, then a BD burner to burn the files onto a disc nearly as expensive as the original media. Why not just buy the media since you'd have to have a device to read the discs in the first place?

Well, only if you wanted to do the entire conversion yourself. Otherwise someone out there will rip the BD rom and convert it to and HD rom and you'd just download it and burn it.

You're right, it does seem silly to go through all that if you have readers for both types.

Having a reader in your PC is different from having a stand-alone player.

And it only takes one person you know to help you out to do it.

That's essentially what I said, isn't it? You'd have a burner, I assume in the same format your stand-alone player otherwise what's the point? You'd just need a rom or a full-rez video to burn. Whether you get that from your buddy who went with the other format or off the internet, what's the difference?

Doesn't Blu-Ray have that upgradeable copy protection scheme, and isn't that the main reason why Fox went with them in the first place?

If so, if HD-DVD is cracked that would be a big problem for that format, since there would be no way to "fix" it like they can with BD.

Again...if BD is cracked...well, that might help this war out a bit.

Just try and tell a hacker that something is un-crackable.