S
Steve K.
Lawrence said:Read "historical reasons". At the time the CD audio format was being
developed, "digital" was a new and wonderful thing. It had to be a
simple format because you couldn't build consumer appliances with
full-fledged computers in them, to do decompression, DRM or anything
like that. The idea of using CDs for computer data came later, which is
why CD-ROMs hold less data than audio CDs (the normal audio CD error
correction isn't quite good enough for computer data, so additional
error correction needs to be included).
For DVDs, it's quite the other way around. The DVD format is primarily a
computer data format, and DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and all the other DVD
applications simply build on this computer data format--put any such
disc into your PC and you'll see a UDF filesystem with files on it.
With Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, I assume they're doing the same thing as with
DVD: the discs are designed first and foremost to hold a computer
filesystem, and all applications are built out of files stored in the
filesystem.
It's still craziness to run around trying to protect low quaity files
when higher quality ones are wide open.