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I don't see any quality issue. Its crisp clear.

The relative value of a lossy video codec is in how good the quality is, at a respective bitrate. If you crank up the bitrate on ANY video codec, you'll get something that is true to the original, but at a prohibitive bitrate.

VP3 and Theora have been tested, over and over again, and simply do not provide better quality than practically any other video format, at a reasonable bitrate. Nearly all Divx/MPEG-4 ASP and h.264/AVC codecs substantially outperform it, as has been demonstrated time and time again...

http://www.doom9.org/codec-comparisons.htm
http://www.doom9.org/codecs-quali-105-3.htm
http://ww.osnews.com/story/19019/Theora-vs-h.264/

And yet, it's EXTREMELY computationally intensive... I doubt any CPU out there can decode 1080p Theora videos in real time. Many slightly older systems can't even decode DVD-resolution Theora videos. Putting Theora behind even H.264 in the performance dept.

The only thing VP3/Theora does well is extremely low bitrate videos, because of its deblocking filter. Still, it's not remotely as good as H.263 or H.264/AVC in that aspect, but still, it's something...

quote from the linked forum:

I don't "do" Windows.

...Of course not! Windows "does" YOU.

quote from the linked forum:

I don't "do" Windows.

...Of course not! Windows "does" YOU.

Direct link to announce: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1207578#post1207578

Yeah, they may have found out how to remove the DRM from BD+, but they still don't know how to configure their bloody DNS properly!
http://doom9.org/

Trolls at work? :-)
Theora wasn't the best codec at doom9.org comparison, but such comparison was done 2.5 years ago! I am sure things have changed since then. Any recent & decent comparison link, anyone?

You can read here about Theora's age, heritage, and problems. It's not FUD, it's the truth. Theora is a shitty codec.

From http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1134322&postcount=3789
"Also before the Slashdot crowd jumps in here.... Last week we received a complaint noting a DMCA violation on the Google Code project for "CoreAVC for Linux' (MPlayer). Under the terms of the DMCA we 'had' to act on that complaint and asked Google to take the project down.

Now... did we 'want' to do it? No and I am working with Alan (the project creator) now on what the complaint addressed so we can have Google restore the project."

I don't understand the DMCA completely, why would corecodec 'have' to act on it? Aren't they the ones making the complaint?

You can check out the progress of Shrodinger (A Dirac implementation) over here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135176

It's been cracked by Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD, including BD+. I rip it with eac3to to a MKV with an AC3 soundtrack, compress it using meGUI and X.266, then mux them back with MKVmerge. This is much the same as how I do HD-DVDs with some slight tweaks. Here's the process for HD-DVD which ought to help get you started on BD -> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135361

One thing to be aware of - a file on HD-DVD would max at about 21Gigs, files on BD are coming off at as much as 40+gigs. They also have some seamless scene changing that allows them to have multiple versions of a movie on the same disk. This means that instead of 1-3files like an HD-DVD you might have say 20 on a fancy BD. Stitching these together is doable in eac3to but figuring out the order for the stream you wanted, say theatrical vs director's cut, is a PITA....

Anyway, when done my BD and HD-DVD are about 13-15Gigs MAX and play VERY nice using XBMC on Linux. GL and feel free to ask questions on Doom9, Slysoft's forums, and on the AVS foprums - lots of info out there. I'm buying up HD-DVD like mad right now :-)

I've been following ebay for the Toshiba HD-A1, and have been surprised and disappointed that they continue to sell for a fair amount. I, personally, have really wanted to buy one, but not to watch movies (they are all boring). Instead, the HD-A1 has a Pentium 4, 1 GB ram, and an ide drive. The best part, however, is that it already runs Linux. If one could get his own kernel running, it would be quite a decent Myth front end, complete with HD video. See this for all of the fun details.

They probably use only the basic "blend" form of deinterlacing, rather than checking whether it is best to use IVTC for "Film" (typical DVD) or one of the fancier deinterlacing methods like TomsMoComp for "NTSC" video (typical camcorder).

It's probably best to deinterlace video yourself prior to uploading to YouTube, if you care about quality.

it's a strong disincentive for me to start buying movies in HD, until the DVD format is phased out completely, or until it becomes possible and easy to rip movies from Blu-Ray and reauthor them minus the DRM.

