The movie industry has another weapon in its battle against piracy. From 2006 the soundtracks of all major movies released to the cinema will contain an audio “watermark”. The high-definition DVD players due to be launched next year by Toshiba will be able to detect it.
The watermark is introduced when the soundtrack is being mixed, by slightly varying the waveform of speech and music at regular intervals. The variations are too subtle to be audible, but the pattern can easily be detected by a decoder in the player.
The system was unveiled by Alan Bell of Warner Bros Entertainment…
