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Work Around for New DVD Format Protections
An anonymous reader writes "For the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats, Hollywood implemented a complete copy protection scheme; almost everything has to be encrypted and authenticated. Despite the crypto-stuff in Advanced Access Content System and High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, they left the backdoor wide open — they forgot about the PrintScreen button. Using this function you can create exact digital copies of a film picture-by-picture and reassemble them into a stream."
thats quite a bit of work to copy a movie
You could just hook up your DVD player to a VHS recorder. Ever think of that?
+5, Truth
This copy protection quagmire (we need to come up with a withdrawal plan)... it creates problems in other ways on other fronts.
Consider the long discussed issues in general with DRM and DRM's interference with easy adoption of new (and really potentially very cool) technology for consumers. This has been discussed to death on slashdot as well as other forums -- and remains one of the foremost threats to the success of HD in any
What may be less obvious is what starts to happen when these tiny holes appear in the digital dike, and the industry discovers they're gaping holes, and the patching begins, to the detriment of other accepted technology.
In the case of this described "hole", a screen print? This becomes the DRM's worst nightmare? If they succeed in lobbying the PC industry and others and get this hole blocked, all of a sudden a long-accepted practice, i.e., screen printing, becomes suspect and may even be taken away as an option because it is potentially used for pirating.
Don't discount the possibility this could happen. A few years ago all may have pooh-poohed the idea as preposterous because computers just plain old didn't have the horse power and storage to pull this kind of feat off. Today they do. And if someone does start pirating DVDs this way it would be predictable the MPAA could go after that technique, maybe successfully.
Unintended consequences. I would find it highly objectionable to see the capabilities of my computers to expand and my ability (or permission) to use those capabilities diminished.
I was trying to view this story but it kept telling me ...
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
But I found a work around!
Copying The DaVinci Code frame by frame
Hollywood didn't implement squat.
They browbeat/bribed the companies that developed the software to implement it.
Splitting hairs, maybe, but Hollywood would have trouble implementing a flush toilet.
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
30 frames/sec * 60 seconds/minute * 150 minute movie = 135000 pictures, no? That's an awful lot of times pushing the print screen button. Even if you can "print" to an image file, and use a script to "push" the button continuously, once you factor in reassembling it, that'll still take a while.
1 - Shift key - DMCA circumvention
2 - Print Screen - DMCA circunvention
Let's hope they don't take our entire keyboard to protect their stuff from the thieves...
how long until
Yes I will spend hours hitting print screen frame by frame so that I don't have to buy the DVD. TAKE THAT MPAA HAHAHA SUCKERS
Printscreen?
Give me a break, somebody please send a HD-DVD/Blu-ray drive to DVD Jon so he can start doing his stuff.
Hollywood makes me L-O-L
No consumer content will be safe from copying until they can beam it straight into our heads.
Both video and audio, you can always plug the output device into an input capture device and copy it that way. And with new digital transmission mediums the quality can be kept very high (compared to those who remember the VCR-to-VCR via RCA cables days).
Not to mention that any encryption scheme that can be decoded can be broken. It's only a matter of time.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
the MPAA has started legal proceedings against keyboard manufacturers for their "Deliberate and malicious attempt to circumvent our government guaranteed profits."
Also, Copyright Lawyers all over the planet needed new pants in order to cope with all of the involuntary orgasms.
More news at 7.
To make "other" copies is too troublesome. As always, real pirates will use the means they always have. They will work "off hours" at DVD publishing sites making uncounted copies indistinguishable from the counted copies. They will have the production equipment in their homes to make exact duplicates.
This is not about stopping piracy because these measures to nothing to address the two primary methods. What it does thrwart is casual consumer copying to better ensure that the consumers will buy multiple copies of the same stuff.
What I am saying is not new and has been repeated since the creation of the first DVD format.
Wouldn't it be easy to reprogram the PCI-Express graphics card to slave the images to another graphics card which would then output the full glory without protection?