We're well past that point, and have been for some time. AnyDVD HD(commercial) rips the DRM off any blu-ray disc I've ever thrown at it, and is updated very frequently with new keys. It can use either the built-in key, or it's database.

Or, if you're looking for encryption keys, feel free to Grab a List (spans a bunch of pages, but that's what search is for), and decrypt 'em yourself. Tools are in the same forum.

Almost a year ago.

See, legally the copyright expires, of course. But technically it doesn't. If a copyright holder places "technological measures" to prevent someone from copying/accessing a work, then as long as the measures continue to function, you are legally prevented from using the material once is has entered the public domain, because the "technological measures" are given force of law.

Nice try, but:

a technological measure `effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title.

Once something has slipped into public domain, it no longer has a copyright owner to protect the rights of. The technical measures would still be in place, but they would not be given the force of law after the expiration. CSS, Fairplay, PlaysForSure, and to an extent AACS and BD+ have all been broken by groups working underground. If commercial entities would be able to reproduce public domain works for profit, the force behind the cracks would increase tenfold.

As much as I hate the DMCA, it doesn't give an indefinite term to copyright. I suppose it's possible that an unbreakable DRM could be created (though I doubt it), but that's not the force of law.

Theora is patented, but On2 already said it would be no problem, but Nokia is concerned about a non-obvious company waiting for a single big player to adapt those technologies to bring a suit.

The second is to use no technology newer than about two decades, ostensibly to avoid patent issues. I think Nokia is angling for this because it ultimately ends up being the same as specifying nothing, as any web content provider will be forced to not stick to the standard,

Use FairUse4WM to remove the DRM. Problem solved.

I did try Gordian Knot, along with AutoGK, as I said. No luck.

The Doom forums is one of the forums I poked around on trying to fix the problem. It is rife with people having the exact problems I'm having. Here is an example thread I found in 10 seconds:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=131202

Check out the proposed "fix" in the above thread by user "setarip_old"!

Get real! And this is exactly the kinds of "fixes" I muddled through for a few days trying to get the free stuff to work. It's like a freaking arcane black art or something. No thanks. I paid my $80 and now I make a few clicks from a nice, simple GUI and it JUST WORKS.

Never tried Gordian Knot? http://www.doom9.org/

Some more info about it at http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=130527&page=5 Knew it was only a matter of time...

Maybe try 3ivx's DirectShow filter:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39976

According to Karl Lillevold, a (lead) programmer for Real Player, Real Alternative is nothing but rebundled DLLs from Real Player in a wrapper for support other players. Thus, it is still exploitable.

Brought to you by a linux-user, Real(TM)-hater/uninstaller. I uninstall it on every computer I encounter :)

Spiralfrog allows downloads and has universal as their biggest label, but the downloads are DRM encapsulated windows media files which can be copied to mp3 players but not burned to CD, spiralfrog requires a special Active-X plugin so its windows + IE only. I wonder whether the average user will tolerate the restrictions in exchange for being free, or if they'll just stick with p2p downloads instead?

On a whim, I went to SpiralFrog and installed their software. I logged in with a fake account (thanks BugMeNot), downloaded a song from IE7 and from Firefox, and then ripped the DRM off of both using FairUse4WM. The end result was free music, without DRM, and without giving away any of my personal information. If the only trade-off is that you have to use Windows (Firefox works, so you don't have to use IE), that seems fair enough to me. The music is still in WMA format, but with the DRM stripped off you can convert it to whatever format's useful for you.

Here are the links to the FairUse4WM :

FileSend
zUpload
Files-Upload
zShare
QuickSharing
SendSpace
ShareBee

MD5 hash 0d5eaa7f8010e1293221a320943adb7e
Via:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127943

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127943

To create a high-quality .AVI file from a DVD (the easy way), all you need are two tools:

1. A ripping program to rip (not compress) the .VOB files and other files (index, chapters, subtitles, etc) from the DVD and to remove the copy protection. DVD Decrypter was the best, but it was discontinued about two years ago after the author received a cease-and-desist order from someone in Hollywood (covered in a Slashdot story). Since DVD Decrypter hasn't been updated in 2 years, newer copy protections will prevent DVD Decrypter from working. RipIt4Me (which you mentioned trying) is great (it basically updated DVD Decrypter to beat newer copy protections), but it got a cease-and-desist notice on March 31, 2007 (shit). The next ripper I'm going to try is DVDFab HD Decrypter, which is highly rated on VideoHelp.com and looks very easy to use.
2. AutoGK (Auto Gordian Knot) . This tool will create a simple .AVI file (using XviD compression by default) from all those files you ripped from the DVD. It simplifies the process and its tutorial is very easy for a newbie to follow (it assumes you already ripped the DVD and removed copy protections). You basically just choose an input file from the DVD rip (I prefer a .IFO file, which is like an index), select the desired size of the finished .AVI file, and let AutoGK do the rest with its default settings (which are good enough).

