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CSS Decryption Library Released by Videolan.org
javilon writes "libdvdcss is the cross-platform library used by vlc, the VideoLAN Client, to access DVDs with transparent CSS decryption. It is the first library based on the vlc codebase, but others are planned.
VideoLAN is a project of students from the École Centrale, Paris. Coming from a research background they could have some legal coverage to fight the RIAA in France.
" VLC is currently the best DVD player for Linux. apt-get install vlc-gtk for you deb heads. Check it out. It's not 100%, but its pretty damn good.
On my machine, xine currently beats vlc by a little bit in terms of CPU usage. With the new video-output code soon to be commited to vlc, videolan is in fact lower than xine. Also, xine seems to become corrupted in between chapters changes at an alarming rate - a problem I haven't experienced with vlc.
You should take a look at a newer version of vlc - I submitted a patch to allow full-screen xvideo playback a few versions ago. libdvdcss has many advantages over libcss, including not requiring the region to be set on a DVD drive as well as being supported on more platforms (windows, BeOS, linux, *BSD)
Can anyone explain in simple terms how this works? I don't see how you can decrypt the movie with er.. decrypting the movie.
Really? Videolan is the best? I tried it a few weeks ago, and it just crashed. I didn't really pursue it because I already had a the best DVD player hat worked on the first try ;)
F0 07 C7 C8
Not that I know how to spell, or use HTML, or anything...
F0 07 C7 C8
Doesn't VideoLAN support Xv? That'd be a whole lot faster if it does.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Impressive. Yet another mistake that the MPAA and friends will be kicking themselves for, I'd guess?
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
How can it allow the reading of DVDs from any region on a region-locked (RPC-II) DVD-ROM drive? I was under the impression that the hardware just wouldn't allow it, but as long as you had a (slightly) older (i.e., pre-RPC-II) DVD-ROM drive, you could read a disc from any region, as well as RPC-II drives with patched firmware.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
As for digital distribution, sure, I've napstered stuff. Much of it sucked and was subsequently turf. The ones that didn't suck I went to the store and purchased when I could (One album, Jethro Tull's "Songs from the Wood" took me two years to find). If I didn't have napster for those occasions, I'da ended up buying albums that suck based on one or two good singles. Maybe that's what is really pissing them off... they can't make 'sucker sales' to people based on a good single any more.
If there were an online store that'd whip up CD images for me from original media (ie: not sampled to mp3 and back again) at a reasonable price, I'd probably buy my music from them and love 'em for it.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
This is legal in Europe, but not for long. The EU recently passed a multinational-sponsored Directive on Copyright, which is even more draconian than the DMCA. This requires EU member states to criminalise circumvention devices, giving them no leeway; member states are expected to ratify this (and it's extremely unlikely that the usual protests from local academics and napatistas will persuade any nation to buck the EU). Once it's passed, this will disappear, or move to one of the rapidly dwindling number of nations without a DMCA-analogue law.
Would VideoLAN be able to do subtitles on a machine without hardware overlaying? I've been unable to get subtitles working with Xine on my Riva TNT2 card; apparently Xine's subtitle feature requires hardware overlaying, which is only supported by drivers for a few high-end cards.
Most RPC2 drives only do the region check once, during a key exchange process that libdvdcss manages to skip. Any subsequent access doesn't get blocked.
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God, root, what is difference ?
How similar is a Description library to a Decryption library?
Movie acting is becoming obselete anyway. In a few years people will be able to make their own movies a la Shrek.
stay frosty and alert
You get your IFO spec and code it. Oh right, there isn't one. Atleast not a complete one. It's not quite that easy.
-matt
Because the information for the menus is stored in the IFO files on the disc. These files have no official documentation available, and very little has been reverse engineered. It's a very difficult task to reverse engineer a file format about which you know very little.
-matt
I'm sure this is redundant, but I found vlc to be the easiest way to play DVD's on Linux. All I did was make a symbolic link from /dev/dvd to my dvd player, ./configure, make, make install. That's it. Plays everything I've thrown at it (encrypted as well). Xine didn't work for me, neither did oms. Not to mention the pages of install instructions for those packages, and the software required.
Great job with vlc!