:)
Unless they protect the image in memory we can always sniffz it
Whatever happened to the "I bought the DVD, I should do what the fuck I want with it"?
+5, Truth
Is it April fools day?
Put that shit in a signature.
On HDCP protected hardware, if you use PrintScreen, the frame will be completely blank (solid black).
any decent video app worth it's salt [hell, even blender, the 3d app] can treat a sequence of numbered images as any other animation file
[that said, I'd expect them to be using video overlays to play hd video just like every other video player [except flash]... though I could see an option to not use an overlay as a fallback, I can't see any computer less than 10 years old unable to do video overlays]
Really, I resent the fact that some DVD players block image capture for the occasional still frame. I would hate to see the software players remove the feature from the high def software players because some clueless weenie had to announce it to the world.
That really is a stretch, the analogy about the camera filming the screen nails it, at least that way you get properly synched sound. Speaking of which, you forgot to mention that you should open up sound recorder so you can capture the audio in sub par format as well. Of course there are applications that could be created and probably already exist that would allow the recording of each frame the computer displays. This would prove to be ineffective, inefficient, and probably low quality as well when you attempted to compile the frames for distribution. I know that we aren't big fans of the encryption features, but its probably not good use of Slashdot to fill its boards with absurdly obvious "hacks" that don't work.
This just shows that whatever the content industry (not the content creators, btw) do to protect their distribution monopoly is doomed to fail. After all it requires just one good enough rip and the thing is out there. This specific security hole is extremely stupid, since the attack is one of the most obvious things to try. Even if ripping is harder and the domain of technology enthusiasts, distribution via P2P filesharing is easy and P2P filesharing is by now basically unkillable.
Still I think there is hope: The stuff Hollywood had been producing in the past few years is now so bad, that soon it will not be worth the bandwidth and disk space to download it, let alone the time to look at it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Plus, what's the point of going back two generations? Sure, you could watch the movie, but you're not getting a high definition picture anymore... So why not make a copy of the regular DVD, which as we know are easy to rip/decrypt. Otherwise, it would be like going from a CD to an 8 track. And I don't think there's too many people out there doing that.
Now was not the time to splatter this information all over the world. If they had waited for wider deployment, this hole could have been kept wedged open as closing it on hundreds of thousands of clients wouldn't have been terribly practical.
Remember would be DVD-Jons, if you find DRM holes in new media tech SHUT YOUR YAP UNTIL EVERYBODY AND HIS DOG HAS BOUGHT SOME. THEN RELEASE THE INFO. When you do release the information, do so complete with "mom friendly" utilities and use warez "spreaders" to be sure everybody and his dog can start using it right away. This also complicates shutting the hole in various social and technical ways.
Ooh, can I make the obvious comment?
Oh boy, I can't wait until the MPAA takes away my PRINT SCREEN key!
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I'm just throwing out ideas here, but could a pirate with decent art skills redraw every frame of the movie on paper? A few thousand pieces of computer paper would be all that's needed. Staple it all together and BAM, sell on the subway corner for 2 bucks a pop. Piracy will never end!
If O2 is good, O3 must be 1.5 times better!
Well see now, the analoge hole argument ignores little details like that, and plays up the "see! see! you can't stop us from getting what we want". It's basically a game of one-upmanship, not of technical superiority.
Of course everyone misses the point that DRM and other mechanisms isn't about stopping every "infringer", any more than having police is about zero crime. One just needs to keep the problem to the background noise level.
Err... Isn't even this post a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its anti-circumvention terms? The law basically says it's illegal for you to fix a design defect (like DRM). I believe it's also illegal to share information on how to point toward a way to fix a DRM problem. Hmmm....
I can't believe prison is a threat for someone writing news like this. Too bad the poster of this news had to be anonymous to engage in free speech! Time to kill this stupid law!
So the new copy protection sheme is supposed to keep professinal pirates (the guys that copy the movie and then sell th ecopies in large quantities) from gaining a copy? Gimme a break!