Can anybody point me at a utility (Linux or Windows, I have both) that does this without me having to baby step it through 5 different utilities and a hundred command line options?

1. Use DVD Decrypter (last available version was 3.5.4.0 - MAFIAA tried to kill them but you can still Google it, the name of the file is SetupDVDDecrypter_3.5.4.0.exe and the size is 879 KB) to rip the VOB files, stripping macrovision, region coding, and encryption (of course). There are other more advanced options too but ripping the VOB files to a directory on your HDD will be enough for the next step.

2. Use DVD Shrink to cut out all of the stuff you don't want to burn onto your copy disc (i.e. other languages, commentary tracks, advertisements, FBI warning, etc). Burn your copy (sans junk, no macrovision or encryption and region free) and save an image of the project or burn yourself a second backup so that you can dupe the DVD again, without having to go through step 1 and most of 2 again using the original store bought DVD, when your kids destroy the copy DVD for the Nth time and you have to burn them another one.

There are manuals with the software or you can check out Doom9 for detailed FAQs, How-To, and Walkthroughs. Good luck.

I'm sorry but that is far from supporting proof for the original authors claims.

There are a lot of DVDs that the now ancient DVD-Shrink can't rip without help - they typically have bad sectors that the playback/menu structure knows how to avoid, but anything that tries to read the sectors sequentially will have problems with. The state-of-the-fart for this tactic is macrovision's "Ripguard" but, as you can see from this posting, it is still easily circumvented, and is hardly designed to manipulate the ripping program to execute new code:

http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-1%20%3C /t-110717.html

> I believe that there is only one H.264 (but you might correct me) however different encoders and decoders have been created for it. All decoders should be equivalent (although some might choose to add some post processing) but the developer can vary the encoding method as long as the output still meets the standard. No, unfortunately not. The widely used CoreAVC cuts some corners during decode, hence it has slightly worse picture quality then the other decoders. -> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=973294#pos t973294 and http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119187

> I believe that there is only one H.264 (but you might correct me) however different encoders and decoders have been created for it. All decoders should be equivalent (although some might choose to add some post processing) but the developer can vary the encoding method as long as the output still meets the standard. No, unfortunately not. The widely used CoreAVC cuts some corners during decode, hence it has slightly worse picture quality then the other decoders. -> http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=973294#pos t973294 and http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119187

That's what I thought you were thinking, which is why I asked. It's a reasonable thing to think, but in this case it's not correct.

AACS is an extremely clever system, designed specifically to avoid the exact issue you're referring to. While CSS had only a few keys, so that every unit in a given model of DVD player had the same key, AACS provides each *individual* player with a unique set of keys. This means that if you manage to compromise your player, AACSLA can revoke just your player, without affecting mine at all even if I have the same model and, indeed, even if mine came off the assembly line immediately before or after yours.

The math that makes this work is very cool. The original paper is at http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~naor/PAPERS/2nl. pdf, and a decent layman's explanation is at http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122363.

Because of this, there's nothing particularly special about breaking a hardware player, and no need to try to remotely update thousands or millions of uncompromised players. Also, there's no practical limit to the number of player keys the AACSLA can revoke. On average, the AACSLA has to "waste" 39 bytes of space on each HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disk for each revoked player. Given the capacities of the disks in question, it's no problem to produce disks that are unplayable on millions of compromised players, without affecting playability on millions more uncompromised players.

Original source of key.

AFAIK, you can't burn CSS keys to a DVD-R for Authoring disc either. (cite 1, 2, 3)

As I mentioned in another response, copy protection is always limited in the type of copying it intends to prevent. A game that requires you to enter words from the manual only prevents the type of copying where you just give someone a copy of the disk--it doesn't stop anyone who's willing to scan or photocopy the whole manual--but that's still a form of copy protection. Likewise, CSS prevents you from copying one DVD onto another. Sure, you can make copies, but those copies won't be DVDs.