Your post contains the following implicit assumption:
This does not follow. Please provide some form of justification for this assumption, or i will be forced to completely ignore the last paragraph of your post.I *could* make some comment on the way your post seems to assume that the recording industry and the RIAA are all the same thing and that is good for one is good for the others, but it isn't worth the bother.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This code, along with patches for OMS an Xine, allow RPC II drives to play dvds without ever setting the region code. Check http://www.prout.be/dvd/
This is a pretty novel approach to DVD-decryption. I'm not sure as to the legality of this, but I do know that the server where this code resides is in France, maybe they have a saner intellectual property policy?
I really think that with this release the folks at videolan.org have surpassed the OMS project, which also had an aim of bringing DVD video to the desktop.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
Well, it's an open-source method of transparently extracting DVD data probably based on DeCSS. Last time I checked, 2600 lost their DeCSS case to the MPAA and unfortunately were forced to remove their links to the DeCSS code.
Of course the question here is, "Is it legal?" I didn't even infer it was illegal, I just wanted to know how close to illegal it is, or if there was some kind of legislation in France that permitted this sort of thing. If "people" are stupid enough to associate "libdvdcss" with "illegal" just because of something they read on Slashdot, they'll also believe that Natalie Portman has been petrified, everyone should have grits in their pants, and that all your base are belong to CATS.
WARNING: Slashdot is for entertainment purposes only. Any information found on these message boards is probably partially incorrect, mostly incorrect, or completely fabricated. As a matter of fact, you've probably just imagined the whole Slashdot thing. Go home now.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
Exactly, and that is where the DeCSS fiasco may die, if we only let it.
If the DeCSS fiasco was simply a matter of "letting it die", the issue would have been dead for months now.
People are stupid enough to associate with libdvdcss with "illegal" when they hear people asking "Is that illegal?"
Well, I never said "Is that illegal?"
IanCarlson: I'm not sure as to the legality of this.
All this means is that the legality should be looked into futher. I sure do hope that the code doesn't infringe on the intellectual property rights of a company in the MPAA, but if it does, it should be noted for the record.
It is silly to think that if you don't question the software's legality, the MPAA lawyers won't either.
aÍÍ©ÍÌÍ£Ì'̽ͩÌÍzÍYÌÍÌY
remind me to not vote for this article for roblimo's 'best online article' sponsorship contest. it took approx. three rereads to understand it at all, and the end result was equivalent to an ice cream headache.
complex
Well, I just grabbed all the source, and while I realize it's early alpha and all that it still seems extremely linux-centric. It bugs me when something is plugged for many different operating systems when I (admittedly not a coder, but I'm not totally clueless) can't compile it for the life of me on a recent stable FreeBSD release. This might not be such a problem if there was any kind of documentation, of any sort, anywhere, regarding other operating systems.
:)
So while this product looks really slick, not all of us can bear the thought of slapping RH 7.1 on our boxes, which is unfortunate. oh well
EOM
5:11pm - Saving from http://www.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.2.80/vl c-0.2.80.tar.bz2
at 0,1 k/s
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Like, uh, French fries?
-- Colin
o/~ Join us now and share the software
"RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly
Like "AOL Canada" and "AT&T Canada".
The problem with this sort of thinking, is that it does no real good. Sure, it may get you somewhere you're happier, but it does nothing to fix the underlying problem. You can't run and hide from everything. We have what's called the "fight or flight" response when we're threated. Our bodies prepare to do either, should they need to. It's not just the "flight" response, there are two options.
;-)
If I'm a wolf looking for a place to sleep, and every time I lay down some other wolf comes and scares me away, I'll never get a place to stay. Sometimes you have to stand your ground.
"So, go somewhere where there's no wolves to bother you."
Sounds good in theory, but it's gonna be awfully lonely come mating season...
The bottom line is, if you simply move to another country when some corporation does something you don't like, then they've won. You're giving them the power to push you out. If all the people who didn't like the MPAA moved to different countries, they'd have no opposition from within the country and no problem doing whatever they want.
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
There task list is numbered in hex ;-)
Here is an example...
Task: 0x5e
Difficulty: Hard
Urgency: Wishlist
Description: All-in-one interface window
Find a way for the interface plugin to provide video output capabilities
and have it display the stream in the same window.
Status: Todo
You mean pommes frites? "French fries" isn't that much of a stretch.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
And it took me a few parses to figure out what CmdrTaco meant by "CSS Description Library" in the title. I can't wait to get this software so I can *describe* all my DVDs. Yay!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It is a 10Mb ethernet switched network with an ATM backbone made of 3Com stuff.