And it is supposed to be a hurdle to those "release groups" (the guys that compete with each other to be the fastest to release a movie to the p2p networks)? Yeah, right!
This hole (and there will be others) is another prove that there is no protection against those two groups. They will simply find another way.
But it puts a major obstacle in the way of paying customers that just want to watch movies. The movie studios don't realize it because there is no pressure from an alternative. That is also called a monopoly. And who is going to break it up? The movie industry and the record industry both seem to need a little "help" to get some competition back into their respective markets.
DirectX recorders exist, primarily used for recording videos in games. I'm pretty sure most DVD player apps use the same directx layer, and so could easily be recorded by such a program. This is just an idea off the top of my head.
Result: watch for the MPAA to start outlawing your favorite DirectX recorders in the near future. Seems they will always find it easier to prosecute the loopholes than to fix their own stuff.
Just set your DVD software to play frame-by-frame. The rest is taken care of by the automated script. Sure, it may take a couple of attempts, but once you have the formula down, ripping an entire DVD movie should not take more than 4x or 5x the normal duration of the movie. Just let your computer run all night and you can have a brand new DiVX in the morning.
Now, what I'd like to know is: how do you rip the soundtrack off those uber-protected DVD? Hook the DVD player to an MP3 recorder? Or do you use one of the software that pretends to be a valid sound card?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Check this out:
Using my 733t hax0r sk1llz, I can use my EYES to COPY the movie to my BRAIN, where I can remember it OVER and OVER again -- for FREE!
Eat THAT, MPAA!
I'm a digital dike, you insensitive clod!
High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) "protects" DVI & HDMI interfaces but for this to work on a regular PC then the OS has to be in on the deal as well, right? So if a drive and video card support the devil that is HDCP, does this "back door" work if the OS is in on the HDCP? I would venture a "no" on that one.
Taking print screens is a weak solution, but a solution nonetheless. All it takes is one person to have the patience or scripting skills to automate this for a copy to hit the internet. One. That's the problem with DRM in that it may deter most people but to be totally effective it requires determent of everyone. Feeding millions of individual frames to an encoder is not beyond some people, I'm sure. Especially since hollywood raised the stakes.
If this is a back door, then it's one of those miniature clown doors. When someone figures out a way to completely strip out AACS (like what was done with CSS) then we can call AACS hacked and laugh again at the never-winable battle that is DRM.
DRM is unwinable because you have to give the decryption key to the user so that they can use the product. If you don't give them the key then they can't use it. So DRM gives the encrypted data and the decryption key to the user every time.
:wq
If he puts it in a signature, he can't PageRank-whore for his site now, can he?
Filming off your monitor is subject to all kinds of degredation.
Capturing the printscreen output is subject to output colour adjustments and the quality of your decoder. Beyond that, however, it's perfect digital output in full resolution.
Actually, they are already trying to plug that hole using Camera DRM
"I tried to send a picture of my daughter to her Uncle Tim, but this window popped up saying it was blocked. I decided to print it out and mail it to him. There was a 14-page license agreement that printed out first that I had to fill out and fax to Sony so they could send me an authorization code to print out the picture."
I also remember reading about a proposed DRM that consists of a watermark in the video stream that would disable future digital cameras. Cant find a reference for that, but I'm sure if it can be done, they will do it.
Using this (printscreen) function you can create exact digital copies of a film picture by picture and reassemble them to a stream
George Lucas found out about this, had a fit, and now will release another set of 'Star Wars' DVDs & HD-DVDs that disables this printscreen copy method in order to in his words, 'restore the monetary balance and order to the market force.'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I seem to have lost track of time.
This is a joke, right?
Whatever happened to the "I bought the DVD, I should do what the fuck I want with it"?
You've still got that right, just as you always have!
You can use it as a drinks mat, a frisbee, a wall hanging, a-...
Ohhh... you meant movie contained on the DVD?
Why do you hate freedom?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
"They browbeat/bribed the companies that developed the software to implement it."
Obviously noone here sees the catch-twenty-two.