"Oh yeah and the fact that DMCA take down notices only apply to servers in the US."

Well this statement made me do a quick doubletake and make sure I hadn't somehow clicked on an article from a few years back.

Maybe your statement would be correct if DMCA-style provisions hadn't been finding their way into various Free Trade Agreements with other nations for some time now

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid= 73758

for instance.

So, basically, only servers in the US, and any other nation that finds it beneficial to trade and hasn't been able to avoid agreements like this.

IANAL, but in his description of how he did it, he claims he didn't saw the key in RAM and was well-versed enough in the tech to recognize it. I suppose it would come down to a court to decide if monitoring the contents of your own computer's RAM is considered reverse-engineering, and whether arnezami is in a world of hurt.

I have mod points, but what the heck. The slashdot editors strike again - posting stories without checking their facts. I've been following this since the muslix64 hack, so I do know what I'm talking about. I'm quoting the 'hacker' (arnezami - great guy) mentioned in the Ars Technica article:

QUOTE - Original post

In order to decrypt a disc you need the keys the content is encrypted with. These we usually refer to as Volume Unique Keys (although technically VUKs give Title Keys which are used to decrypt the content but this amounts to the same thing). What is important is that VUKs cannot be revoked. In other words: once we have a VUK for a disc then the AACS decryption-protection is broken for that disc. AACS cannot undo this.

So how can we get VUKs?

There are several ways to get VUKs for discs. But none of them are permanent solutions for retrieving all VUKs for all discs (released in the future).

* Get the VUKs out of "old" versions of a Software Player * Get a Volume ID (unique per movie) and a Processing Key (unique per Media Key Block version) and calculate the VUK.

The first method will expire quickly: we can now use WinDVD to retrieve VUKs out of its memory. But when new discs come out they won't work with this old version of WinDVD so you would have to install a new version. Therefore making this method obsolete for new discs.

The second method requires not one piece of information (like taking a single VUK out of the memory of WinDVD) but two pieces of information. We have several techniques now for a drive to reveal the Volume ID of a disc. So this part of the method is permanent. However the Processing Key will change every time they change to a new MKB version. And since we also need this second piece of information to calculate a VUK for a disc we always need to get the new Processing Key out of some player (whether its a Software Player or a standalone). The Processing Key (or better a Device Key) is very powerful though: if found it makes it possible to decrypt all discs released so far (assuming we can also retrieve the Volume IDs of those discs).

UNQUOTE

Moral of the story: We still need the processing key and that can be changed by the AACS, or by the abuse of language, "revoked". So the new AACS Crack is not "Undefeatable".

The only development since the time this article was written is that the firmware doesn't need to be changed anymore for the drive to reveal the VolumeID. There are some standard commands which get the job done.

Actually, on the sixth page, it is mentioned that xt5 found a way to do this hack with the stock firmware.
Link for the lazy: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=124294&pag e=6

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=987050#pos t987050

Strangely, this was announced April 9th, while the article was published April 15th.

REMEMBER The 1st of MAY.

Actually it's February 11th.

J

Apparently, according to the discoverer, this key also works on bluray. Almost all of the articles and posts I see forget to mention (or don't realize) that this key also works on bluray media. Either way, after reading through the forums on doom9, it seems like it was one hell of a fun endeavor. Hope the MPAA hasnt gotten their hands on the fellow. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121866&pag e=9

Yes, they are both posted on this page of a Doom9 thread. Look for the PDF's attached by Mistar Muffin, that's me.

They are releasing a new set of keys. More here, http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070416/tc_info world/87720 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=124809

I would post the processing key, but I'll link to the original posting instead:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121866&pag e=6

I recommend interested slashdotters read the thread, there's a lot of interesting context to the discovery.

There is a reason for some people to claim vinyl sounds better. I don't really 'choose' a system or something like that, i'm pretty neutral and no 'audiphile' spending enormous of money on speaker cables 'cause they 'sound better'.

CD's are mastered extremely bad these days. CD's can have a pretty huge dynamic range. Kickdrums/snare drums and the like should 'peak out' like they are supposed to do. The result? A very good sounding album, every instrument seperated and hearable, bass lines not sinking away in the rest of the music.

