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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.
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)
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.
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
o/~ Join us now and share the software
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.
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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Imagine the prospect of france being on the right end of an argument!
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
"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
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.
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KMSMA (WWBD?)