Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
How similar is a Description library to a Decryption library?
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
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/
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
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".
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.
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.
------
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.
------
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.
---
Imagine the prospect of france being on the right end of an argument!
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
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.
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.
They aren't plugging it for many different operating systems. For each of their ports, they have a brief description of what is working and what isn't. In some cases, some pretty vital features are missing, and they aren't hiding that. VLC ports: BeOS, BSD, Linux, MacOS X, QNX RTOS, Solaris, and Windows. Click on any of those to get the current status of the port. In the case of BSD, it says encrypted DVD input is untested. So you've got a pretty limited selection of DVDs you can get to work, unless someone has managed to get that code working (it is possible they just haven't updated that page).
"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.
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.
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
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?
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?)
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.