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The Little DVD Driver That Could Change Movies
AnnaBlack writes "DVDSynth is a (currently prerelease) low-level driver tool that can sit between your physical DVD drive and any software that accesses it. So far so what, but the extremely clever thing about this is that it can filter the DVD data on the fly. The example applications included currently allow new subtitle sets to be provided for existing films (which could spawn a whole new activity for movie buffs!) but also a very neat little filter that will remove region codes on the fly from any DVD you play. Supplied with full sourcecode and programmers documentation." Wonder how long before this is contraband code like DeCSS.
I think it would be lots of fun to rip on some of the "great" movies in the style of MST3K or Rocky Horror. Sure, doing it through subtitles is not ideal, but it could still be a lot of fun! It would sure make the recent Star Wars releases 5000X more watchable.
Is this a mix of software and hardware? Are some DVD-ROM drives just un-regioned? Does it somehow rely on the software to participate?
I'm curious because I paid no mind to region when I got my bare DVD drive -- I can play region 1 and 2 discs from linux (mplayer) but haven't ever tried commercial dvd software.
Can someone lay out the steps a PC takes when verifying that it's the proper region?
And how will you do that when the tool itself is illegal, hmmm? It's already in breach of the DMCA, and the MPAA have shown no reluctance to pursue DMCA-infractions outside the US as if they were domestic - as I know to my cost, being prosecuted in California for my deCSS mirror in the UK - and the forthcoming EUCD legislation in the UK mandates DMCA-type provisions, without those pesky exceptions for reverse engineering, interop, et al.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Region codes are enforced both by the drive firmware and the player software. You'll still need a region-free DVD drive. They're hard to find, but still out there. See here.
ONLY if you want external access....Palladium is going to drive a NEW wave of NAT. Instead of just the IP, new NAT is gonna have to mask a Trusted Computer Bit as well. Then I can have just ONE Judas box and the rest of my network can be safe :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I think you're missing something here.
In the future, a Palladium-enabled DRM aware OS could stop you from installing this driver. Or even researching enough to write a similar one. With a DRM OS, Microsoft could specify that only cryptographically signed drivers from approved developers will be allowed on your system. The DRM future is one where you don't control your box. Everything you want to do will have to be approved and accepted. This is not your father's copy protection, and you treat it lightly at your peril.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
According to my universities handbook, "Guidelines for DVDs on campus are that any media which contains inappropriate language, nudity, gratuitous violence, etc. may not be viewed or possessed (including video tapes) in the residence halls or on campus.." Will this driver filter out all on wanted bad language. There are movies that I like to watch, Star Wars for example, but am unable to because it contains one or two swear words.
If this driver can do that, I wonder if we would be able to watch upto certain rated movies.
This would also be nice for families. If a parent doesn't want a child to view/hear certain parts of the DVD, this sounds like it will be able to bleep that part out. Sounds like this program may take off nicely.
... but even with palladium, what stop you from using a palladium processor on a CORRECT dvd, and then having a driver non signed in background which takes the bits direct from the screen memory or what is sent to output ? What indeed ? As long as palladium authorise non signed application to run on the same PC as signed application, then there will always be a way. (yeah I know, in the future they will surely try to forbid any non signed app).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This is the best thing since sliced bread. I have a ton of region 3 dvds I wanna watch on my laptop, but until now I had to rip everything to divx... thank you to the author for allowing me to use my dvd drive again!!!
Btw, the install is alot simpler then I expected and works flawlessly on win xp for me. Thanks a million!
When you play a DVD, the first thing the software player does is to ask the DVD drive to return the DVD disc's title key. This key is needed to decrypt a CSS-encrypted movie.
On a Region Protected drive (or RPC-2 drive) before acknowledging this query, the drive first checks that the region of the inserted disc matches the drive's own region.
If they don't match, the drive will simply not return the Title Key. Hence a Region 1 DVD will not play in a Region 2 drive, etc.
Until now, the only way to defeat this scheme was to act upon the drive itself, by flashing a "patched" firmware.
In this firmware, the region check would have been disabled (with other things) so that the Title Key would always be returned, regardless of the disc's region.
Because this region checking was hardware based, it seemed for a long time that no software only solution would ever defeat it, and that the only solution to make your system region free would be to flash your DVD drive.
However, people using DVD-Rippers (DeCSS, etc.)soon noticed that they were able to rip the content of a disc on a region protected drive, regardless of whether the disc region was matching the drive's one or not.
This gave the idea to a few people (this is the 3rd product I know of that makes use of this feature actually) to create "virtual" DVD drives, i.e., fake drives that would rip from the actual DVD drive on one side, and appear like a standard DVD device to the software player on the other side, while feeding it the ripped data.
Of course, as such a software offers complete control on both the (virtual) device and the (unscrambled) data that flows through it, getting rid off all the annoyances like region checks, FBI warnings or Jar Jar Binks characters becomes child's play.
This little tool looks really cool though...
Yep, and all those people who worked on the Athlon and Pentium4 are TV repairmen.
I work at the company that makes one of the above chips, and I'm a EE, and I'm happy to inform you that very few of the EE's who designed those chips would have the first clue about how to even replace a fuse in their TV.
Most of the EE's I've met (mainly the young ones) know only what their company has been training them to do since they started there out of college. They know VHDL, and how to design maybe a DMA unit. Or they know how to design some bitcells in a memory array. Or they know how to do validation on a part of the design, and debug a problem just enough to figure out which part of the design the error lies in (and thus which person in Design to call up). Their knowledge of electrical engineering is anything but broad; it's so narrowly focussed that they're completely useless at any different EE job, and they don't remember enough of their college classes to be useful at something different.
When a previous posted said only EE's from the 60's can do the hardware hacking stuff brought up here, he was mostly right. There are a few of us young guys (and no, not women; of the very few female EE's I've met, none were in it out of interest in electronics) who do have a broad background and interest in many aspects of the EE field, and actually can take apart a piece of consumer electronics and know what we're looking at (and also care enough to do so rather than just buy something new or hire someone else to fix it). But we're really really rare. Here's a clue though: if you know a EE who also fixes his own car, or builds electronics stuff at home, you've probably found one of the rare hardware hacker types.
Well, I live in Europe, but I'm american, so region free dvd'ing is a big issue for me. At first I noticed that yes, I can rip some other-region dvd's to my hd. But not all. It depended on the encryption. For example, I could not rip the region 2 DVD of Buffy the Vampire slayer (which I own. I just wanted to rip it so I could watch it on my computer, since it some episodes don't play correctly on my PS2).
When I flashed my DVD's bios to make it region free, I no longer had this problem. I can rip anything. I can also play any DVD under windows. Unfortunately, I can no longer watch encrypted DVD's under linux. I know I had the software setup correctly because prior to the flashing I could watch any dvd of the appropriate region. Now even dvd's which previously played, no longer do so.
So I'm wondering if some of the information in your posting are entirely accurate. Specifically, my experience says one cannot always rip the content of a disc, regardless of region. It seems to be possible only when the dvd is not encrypted.
I don't know the root cause of this, but based on that experience, I'd guess flashing of the bios will still be necessary for encrypted cd's.
that said, I'm thinking my problem is I don't have a tool like DVD genie for linux, that software sets a region code when scanning the dvd to play it. Anyone know of a solution to this problem?