When you play a DVD in a system with online scratch correction, your DVD player contacts the distributor of the DVD, authenticates itself by correctly telling the supplier the data contained in eight out of ten randomly selected sections of the disk then scans ahead as you watch the film.

When the DVD player enounters an area of the disk that fails its checksum (usually a scratch) it requests the data from the distributor and seamlessly inserts it into the movie as you watch it.

The Monkfish Enhancement: The player could progressively cache the missing footage. Depending on the time elapsed, bandwidth available and number of errors found do far, the player could start with an audio only patch, followed by a low quality video patch and so on.

Late addition: The device would probably need some mass storage. Since some errors on disks can be intermittent, it would make sense to cache the whole DVD on the hard drive and play it from there.
-- st3f, Dec 16 2002

Scatch Catcher http://www.halfbake...a/Scratch_20Catcher
by redshift9 [st3f, Oct 04 2004]

Low Bandwith Correction of High Bandwidth Broadcasts http://www.halfbake...dwidth_20Broadcasts
By... um... me. [st3f, Oct 04 2004]

Does it cache the data so it can insert it next time without having to contact the distributor again?
-- angel, Dec 16 2002


Cool. The replacement scenes might have to be lower quality for the size to be manageable (depending on bandwidth, amount of damage, and the size of your read-ahead cache), but it would be much better than missing them altogether. (Maybe it would be practical to quickly scan the disc for major errors at the beginning? Then there'd be much more time to download and splice in good data.)

Could be done for audio CDs and data CDs/DVDs, too. One provider with a gigantic database of binaries and the right sort of legal agreements could do it all, contracting either with the distributor/author or directly with the consumer.
-- Monkfish, Dec 16 2002


angel: No reason why not. The player would probably need a hard drive to be most effective. I'm not too concerned, though, since bandwidth becomes less of an issue as time goes on, and the majority of skips will be from rental DVDs anyway.

Monkfish: There's no reason why this couldn't be provided by a licensed third party. Your rental store could provide you with access to this facility, reducing the number of compaints due to faulty disks. I'd prefer getting the film distributor to bear the costs, though, as this would encourage high production quality.
-- st3f, Dec 16 2002



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