1: DVD player company has player they want to sell.
2: Said player is mostly useless without something to play on it.
3: Most content comes from commercial sources (that applies to TV too).
4: Commercial content creators have product they want to sell.
5: Said content is mostly useless without a player to play it on.
6: Most players are produced by commercial companies.
Now the question is whom has the strtonger standing in this equation? Player? Content creator?
I'd say the content creator.*
*One little detail. Sometimes content creator and player manufacturer are one and the same. No browbeating needed.
Anything that appears on my computer screen I can copy - even streaming video.
It is not that hard of thing to do, even if you have to write the code yourself.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
But the reference to a video watermark was true. Can someone find a reference?
It would be a lot of work, if you did it manually. The print screen button is really just a proof of concept idea. Remember that the device is a computer and they excell at repetition.
For example, it wouldn't be too hard to write a DirectX driver for a virtual display device that simply passes every frame it sees into a filter for recording. Same should work for audio, really. Just take the inbound stream and stash it somehwere. As long as you've got the bandwidth inside the machine to move the data and the space to store it, why not?
This is why MS is pushing so hard for that "driver verification" thing. User created drivers can bypass the DRM just before the media gets pushed out to the hardware. The Windows box simply isn't built for DRM level trust at all points in a broadcast. Yet, anyways. It's still possible to break the chain somewhere and extract content. I'm guessing that'll always be the case too, at least for a good long while. Only way to get around that with what we have today would be if MS started selling PCs that are welded shut.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"Toshiba confirmed the security hole found by c't"
In what way does being able to do a screen grab constitute a threat to my computer's security, or anyone else's?
Here's to the day when we read:
"In response to the recently-discovered security flaw -- which could, if uncorrected, allow terrorists to molest your children -- the developers of WinDVD have ensured that only the encrypted data is displayed on-screen."
This *is* a backdoor. The digital data is in the frame buffer, but cannot be extracted (programs that are not trusted cannot be run). The Print Screen function is trusted, and so can run even with end-to-end crypto. The Print Screen function has access to the entire frame buffer. I don't know of another way to do this -- this one is actually brilliant.
And, Print Screen can be scripted. The player can ALSO be "scripted". As in, pause, and single step ("consumer" features). As to the speed of such a utility -- I would estimate that the re-encode process for a typical movie would take around 400 minutes (on a "typical" high end PC, see next paragraph for the amount of data involved). Ripping the audio track is more difficult (especially in full 5.1+ glory), but the technology for that is known. Time for that is real-time. Pulling a figure out of my ass, I would think a usable rip would take 800 minutes.
It's not "2 trillion" screen captures. It is a lot of data, though. At maximum resolution (1920x1080p) its 2 million pixels per frame. At 24bpp, that's 672 GB per hour (108,000 frames). The data HAS to be jammed through an encoder right away. This, of course, introduces new artifacts (its not going to be a "perfect" first generation copy). But its still going to be better than DVD quality.
I believe that the keys for this software will be revoked, and the current users (if any) "upgraded".
The point that this attack makes is that "DRM" is actually rather laughable. Your audience needs the decrypt keys, and yet can't be trusted with the decrypt keys... It just isn't stable.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Neither of these formats is going to go anywhere unless there is a way to make backup copies. This so-called "hole" is actually a feature, not a bug.
I predict that this format war will end when one of these two formats finally has a robust backup solution. At that moment in time, the other format will be dead.
Buy a copy of fraps then i guess, sucking data strait out of the video cards output buffer would be the best way of doing this.
Would be a small guess but with the user level drivers in vista, couldn't you wrapper a program within another program, and intercept all driver commands, pretending you are not listening but grab that framebuffer at a nice smooth 30fps? Of course doing this in realtime would be nasty, sucking in that big an image at 30fps in full frames AVI would be very very bad, last time i recorded a 1600x1200 25fps vid i was useing a gig every 5min.
...
"When asked to comment, Toshiba confirmed the security hole found by c't, which affects the computers already sold, and announced updates for the player software and graphics card driver. These new software versions should disable the screenshot function."
