I don't get it. The DVD has to decrypted or unlocked to view it right? So wouldn't you be able to copy it regardless of any protection they come up with since someone can install like a video stabilizer to remove anything but the video feed? Maybe I'm missing something here but I think all of this BS copy protection stuff is just that, BS. I can see these disc's coming out and the very same day being copied by someone, like they have always have done. These companies share one erroneous conclusion. They assume that THEY are ahead of the criminal element which in fact the criminal element is ALWAYS one step or more ahead of them. Just my two cents worth. Thats why the war on drugs will never be won or any other commodity that has a demand for.

The problem is there is no such thing as a bit to bit copy. There are areas on commercial DVD's that cannot be copied onto blank media. If there was such a thing as bit to bit copy then we wouldn't have any problems doing backups of DVDS, even if they are copy protected. Of course blu-ray is going to use an entrily different copy protection than DVD (AACS).

Bluray copy protection

Here is another artical on AACS and how the encryption keys work. The keys are a product of the Vendor of the disc ID and Serial number of the media which both of these are unwrittable data.

AACS Protection

If you do a search on google you will find a ton of stuff on AACS and Bluray.

Sorry for posting twice in a row!

The other point I would like to make is the whole reason to go with bluray is to get HDTV quality (1920 X 1080) which far surpasses DVD (720 X 480). Bluray players/recorders are going with DVI video interface to get the full advantage of the (1920 X 1080) resolution. BTW DVI is 100% digital, no analog signals like Svideo. Analog type S-video signals are not capable of this high of a resolution so in general the output of the bluray players is not analog, it's digital. This way you can feed the digital signals right into an HDTV set.

My guess is that inside the bluray player that the digital information off the disc is decrypted by a custom FPGA or highspeed processor then sent un-encrypted digital information out of the DVI port. If the copy protection schemes are not on the bluray disc the processor inside the player will not pass the digital information to the DVI port. I don't know this for a fact but it's my guess of what they are going to do with this standard. It's a whole different ball game then DVD....