It's possible that some pre-February 1 players have Cinavia hardware inside; they *could* have Cinavia activated via firmware updates, but for most players that's unlikely. OTOH, I suspect "license" is more important than "production"; if the BDA licensed the particular model for manufacture before 2/1, players of that model made after 2/1 might not have it either (though it could be added as a running hardware change).@trussme: you're wrong on that part. Its not solely the firmware that counts. It's the license / production date of the PLAYER itself that's most important. You can update the BD85 just fine with FW dating after Feb 1st, that's cause the player predates the mandatory cinavia detection.
Just to clarify, this is *exactly* what Slyce is eventually supposed to do--decode the audio, remove the Cinavia watermark, and potentially re-encode the audio. (I believe you were thinking of SlyPlayer.) AFAIK there's no freely-available lossless encoders just yet, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.you'd have to decode the audio to WAV files, remove the Cinavia waveform, and then re-encode it back to DTS-HD MA or Dolby TruHD, and that means providing a lossless encoder to every user somehow (the only legal way would be selling it, and they cost at least $1500). You could leave it 5.1 PCM, but in some cases that will no longer fit on a BD-R (or if you don't care about lossless, just make it AC3 or DTS).
The easiest solution for the "Cinavia problem" is to use a player which *cannot* play retail Blu-ray discs. There are some media players which even support full blown Blu-ray menus, like the Netgear NTV550 (not tested myself).2. MOST Blu-ray DVD fans take the easy way of playing Blu-ray disks. Just add the hardware Blu-ray player with HDMI cable to their HDTV, so all they want is just a Cinavia cure and fast.
Maybe, but not much. And you *can* use DL sizes if you want. And they are so easy to use. AnyDVD -> Rip to image directly to the target drive -> done.Actually if you are writing back to SL BD-R then it's cheaper than harddrives,
True, but IMHO recorded optical discs are more unreliable, if stored over a longer period.with the added bonus of not losing the whole drive if there's a disc failure
Or convert the main movie to MKV which will reduce its size and make it more compatible with more players.
Sure, if you don't care about the menus.
Not really, for SL BD-r's it works out around half the price for 1TB of discs compared to 1TB of HD, and for DL discs it works out around the same price as a 1TB drive, as to storage time, you're constantly using the harddrive so it's more prone to failure than a disc stored properly that only gets used when needed. I have a 12TB raid 5 system for storing my images on as well as using BD-r's and even using enterprise drives I've already had to replace 2 of them which if they weren't in a RAID would have lost me all the images.Maybe, but not much. And you *can* use DL sizes if you want. And they are so easy to use. AnyDVD -> Rip to image directly to the target drive -> done.
Plug the disk to your player -> watch.
True, but IMHO recorded optical discs are more unreliable, if stored over a longer period.
The easiest solution for the "Cinavia problem" is to use a player which *cannot* play retail Blu-ray discs. There are some media players which even support full blown Blu-ray menus, like the Netgear NTV550 (not tested myself).
No retail Blu-ray playback = no AACS license required = no Cinavia.
If you can live without full menus, there are many very good and very cheap media players available.
IMHO recording to Blu-ray media is extremely painful anyway. Expensive, slow, unreliable.
A harddisk as a backup media is cheap & fast.