That still doesnt make sense, something still needs to stop me from ripping ALL Blu-Ray discs in the scenario mick2006 mentioned. I doubt very much PowerDVD is programmed to work as a rootkit in the background, stopping any kind of ripping attempts.
And do you remember the terrible press Sony got for their rootkits and the lawsuits and how much it cost them? Also wasnt it music CDs in that case? I can't imagine Sony risking a similar rootkit disaster again. The bad press would kill Blu-Ray a lot faster than anything lese Sony could screw up.
And i don't have to have any Player software installed, i could rip on one PC and watch the ripped discs on a different one.
Does PCFriendly on DVDs ring a bell?
Of course, pdvd is not programmed to work as a rootkit. It seems some haven't yet quite understood the concept of BD+.
BD+ is a bunch of commands (like java they are independant of processor architecture) that are processed by the player.
I don't know all BD+ commands, but I'm sure, they are nearly all harmless code that is designed to merely check the system/disc for anomalies (passively) - and of course do some additional decryption.
There is one provision supposedly included with BD+, that does sound alarming to me: it can load native code (like x86 machine code) into memory under certain circumstances and run it.
In other words: the disc tells pdvd to load a chunk of executable code into memory and execute it. PowerDVD will not even know, what this code does - but neither will you!
It doesn't take a rootkit to make this a hijacking scenario.
Oh and by the way - the same crap can happen with your standalone player, it just takes native code for that player.
So, what do we have... Sony makes movies, sells players, plays the major role behind Blu-Ray and we'll add this BD+ stuff just as icing.
I think at this point anyone should see, that it might be a big mistake to hand over the whole movie business from the making down to the player at home in one scoop to Sony - especially knowing the face of Sony from the past.
In the end, they'll have you, the customer, in their claws and can do with you what they want, dictate what you see and even how you do it.
James would have have some technical reasons to add as well, I'll just leave it right here,
Now's the time for voting - when the format war is decided, the voting booths close...
Think about it.