Nowadays it's common business to make records EXTREMELY LOUD with -no- dynamics whatsover. It's just a huge wall of sound. It sounds just -bad- (listen to RHCP's Californication), loud and CD's are clipping constantly. However, the vinyl releases of these albums sound pretty good because vinyl just can't get ruined that way and the master tapes are just sounding ok.

Just some links describing this problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_War
http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/
http://one.fsphost.com/roiotrade/loud.html
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=103702

Yeah, I used to think that ripping DVD was for folks who knew computers and were geeks. That was until I worked on a few barely computer literate people's computers and found ripping software! It gets better, while my SO was buying a DVD she'd found cheap at a grocery store the clerk running the checkout starts to tell her all about how to rent and RIP DVDs - then goes so far as to tell her it's perfectly legal! He even told her what software to use - she was pretty amused and just nodded while he went on and on about it. My point is - the folks who don't live computers are doing this in amazing numbers.

Now we're talking High Def DVD and people still want that content. They have just forced a bunch of folks to patch their software. Meanwhile the guys on the Doom9 forums have hacked the HD DVD firmware for the XBOX 360 such that it ignores half the scheme and coughs up the Volume keys. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=124294 Whoops. People will soon be flashing their drives to decrypt the media all over again. What are they going to do, revoke drives in mass? Do they think this SAME thing won't be done to Blu Ray and other hardware? The last time around they even shared keys between Blu Ray and HD DVD pressings, talk about one key to rule them all! Slysoft even released a commercial product to rip the new media...

So what do they think will happen with HD content that's ANY different than with standard DVDs? If someone can hack existing firmware to avoid these keys then what stops an offshore manufacturer from simply producing such a drive? You might have to hit a few buttons on the remote to activate it but you can bet it will happen. the biggest thing slowing it down right now i shear size of the content - 20Gigs and an hour's worth of time to rip it is going to put off a few folks I'll bet. Where are those 1TB drives being released again? :-)

The consumers will speak - this sucker is toast. It won't be long before simply buying a fake on a streetcorner or downloading from a torrent is FAR less trouble than buying the real thing.

Yeah, I think that's pretty much what everyone expects (at least, everyone besides the people making DRM.)

If I'm interpreting http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122363 correctly, there would be 2^22 or 4 million possible keys available. I honestly don't see them running out anytime soon. On top of that, the AACS encryption could be extended pretty much indefinitely, and if the actual implementation is cleverly done, it may be possible to extend it without breaking any hardware players (at least, any players which aren't already revoked - if they actually start running out of keys it would have to be thanks to lots of hacked keys.) I truly don't expect this to happen - they're smart enough to be careful of this.

In parallel efforts, hackers in both the Xboxhacker and Doom9 forums have exposed the "Volume ID" for discs played on XBOX 360 HD DVD drives. Any inserted disc will play without first authenticating with AACS, even those with Volume IDs which have already been revoked by the AACS LA due to previous hacking efforts. Add the exposed processing keys and you can decrypt and backup your discs for playback on any device of your choosing. Now go ahead AACS LA, revoke the Toshiba-built XBOX 360 HD DVD player... we double-dog dare ya.

I frequently watch 1.4gb 2hr movies full screen on my computer without any noticeable loss in quality over a DVD version. The ones I watch are typically encoded with an MPEG-4 variant (Divx, Xvid)... not even a "next-gen" codec. That means your estimate of 500MB for a 45 minute standard definition show should actually look extremely good if properly encoded using H.264. (HD is another story, but if we're comparing to DVDs, that's already out of the picture.)

MPEG-2 really is quite shitty in comparison to any decent, modern video codec... that's why they need to crank the bitrate so high on video DVDs. The AC3 audio is also needlessly high-bitrate. Yvan256 (GP) was absolutely right to make fun of the OP for not understanding why video DVD box sets occupy way more discs than the data DVDs would, for nearly indistinguishable quality.

For an in-depth comparison of what various high-end codecs look like, check out doom9's 2005 Codec Shootout. You can compare high-resolution screen captures from various difficult scenes across multiple codecs and against the original source. You have to really zoom in to see some of the compression artifacts, and that's for a 700mb/120min video or a 1400mb/160min video (including a 128k audio track). Go up another 50-100% in bitrate to 500mb/45min, and add a year and a half of codec development since then, and try to claim that it can't be DVD quality.