ego.istic.org

What follows is another guest post by another friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous.

In one of the last episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, we see John Connor struggling to piece together the jumbled video fragments stored in an unknown format in a terminator's memory chip. Watching this it seemed eerily reminiscent of the efforts I myself had taken to get to this point.

I'm going to break several rules here and talk about two very different things in the same piece: the blu-ray format in general and this particular series. I'm doing this because I want to write about the format, but have only the one example of it; while to the best of my knowledge everything I say applies to all bly-ray discs, I've no way to be sure. My other reason is that there seems to be very little information around on the format, particularly in the context of playing under free operating systems, and I suspect my review will be of more use to many readers here once they know whether they can actually play the discs.

With that in mind, first, the format. As most of you will know, blu-ray is the next generation optical disc format, intended primarily for high-definition video. As with DVDs before them, the discs themselves can also be used to store general data (and unlike with DVDs, “burners” and blank media are available already, making this a feasible option), but I will not concern myself with such usage here.

The discs themselves were shaped like DVDs or CDs but far more transparent; presumably a result of being thinner, though possibly just the different data layer format. I've heard it claimed that blu-ray mandates a scratch-resistant coating which makes them more resilient than DVDs, but am not prepared to test that proposition as yet. One thing I did notice was that the top side of the disc mostly appears silver, with only a small amount of printing on; usually the mark of a budget DVD, which this certainly was not (I purchased the series in Ireland for 40 euros).

The cases are like DVD but shorter, and more rounded on the corners; this particular series comes in a cardboard sleeve with a cut-away metallic effect, a nice (if somewhat pointless) touch. When I saw it I imagined the 50GB/disc storage of blu-ray was allowing a complete series on a single disc, but not so; in fact this is a 3-disc set compactly arranged in a standard case.

Yes, that does mean this 9-episode series (cut short from an intended run of 13 due to the US writers' strike) is taking up quite a lot of space - around 70GB on my hard disk. (Which does beg the question of why it's not a two-disc set - and since two of the three discs are more than 25GB, it can't have been to let them use cheaper single-layer discs. Perhaps the number of discs was finalized before the length of the series was cut.) Those who know me will know I'm a quality fanatic, but the video for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is enough to make even me wonder whether we haven't reached a point where it's “good enough” for human eyes, like the audio CD was for human ears, at least for celluloid-filmed live-action shows. (The recent series of Batman animated shorts, Gotham Knight, has convinced me that there is still plenty of room for increasing the resolution of digitally produced animation, but that's not what today's review is about.) It's in “1080p” format, i.e. 1920x1080 resolution, though disappointingly still at a mere 24 frames per second - no doubt the result of the show being shot on film and then later digitized. With this much resolution the film grain is clearly visible, which makes it disappointing that the show didn't have an all-digital production process. On the positive side, this does suggest that the blu-ray format has surpassed the detail limits of traditional film, meaning it could be a truly archival-quality format for material originally produced on film.

The video codec for these discs is VC1, which seems to be used for almost all blu-rays, at bitrates high enough to confuse the tools I tried to use to identify them; audio appears to be 640kbps AC3. Of course (almost) any codec would perform well at the bitrates in question, but it's nice to see the state of the art, at least for a little while, in use on my purchased discs. (Whether these codecs are the best currently available has the potential for countless flamewars, but they're certainly close). As with DVDs, you could probably achieve almost the same perceptual quality with a third of the bitrate, but for this to be a truly archival format I wouldn't be happy with much less, and the extra bits would doubtless come in handy if one wanted to filter/edit the video.

Now, the part that you've been waiting for: the DRM. Since I'm using my newly purchased computer, I have almost all the required parts: the blu-ray drive and a software player supplied with it (PowerDVD 7), a compliant motherboard, a supported OS and even a new enough graphics card for HDCP. But since I've yet to make the leap to a digital monitor (I wouldn't be happy with any lower than my current resolution of 3200x1200, and when you can get that on digital monitors for within an order of magnitude of the £15 I paid for these two CRTs, give me a call), my genuine software player downscales my image to something very much resembling DVD size. Therefore, in order to enjoy the high-definition content I'd paid for, I resorted to cracking it. I'll spare you the tale of my trials and tribulations in search of a crack, and merely report my conclusions.

First, the bad: it is impossible to get at the content without a “genuine” player. So those of you running a pure linux setup are out of luck; the movie and television studios are not willing to sell you their product in HD. Unlike with HD-DVD, the blu-ray DRM is mandatory, so there's no option of supporting those studios who leave it off. However, in my case Supreme Commander means I keep a windows install around, and together with the aforementioned PowerDVD 7 that gave me enough to start accessing the discs.

The first barrier, and the one that requires a genuine player, is the "Volume ID" for the disc. This is a 128-bit ID needed to even start getting the decryption keys from the disc, and not stored on the standard (UDF 2.5 - meaning linux users will need a very recent (or patched) kernel to access these discs) filesystem. For software to read this it must handshake correctly with the drive, and the drive will refuse to do this if the software in question has had its key marked as compromised on the disc. More nefariously, if I understand correctly, the drive will store the lists of compromised keys and so refuse to decrypt older discs with publicly known keys, even if those are discs pressed before such keys became available.