The format DVD uses is mpeg2 so making a decoder for DVD is not really more complicated.
Chuchi
I can't agree more. Videolan is the best DVD player now available for Unix and BeOS. I tried other alternatives like Xine, but Videolan looks more stable and needs less CPU time than other players.
Great work !
{{.sig}}
I think your statements on music are good, but the movie one is kinda only half right. The majority of the big movie dollars is in the theater sales, not the home movies. Actors in a straight-to-video movie hardly make tens of millions of dollars for their performances.
Last time I checked, 2600 lost their DeCSS case to the MPAA and unfortunately were forced to remove their links to the DeCSS code.
Exactly, and that is where the DeCSS fiasco may die, if we only let it.
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I want all of Slashdot to STOP SAYING THAT! The last thing we need is people associating "libdvdcss" with "illegal". The more this gets engrained in people's heads, the more likely it will be to actually be outlawed.
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I agree, i have Xine working great on my machine, fullscreen and windowed xv output with perfect audio sync.
I also have it playing back through my Hollywood+ after using the dxr3 patches. Audio sync is not working perfectly yet, so i wouldn't use it as a replacement for my hardware DVD deck, but practically no CPU usage and a perfect picture on my external TV is awesome.
Xine also plays DivX and other AVI formats if you supply it with win32 codecs, which earns it top marks in my books.
While I will try VideoLAN at some point, i can't imagine how it could be particularly 'better' than Xine, since xine works so damn well with almost all my video clips.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Actually, I beg to differ. Xine is currently the BEST DVD player for Linux, and supports Xvideo playback in both windowed and fullscreen mode, which videolan does not. Further, LiViD release libcss long ago and works with a libcss plugin for Xine, so this isn't the first time this has been out for the public to grab, though I suppose it might not be based on the same thing. Regardless, that was quite a declaration, sir.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Okay, before the self-pity express takes off here, let's clarify a couple things about old-fashioned european languages.
First off, the English language as we know it has only existed for a few hundred years. Before it came "Olde Englishe," which was basically German with some French vocab thrown in (hence, the term "Anglo-saxon" to describe englishmen). It was really only English insofar as it was the language spoken in the place called England. But basically nothing like the language we know.
Middle English arose in the 13th and 14th centuries, when some particularly English idioms found their way into the vernacular. While you might recognize a passage written in middle english, you'd almost certainly need footnotes (at the rate of about 2 per line) to really get the gist of what was being said. For comparison, pick up a copy of the "original," non-modernized "Canterbury Tales" by Chaucer.
By the time Shakespeare was even born, Gutenberg was dead and the printing press was revolutionizing the way people thought of literature. Because identical copies of a text could be distributed ad infinitum, the language more or less became standardized, and eventually canonized into the Oxford English Dictionary. This is, more or less, the language we know today as "English." There were still some spelling issues to work out, and of course contemporary idioms always change, but the essential grammar and indeed much of the vocabulary has remained the same ever since.
So no, you didn't have to memorize any "middle english" to play Mercutio. If you got a printed copy of the play, you didn't even have trouble reading the glyphs, which might be a legitimate complaint of a modern Shakespeare scholar poring over the frist Folio. Sorry if you don't know what an "alderman" or "philome" are, but you could probably find out with a good dictionary. So, I'm sure you're a great actor, but PLEASE don't go around bragging about memorizing a hundred lines in an ancient language just because you had to read the freakin' queen mab speech.
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Hmmm... I tried this just the other day on my Athlon 900 / Geforce2 / 256MB ram / Kernel 2.4.5 / GCC 2.95.3 / GLibC 2.2.3 / SLD 1.2, and it was extremely slow.
Anyone know what would cause this?
I was using SDL for the output.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Sure there is one.. just that you're not getting it!
How else would all the proprietary players exist and work as well as they actually do?
--
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
Well, I meant MPAA, my mistake...
But if the guy who wrote DeCSS could get arrested because of pressure from the EEUU you could get the same happening here...
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Yes, I know... I really do use Debian myself... don't mod this as redundant (overrated, maybe, but not troll or flamebait ;) )
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
But the CSS crack is old news by now.
You're missing the point. This isn't "wow, the VideoLAN team managed to crack CSS with a cryptic ninety-line Perl script that you pipe from /dev/dvd into /tmp/obscenelylargefile." This is "wow, the VideoLAN team managed to create a portable, simple, well-documented CSS decryption library that lets you access the DVD as a block device without even caring if it's encrypted."
