FROM this week, well-heeled gadget fans will be able to buy a home-cinema
system that lets them watch the astonishingly high-quality pictures that till
now have stayed locked inside DVD movie discs. But Hollywood studio bosses are
worried. They see the new system as a pirate’s charter, and have been fighting
to keep the pristine digital signal out of consumers’ hands for fear that people
will make broadcast-quality copies.
DVDs store video as digital code, compressed to the MPEG-2 standard used for
digital TV. The data rate varies continually between 3 and 10 megabits per
second, depending on whether the…