While player keys for this have been published - amusingly enough, the most commonly available one being from that very version of PowerDVD which shipped with my drive (that cyberdrive saw fit to require me to make a 90mb download for the sake of a 128-bit key is something I won't go into here) - they have been revoked quickly enough, and been hidden more thouroughly in the player software each time, that this seems to be no longer considered worthwhile. Instead we obtain the volume ID by "hammering", using the "dumpvid" program, which waits for our genuine software player to authenticate with the drive and then piggybacks onto this to obtain the VID. While this seems an ugly solution, I can't complain about its effectiveness in practice.

With the volume ID all the following steps can be done from linux, should you so desire. We use the "aacskeys" program, specifying our VID from the previous step, to obtain the disc keys, using another kind of player key. This needs to be separately obtained from the internet, and can also be revoked (though only on new discs, not retroactively), but given how long the current publicly available latest key has been around ("MKB v7") it would appear the movie studios have stopped bothering. This whole process should really be a part of the next step, and indeed there is some experimental support for this, but given the difficulties of combining Java with native code (but again, the suckiness of Java is a separate rant) I found it a lot easier to just use the two programs separately. We record some of the keys thus obtained in a configuration file, "KEYDB.cfg", together with an SHA1 hash of a particular file on the disc (calculated with "openssl" or any number of programs) to identify our particular disc. This is rather cumbersome, but straightforward. The recommended key to use is the "Volume Unique Key" or VUK, but I found this did not work, whether because of a flaw in the program in the next step or some specification-incompliant craftiness on my discs I don't know. In any case, I used the "CPS Unit Keys" (or rather key; there was only one for each disc), a "lower-level" set of keys (the video files are encrypted with these keys which are then encrypted with the VUK and the encrypted version stored on the disc, or something on those lines), which worked fine.

Now that we have all the keys ripping the disc is a simple matter of AES decryption; the program for doing it all is "dumphd". As mentioned before, it's a java program; nicely it supports both GUI and commandline operation. A word of warning here; unlike at the previous steps, there's no warning if you got the key wrong (e.g. by typoing when writing it in the configuration file in the previous step), you'll simply get a full disc's worth of (essentially) random data. So it's wise to check shortly after you start, rather than waiting for the complete rip to find out you've been ripping junk - while bluray's storage is a lot denser than DVD, reading 50GB of data is still going to take a long time. (The limiting factor, incidentally, remains the speed of the disc (at least on a modern system), rather than CPU or hard disk transfer rate.)

The easiest way to check is looking at the video files you've produced; the actual video is in BDMV/STREAM/ , in m2ts (MPEG-2 Transport Stream) files. While some of these will be "empty" when you try and play them, or were for me (“NO VIDEO! NO AUDIO! NO SUBS (yet)!” screams mplayer), they should all be correctly demuxed as TS by mplayer; if you start getting random raw video display, you're probably decrypting incorrectly. The rest of the disc structure presumably contains the menus, but I can find very little information on their format; the most promising google result was replaced by a “sorry, I've signed an NDA” page when I visited it, a stark reminder of how poor a situation we're currently in. Given time I may make an effort at decoding the format and adding support to mplayer or some other such player, but for now all we have are the individual video files, which makes navigating the special features somewhat tricky. Fortunately this format does not have DVD's 1GB-per-file restriction, so the episodes are easily identifiable as the ~7GB files among a host of substantially smaller ones.

Visually the show is solid while never spectacular. As is the way with technology, the effects which made Terminator 2 the most expensive film of all time at the time of its release are old hat now (though I should note here that The Sarah Connor Chronicles does not use the "liquid metal" version of the eponymous villain), but this does mean they have been perfected. There is nothing ground-breaking here, but nor are the blue sparks of the time machine and the terminators walking with partially exposed mechanisms going to be laughable in twenty years' time. Instead the focus is on the actors, and here is where The Sarah Connor Chronicles shines. Lena Headey's Sarah is an intensely believable mass of contradictions, trying to be a caring mother to John while at the same time fighting a one-woman war for his survival. That very little effort seems to have been made to make her look the same as her predecessor, Linda Hamilton, is a decision which has come off in spades; while the differences between the two may alienate continuity nuts, Headey's own interpretation of the character stands up every bit as well as the film version.

Thomas Dekker's John has also captured the role very well, though an almost-typical teenager is admittedly a far easier target. Still, he brings real believability to the role; a boy forced to grow up before his time, accepting the lifestyle of a fugitive and knowing that his mother truly has his best interests at heart, yet unable to entirely suppress his pinings for a normal life. John has all the grounds for typical teenage angst, but cannot afford himself the luxury; for him life truly is “so unfair”, but he can't complain because he knows his mother is doing the absolute best she can. Their relationship is a beautiful thing to see, though Dan's earlier post did make me realise they are less physical than one would expect of a family in those circumstances. But that's a minor gripe when set against such a true-to-life portrayal.