Yes, the fact that CSS can be cracked is old news. The fact that there's a very high-quality library to do so is not.
"RIAA in France." Recording Industry Association of America... In France... That alone is incredibly silly, but what does the RIAA have to do with CSS? I thought that was MPAA?
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Movie acting is becoming obselete anyway. In a few years people will be able to make their own movies a la Shrek. You mean I get to meet Cameron Dias? Sweet!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
You have penis mightiers?
I think that this is an excellent project in general, not just in the input library. It already has much functionality, it is developed an coordinated thoroughly, and they even gave thought to porting their player to other platforms.
Notate bene also the fact that they have not tried to make themselves known, in spite of the fact that they have a superior product, contrary to the massive media coverage some other, significantly less successfull developments are drawing.
Also mark the fact that the students in questions are as far as I can tell college students. Writing a DVD player is an exceedingly difficult task; I just hope that my school would spawn projects more significant than a pocker game simulator.
To sum up, bene factum.
After browsing through the pages, it seems that they mean that it's something to let you transparently decrypt CSS. The library lets you access a DVD as a block device, as if it didn't have any encryption at all. The page for the library itself is here.
Sure, they can win small, isolated victories. But even if 2600 lost, do you think that would even begin to stop the spread of DeCSS-related software, or the people who made it possible? No way! It would probably do quite the opposite (mirroring campaigns, etc).
2600 may be a casualty of war, but there are a hell of a lot more angry hackers on the battlefield, and they can't target 'em all.
-John
First off, VLC is pretty cool. I tried it a while back, and it worked almost perfectly. Just like a DVD player should, under any OS. Hats off to its creators.
But the CSS crack is old news by now. While the MPA (not the RIAA) is entangled in futile litigation, we're watching movies. We have been for a long time. Dave Touretsky's gallery of CSS descramblers (http://cs.cmu.edu/~dst) has grown to an enormous size, there are several Copyleft anti-DVD CCA shirts at every LUG meeting, and the algorithm is very well understood by now. I propose that we consider this a victory of information and move on to other fronts... There's plenty else to fight.
-John
Perhaps that's because straight-to-video movies generally aren't very good, and that's why they were s-t-v movies in the first place? Theatrical releases function as much for advertising for the video release as they do for making money in the first place.
VLC is currently the best DVD player for MacOS X, considering Apple still hasn't released one yet...
grrrr...
*sigh*
*This message has been brought to you by the makers of skin...Hey, we've got you covered.*
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I just tried Videolan .. to all those reading - performance may vary depending on your setup! I don't get good Videolan performance but Xine works near perfectly for me. Videolan may work well for you, or even OMS.
There aren't that many players to try, so you may as well try all of them and see how your mileage varies. I attribute part of my problems to my Aureal Vortex 2 PCI sound card.
Regardless of the moral stance you may take on the whole RIAA copyright infringement circus, there is a bit of irony here.
The business side of the the recording arts, has made it's fortune from technology, with unrelentless greed. The multi-billion dollar industry exists only because someone invented everything from the motion picture through the eight track to the digital media.
The recording arts business embraced every chunk of technology to come along, and has sucked it for all it's worth.
Overwhelming greed pushed the industry into releasing material in digital form, not a huge desire to increase the quality of the product they sell.
Now it has backfired. There probably hasn't been a CD produced that is any good, that hasn't been converted to an MP3 and spread out on the net. The same will happen for movie DVD's.
I personally think this is wrong, but that is irrellevant, it will happen.
The irony is that the golden goose that made the business side of the recording arts what it is (technology) is what is going to sink it. They never will be able to encode digital format in a way that some geek can't crack, an still have something that will play in a cheap player. They won't quit releasing digital media, because it is way cheaper to produce than the analogue version (lp, cassette, vhs), and they won't be able to stop pirates.
If bands wanna make money, get a tour bus and hit the road. Put your albums out for free on the net, they are going to get there anyway. I guess actors can do the same with live performances. The business side is a huge leach that it was created by technology, and is now taking it's lumps from it.
It's easy to write songs, you just sit down and write them?
Unfortunately it would then make the kernel module illegal, possibly even the entire kernel if compiled-in. However, on my reading of the DMCA, I think the RIAA would have severe difficulty claiming that a DVD player with compiled-in decryption was a circumvention device - because that would make all players illegal, licensed or not. There's no mention of licensing in the DMCA as far as I can see.