So, basically, not only does Hollywood own the playback hardware you buy, but they can remotely disable your application software and drivers, too?
NEW AND IMPROVED! HIGH DEFINITION DVD! BUY NOW!
Oh, and, by the way, if we don't like how you are viewing our product, we'll remotely break it.
Remind me again why I should pay any money for something I won't actually own?
You never did have the right to do what the fuck you want with it. You never were allowed to copy it and sell it. You never were allowed to charge people to see it. You never were allowed to rip it and upload it to random others whom you don't know.
What you have had the right to do is view it for your own private entertainment, to loan the disc to a friend, and to give away or sell the disc provided that you don't keep any copies of it. What you should have the right to do is make a backup copy for safekeeping, or for viewing on a device that doesn't have a DVD drive/player (notebook PC, iPod, whatever).
This was one of the ways to rip DVD's when burners were useless due to the +/- battles on burners. It required powerDVD 5.0 and a simple software program to take and encode all the "printscreens" into a video file (for the most utility an .mpg). The video file would then simply be burned onto 2 VCD's (or SuperVCD's) and you could play it in your DVD player. TV's had such poor resolution it was hard to tell the difference if the video had a decent bitrate.
I'm surprised here at slashdot so many 1337 nerds (news for nerds, no?) think they'd have to physically press the button 135k times.
Here's a hilarious excerpt from the EULA of a Dreamcatcher game:
t ial_blends/bl/images/blindfold.jpg
"You will not copy, decompile, reverse engineer or disassemble the Application Software, or otherwise reduce the Application Software to a human perceivable form;"
This is the only surefire DRM:
http://www.rockingham.k12.va.us/sound_sorting/ini
If a non-interactive medium can be percieved by humans, it can be duplicated. There's no way around it. One of these days copyright law will inevitably state that any media released in any percievable form to the public domain is ripe for the picking.
Wait, HD DVD and BluRay aren't cracked yet? They've been out for weeks... Come on, you lazy hackers!
I'm gonna downmod every post I see from that fucktard until he stops doing that shit. Hope other will do likewise. He can't whore for his site very well if all his posts are at -1.
There will be an image quality degradation since it's the decompressed stream that is being copied, and it will have to be recompressed to get it back to a size that will fit on HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. Therefore, this isn't equivalent to a direct copy of the compressed data stream.
So you're saying they're going to ban screens?? Or perhaps they'll be sold with a piece of black plastic glued on them?
... hmm it just might work !
Oh and they'll need to do some more work on bitwise copying.
Perhaps if they stopped making stuff, that would stop people from seeing it
The article mentioned writing a program to do that for you which would run in the backround while the movie plays. However, this is all moot because they still need to deliver the content to the people they are protecting it from. This means it will be broken, over and over. This time they can force you to patch it to watch new content which can invalidate your current key, if I understand this correctly.
I wonder if Grandma is going to like taking her HD-DVD player back to the store each time some kid breaks the current copy protection scheme. I just can't wait until the firmware wars begin. You'll have one group of people, we'll call them hackers, who take it upon themselves to figure out the encryption scheme, not because they plan on pirating anything, but having to update your firmware every month gets annoying. They release an open firmware for a player, then the MPAA disables the key, the whole world has to update. Then they figure out a new key, and so on. It'll be just like the XBOX hacking scene, everyone knew which games included dashboard updates and people would avoid them until a new hack came out (the softmodders at least). Though it my understanding, I could be wrong that the keys are based on some sort of tree of priority, so if a specific key is invalidated, anything below it on the tree is too. Once the hackers find the root, or it gets leaked, things will get really interesting.
The only real casualties in this are going to be the consumer. The grandmas without internet access who's eyes get glassy if you try to explain what a firmware update is. I think the burden on the consumer is enough to kill AACS before it really gets off the ground.
This is terrible. Clearly, the PrintScreen button must be banned.