And then we have Summer Glau, playing the metal man (well, woman) batting for the good guys. Summer has clearly got "crazy" down pat, but at times it feels like that's all she can do; in her position I would be very worried of being typecast. The series goes out of its way to emphasise her inhumanity, both as a ruthless killer and in her conversational style. While this is a welcome change from the overdone tale of a robot who just wants to be human but lives in a world of those blinded by their prejudices, at times it seems implausible that the “most advanced learning computer ever built” would struggle so much with the US teenage vernacular. Her character's behaviour seems like some very unmechanical mood swings—one moment perfectly human, the next the most severe mathmo ever created—and it comes off a lot less well than Schwarzenegger's more generalized conversational inability. Like de Niro in The Untouchables, Summer has clearly poured heart and soul into the performance, but it's not enough, the character is too large for her.

The remainder of the cast fade into the background; Richard T. Jones gives a solid performance, but his character (the FBI agent who just happens to be tasked both with pursuing Sarah and solving a series of murders committed by a Terminator on the hunt for John) feels too contrived, and despite his best efforts the role seems to have “tokenism” written all over it. Brian Austin Green's character is a hollow Action Man, paradoxically less human than the machines he's fighting, and as such his acting skills whether good or bad are irrelevant here. The highlight of the miscellany is Brendan Hines, as a passionate geek inadvertently building a key piece of Skynet, but other than him no-one really stands out, for better or worse, compared to what is overall a superb performance from the leads.

Sadly, this superb performance is dragged down by the series' lacklustre plot. The big problem for a series in this position is giving us something to care about, when we know how it all ends, and on this front it falls flat. We've seen Terminator 3: John survives, Sarah dies, and neither of them has succeeded in preventing “Judgement Day”. The series fails to draw us in with the remainder of the cast—neither Cameron Philips (Glau's killing machine) nor Derek Reese (Green's warrior from the future) are human enough for us to care about, leaving the only point of interest as the tale of how the Connors tried and failed to stop Skynet. And this is something The Sarah Connor Chronicles fails abjectly at drawing us into, because for a fight supposedly about the future of all mankind, the actions are always too small and provincial. A Terminator “expanded universe” novel I read had the Connors infiltrating a secret Antarctic base; this has them infiltrating a city hall and a chess tournament. Of course taking on larger targets would be unrealistic with the force at had, but therein lies the fundamental problem of the show: John's decision to try and alter the course of human history by force with a mere three people is, when looked at objectively, ludicrous.

This is a war series without an army, an action show without the action. It's a setup that could have worked well as a spy show, with gadgets and sneaking, but—aside from a small amount of surprisingly faithfully presented (by Hollywood standards) hacking—the Connors' imagination is too often limited to “guns, lots of guns”. If they had the superpowers of The Matrix, or a lesser opposition, it would work, but they have nothing—with one Terminator against many, not to mention the FBI on their backs, mere survival is more than difficult enough. In many ways this is a show that wants to be Firefly, but that show's Mal was never trying to save the world, nor was the world (by and large) treating him with anything more than indifference or at worst mild hostility. The Sarah Connor Chronicles ultimately doesn't have enough science to be science fiction - the time machine is used only to set the premises, and the Terminators could be replaced by humans throughout with only the mildest changes to the plot. Which leaves this series floating in an uncomfortable no-man's land, neither one thing nor another.

All this results in a plot with, fundamentally, no idea where it's going. The episodes are disjointed from each other, with very little overall structure; while some aimless drifting after landing in a new time is understandable, the Connors spend too long taking potshots in the dark—destroy object X, rescue person Y, and hope it might be enough to change the future. Which, while a believable enough response to their situation, doesn't make for interesting television. The show also deserves some criticism for being the first to change the "global" plot away from a single consistent timeline—whereas in the film series the Connors' best efforts to change history come to naught, here we see explicit contradictions between the future some of the characters have come from and their actions in the present—which, at least for a mathmo, greatly reduces the plausibility of the thing. The intended four more episodes might have given the show time to weave together plot threads into a decent conclusory arc, but the claim that most of the intended storylines have been incorporated into the second series would seem to refute that. In any case, the story as it stands is resolutely episodic, and in this age of the more interesting arc-based storylines it stands up poorly, especially in the context of a series box-set. The finale we have is interesting and quite daring, but unfortunately occurs about 5 minutes before the end of the final episode, the show insisting on leaving in the middle of a fresh piece of action to bait us into the second season. It's unnecessary, and cheapens the show as a result.

Overall, therefore, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was something of a disappointment. Superb acting cannot rescue it from poor pacing and a fundamentally dull plotline, brought on by the show never being sure where it's stylistically going. The actors doubtless have some great series ahead of them, but this is, alas, not one of them.