Also a comment on the original story ...
Coming from a research background they could have some legal coverage to fight the RIAA in France.
They don't have to - it isn't illegal in France - yet. And I suspect (usual "NAL" disclaimer) that CSS could never be claimed to be an "effective technological measure" under laws implementing the EU directive, because under the directive the word "effective" retains its usual English meaning, and any alleged "effectiveness" was blown away long before the law was enacted. Same goes for SDMI.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Great album (had it on vinyl since it came out). I've seen the CD in stores here in Germany, but my vinyl copy is still in good form. I'd recommend most of their other earlier stuff too: "Thick as a BricK", "Aqualung" - there's a long list.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
.. it ended up as a DVD-player ?
:-))
videolan project started in the old days beeing aimed at broadcasting mpeg2 video on the students' campus' LAN in Chatenay.
I remember they got huge funding to buy a complete 100MB switched ethernet network, mostly sponsored by companies such as Cisco (or maybe else..). I saw the very first demos in 1999 or so... they were using a mpeg2 decoder card, and focused on developing the streaming over the LAN, which i remember as beeing quite complex.
I didn't even know they GPL'ed the whole thing and started developing the decoders themselves. nice thing !
Still, i don't really understand how DVD format fit in the initial picture. ability to brodcast DVDs over the LAN ? Isn't that a big copyright and broadcast issue ?
The US is a country dominated by the interests (or at any rate wants) of big business. This is known, and is why the latest round of draconian copyright laws are being put into place. It's why the US is the home of some of the most powerful corporations in the world, including MS - which controls the very way we can use computers, and AOL-Time-Warner, which controls a large proportion of what we see, read and hear. This isn't new, it isn't news to anyone reading this.
The truth is that anyone protesting about these conditions can see look across the world and find examples of places where it is legal to do the things you want to do. This varies from countries with more liberal drugs policies, to countries where working conditions are guaranteed. And, in the case of the DMCA, most, if not all, of Europe is untouched by this kind of legislation.
And generally, if you're the sort of person who finds this important, you probably can move to the country that has the laws you want. If implementing DVD viewers is your speciality, it's highly unlikely that you don't have the skills to get a European employer to sponsor a visa for you - and that's assuming you don't want to take the student route, or some other similar perfectly legal way of getting into Europe.
Ultimately you have to make a choice. Moaning about how the government has been taken over by corporate interests can only go so far: if you want to deal with it, you have to take matters into your own hands. There are countries out there that are not in the pockets of big business, that have laws protecting the rights of employees, of people to write code they want to write, that have written the right to privacy into their constitutions or as their highest priority laws. It may sound faceous, but perhaps it's Europe that yerns for America's "huddled masses" now, as a collection of nation states committed to democracy in a way that a US controlled by private corporate interests never can be.
Either way, there's little excuse to continue complaining. Continuing to live in the US is a choice, more so indeed than choosing a career or to have a family - the favourate examples of areas where people shouldn't complain if they choose to do these things and then find they have less freedom than before. If you don't like the DMCA, get the skills to leave, and then do it.
--
KMSMA (WWBD?)
The action against 2600 Magazine is on-going. Until the legal system realizes that they cannot (and more imporantly, must not) block the flow of knowledge implicit in the concept of "fair use", you are still at risk. Maybe not for DeCSS, but for the hack for the next "secure" (fair-use-free) technology and the one after that, and the one after that...
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
While you're busy fighting the RIAA in France, could you also fight the Evil Empire in my pants?
Or maybe you meant the DMCA and the MPAA in America as applied by the Hague Treaty, but then, that would require a clue.
it rox :D
If bands wanna make money, get a tour bus and hit the road. What? And make them work? Nonsense. Copyright protection exists solely to make artists and labels rich, and keep them that way with outrageously long terms. I have had lengthy discussions on the Napster forums with an owner of a small record label. You'd think I was taking the food out of his mouth when I spoke of my defense of file-sharing. The distribution model in place is an outmoded dinosaur with too many hands and the till. Until the industry and public realize that the product isn't worth $20 a pop, the record companies will still produce it. And the public wil buy it.
Hey it seems a guy has written something similar but using the LiViD's libcss, I have tried and they all works, the patches can be found on http://www.prout.be/dvd, it's a french page thought, but hey it works!!! :)