What you should have the right to do is make a backup copy for safekeeping, or for viewing on a device that doesn't have a DVD drive/player (notebook PC, iPod, whatever).
Don't forget having the ability to rip certain parts of the movie to disk to edit and play with, use for presentations (PowerPoint, etc...), and just plain old make parodies of. Making amateur derivative works without charging for them is beneficial to society as a whole. Just look at youtube.com to see countless examples. The real problem is that user-created content is starting to steal the spotlight from Big Media, and DRM is one way to lock out the non-conglomerates from competing.
If they take away the print screen button's functionality, I have an equally effective work-around: simply hold a piece of tissue paper up to the monitor screen and trace each frame of the movie.
Print screen each frame of a movie to copy it -- give me a break!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I'm sorry, but am i the only one who thinks all these codecs, DRM tools and other garbage are just a waste of time?
There are already many ways to get a clean WAV file from anything playing on your computer, drivers that hook into the direct sound and just copy what ever is there. Or how about just burning the CD from iTunes, then ripping it with a freeware tool?
What these XXAA need to do is just understand that if you can watch/listen to it, it can be copied. That's it! Make people want to buy the product for other reasons. I own sooo many different seasons of different television shows because i like to have the boxes sitting on display. Anywho, is this really news? another attempt to create "un-copy-able" media failed?
thanks for listening
**end rant**
The first DVD ripper program ever released, long before deCSS and various hacks to windvd/powerdvd actually used this method.
:)
MS and the content industy will close this hole and similar ones easily with the new tools that tcpa , vista and "protected video path" gives them.
But then again, how hard is it to just strip the hdcp and capture the resulting raw video
I suppose it will be possible to create a 'camera', a CCD really, that is of the same size as your screen and that goes on top of your screen like a film and captures each pixel's intensity and color in multiple points even, averages out the color of the actual pixel and records this data as a video. Audio can be also copied in analog mode. Of-course it will always be possible to just point your camera at the screen and shoot (they will try to prevent analog copies as well, of-course, but that will be nearly an impossible war.)
You can't handle the truth.
Not to mention: What are you going to do for a soundtrack? Hum along?
Holy slowness batman! Even if it is automated!
I demand the right to make backup copies of any media i purchase...
I have CD's which i like to listen to in the car, they often end up getting damaged by extremes of temperature in the car.
I have younger brothers/sisters, and i could have kids, who are highly likely to want to play games and watch movies... Can you really trust kids to take care of media? I have made countless copies of various CDs, Games and DVDs for my younger brother, who has managed to scratch or otherwise destroy hundreds of them through mishandling (he likes to carry CDs/DVDs around in his pocket, which also contains coins) and when he's finished using a piece of media, he likes to just leave it laying around, on the floor to be trodden on or picked up/chewed by the dog, in direct sunlight, on/near sources of heat like radiators, or he handles them with dirty hands...
I don't mind losing a pile of $0.05 cheapo blank CDs to kids, it just goes with the territory, but to lose a $50 game is another matter.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
OK - you've stripped the pictures for the movie.
Where's the sound coming from? (I'm assuming that the sound is also 'protected' by the encryption system.)
there were programs that did screen caps and ripped the audio stream from the system's playback, so it was 2 pass, once to grab the audio, another to grab the frames. the resulting files were then combined.
I'm sure this will happen again.
Then I'm sure some vendor will be an asshat and leave an unencrypted key in the public and DeBSS or whatever wil lbe born.
"This just shows that whatever the content industry (not the content creators, btw) do to protect their distribution monopoly is doomed to fail."
Um, you may want to sit down for this? Without content creators there can't be a content distributor. And by extension there can only be a monopoly on what the content distributor has licensed from the creator (Coke having a "monopoly" on Coke).* Now I know most of you are fresh out of your eggs and don't have an inkling about why distributors are needed (it has nothing to do with the internet, and most do more than "distribute", despite the name). But they serve a useful role, and a lot of content wouldn't have seen the light of day without their dollars (obviously pirate dollars don't contribute (1)).
