The blessedly short-lived format war pitting Blu-ray against HD-DVD turned on a host of big assumptions, chief among them the promise to Hollywood that Blu-ray discs are more resistant to rip-and-burn piracy. A recent piece of research declares that logic is flat wrong.

According to the UK-based media consultancy Screen Digest, Blu-ray disc "rips" are appearing on bit-torrent file-sharing networks with greater frequency, sometimes days after the Hollywood studios put the titles on the market. That's what happened to Paramount's Iron Man, which was made available on Blu-ray in late September and days later popped up on Pirate Bay. Sure enough, a quick search by me of other popular file-sharing sites reveals more than 20 Blu-ray titles including an 8GB version of What Happens in Vegas, a 5.5GB version of Ratatouille and a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix weighing in at 14GB.

The file sizes are a dead giveaway. While these pirated versions are indeed large movie files – they are several times bigger than your typical DVD rip, and, thus, you'd imagine the image and sound quality will be that much better – they are a fraction of the size (and, of course, quality) of a legit Blu-ray version. This begs the question: why bother?

Pirated versions of Blu-ray discs have been circulating online for a while now, but their numbers have been limited, probably because they were such hefty files, a few gigs in size. And, to the average net user with a plodding broadband connection, that might prove a bit too fat to bother with downloading. Plus, the results were often disappointing. Your typical two-layer Blu-ray disc can store up to 50GB worth of high-definition features, effects and sounds. Why would you bother with a ripped version that gives you a fraction of that experience?

According to analysts at ScreenDigest, the watered down pirated versions typically run at a 720p resolution (the number refers to the horizontal lines of resolution), considerably inferior to the 1080p image resolution of Blu-ray discs. At that level of compression – 720p – the viewer is getting a good picture quality, but the resolution is still just two-thirds as sharp as the original high-definition version. Given that the primary point of Blu-ray is its unrivalled picture quality, that seems like a big sacrifice.

Hollywood is beginning to get agitated about the proliferation of Blu-ray-branded, 720p knock-off versions that are now proliferating. The bootleg version in question is called AVCHD. Movie pirates are ripping titles in the AVCHD version, labeling them as Blu-ray and hawking them on street corners and other dodgy places online and offline, to the consternation of Hollywood studio execs. If history is any judge, AVCHD rips will be flooding the market in no time.

Judging by the pixel compression figures, AVCHD, while inferior to Blu-ray, packs a superior picture quality to traditional DVD. An AVCHD version of, say, Iron Man should even look pretty good played on a high-definition television set. This has to be worrying Hollywood, which owed its decade-long surge in DVD sales to the poor quality of pirated DVDs. The dawn of high-definition piracy puts that competitive advantage in doubt in the Blu-ray era. AVCHD may well lag behind Blu-ray, but if the word on the street is that it's better than DVD, that's a pretty powerful marketing message.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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