*Side note: Piracy shows contempt not only for distributors but content creators as well. It's like you creating and distributing code under a F/OSS license and me then doing things with it contrary to both the license and your wishes (lets not drag the "Apple vs KDE code" issue up).
(1) Because of the "I'm not stealing (hurting) because I never would have bought it anyway" excuse
The fact is that the notion of DRM is intrinsically flawed. This 'print screen' workaround is another version of what has been referred to as the 'analog hole'. Any time something like this is being done on a general purpose machine (read 'in software') it's trivial to get a machine-readable copy of the content by using storage as the audio/video device.
...because the seller will have to provide the data, the decryption hardware, and the decryption key to every single user every time. That means they're giving you the very means required to unlock the "protected" data, every time, or you wouldn't be able to watch your movie at all. This is self-evident if you just stop and think about it.
It does not matter if the "protection" is embedded into hardware - it is still a part of your system. As long as you as a buyer have access to all these three things, you are able to copy any data you are able to buy, even without buying it.
/ Per
This is HD we're talking about. Presumably they' be capable of 720p or (hopefully) 1080p, and not be doing interlaced screen shots. So 60 frames per second. And fwiw, even regular tv isn't 30 fps, it is 29.97. That slight drop was introduced when color TV came around. It necessitates doing "Drop Frame" calculation to find out how many frames there are in, say, 30 minutes of video. You drop 2 frames every 10 minutes or something like that, video software does it for you, but it needs to be done or else you'd creep increasingly out of sync with your daily schedule...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
So is burning a protected iTunes song to an audio CD, which consequently can be ripped again to anything you want. Still, that doesn't stop people from complaining that the re-encoding will slightly degrade quality. So I bet the videophiles with their golden DVI cables running to their CRT monitors with 500MHz refresh rates won't accept this workaround...
Donate free food here
Watching a movie on a computer with the keyboard attached will result in copyright violation.
Sorry honey, I can't pause the movie!
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
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I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Seriously, This is a beautiful application for distributed computing:
Since each copy of the DVD titled "Foo" is identical, one could:
Write an app that will grab a random ten seconds (or 256 frames, whatever) of audio and video from a DVD
Distributed app will then share those ten seconds via bittorrent protocol with the rest of the world
Distributed app also monitors trackers to grab other ten-second chunks of movies you're interested in
Buy a DVD, share ten seconds, get ten movies in return. Not a bad model. Unless you're the MPAA.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Well, if you're going to correct yourself, then next time do it quicker so I don't look so silly!
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
I don't mind losing a pile of $0.05 cheapo blank CDs to kids, it just goes with the territory, but to lose a $50 game is another matter.
One might say... It's a thousand times worse!
Buh-dum-cha!
Capturing the printscreen output is subject to output colour adjustments and the quality of your decoder. Beyond that, however, it's perfect digital output in full resolution.
Which you'd have to re-encode with something lossy to make it manageable.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I am suprised at the number of people talking about how hard this would be to do. Its actually pretty easy. Hitting the print screen button is calling an operating system feature that can easily be called with another program. The whole thing could be autimated with a program pretty easily. The real issue here is that no matter how hard you try at some point the DVD has to show up on a screen. That means pixel 1,1 is going to be blue and pixel 1,2 is going to be green. There has to be a point where the image is not incrypted and thats the point at wich "hackers" will capture it. The same is true for Audio. At some point it has to go to the speaker. The only way to stop this effect is to require tv/monitors to recieve an encrypted signal. Before you start yelling I know that this is already happening but whats also happening is that people aren't adopting it because they don't see a point. You loose a big demographic if you tell people there old equipment won't work with there new equipment.
The movie stored on the disk will be heavily compressed. Each frame will have been de-compressed for display, so assuming a 32bit colour-depth and a 1920x1080 screen, each frame would take up about 6MB. At 24 frames a second a two-hour movie would take up about 1TB of space. Before it could be distributed, the 1TB would have to be authored to identify key-frames and so on. Very time consuming.
DRM not only gives the encrypted data and the keys to the users, it gives the unencrypted data also. And the unencrypted message is hardly random data that you'd have no way to know if you decrypted it correctly.
What kind of successful crypto scheme gives away literally hundreds of millions of keys and decryption devices along with thousands upon thousands of different encrypted and unencrypted messages of a known format?
It's bound to fail.
Heck, even the NSA only uses keys for short periods of time for US military comms. And they keep those keys about as secret as they can. And even then they toss them as fast as they can replace them.
The MPAA wants to distribute "forever" keys and decryption devices by the millions. When the decrypted message is a movie that only needs the Mark 1 mod 0 Eyeball for quality control.
You can't create an "exact digital copy" via this method unless you store the file in an uncompressed format, which would be monstrously large. You can create a lossy version the same size as the original. Whether the loss in quality is significant is an open question (one would suppose HD users are relatively fussy about quality...), but the fact is it doesn't allow the same type of ripping you can do with DVDs where the copy is exact apart from the removal of contect protection.
"To make "other" copies is too troublesome. As always, real pirates will use the means they always have. They will work "off hours" at DVD publishing sites making uncounted copies indistinguishable from the counted copies. They will have the production equipment in their homes to make exact duplicates."
Uh, huh. Just a side-question here. Just how many here are actual pirates? I want to make certain I'm getting this "anecdotal evidence" from the horses mouth, instead of the other end.
"What it does thrwart is casual consumer copying to better ensure that the consumers will buy multiple copies of the same stuff."
Really!? Are you telling us that bits ARE like physical objects and will rust and rot and fail in the future?*
*BTW just how many "multiple" cars have you bought so far because either they came out with a "new and improved" car, or your original car didn't last forever?
"What I am saying is not new and has been repeated since the creation of the first DVD format."
Or at least at the point slashdot got taken over by the "me generation".
"screen printing becomes suspect and may even be taken away as an option because it is potentially used for pirating."
Its called using an old keyboard...are they going to take that away too?
So sure, they can be Big Brother and take away my keyboard; they'll have to change the OS too. Just because the key isn't on the keyboard doesn't mean I can't invoke it!
Image
:x
Actually, the linked story claims Toshiba says they do not expect the keys to be revoked, as this feature does not violate the AACS security stipulations.
However, the article also claims Toshiba have announced 'upgrades' to remove this feature. This does raise the question though of if this feature is allowed, then why are they removing it?
if you wait a few days after a dvd release, it is streamed on ppv on digital units...Ive never had an issue recording from the receiver outputs into a tv tuner input....high def or standard res....be easier than trying to hack a disc?
Just a thought
I switched my print screen key with my scroll lock key. They took the wrong one! Hah! I am the master of the internets.
You already have the right to make a single backup of any media that you legally own in the US. Its given by the copyright laws (came from the time of 8tracks).
You may make a single backup provided that you do not profit from it (IE sell it without selling the original). Nintendo tried to stop it from happening to SNES carts but failed horribly as the courts ruled against them.
Happy hunting.
All they need to do is sell the DVDs embedded into a DVD player which in turn is embedded into a HDTV and sell the whole package to the consumer. "A brand new TV with every DVD purchase!"
That, and have it self-destruct in any attempt to disassemble it.
Damn. Just... damn. Are all Anonymous Cowards as stupid as you?
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
There is absolutely no way to create a data format that makes it impossible to extract a perfect unencrypted digital representation of that content. At some point, no matter how much encryption and encoding and authentication you add to the disc, the consumer is going to be able to play it in all its digital glory. The mere fact that this is possible means you have to have access to the unencrypted data, which can always be copied.
They're employing encryption techniques in a field it wasn't suited to address. PKI is meant to be used to allow a user to authenticate that the content on the disc came from a trusted source. It fails when you try to forcefully disallow reading content from a disc if the source (in the case of DVDs, the player. in the case of an XBox, the disc) isn't trusted. This can generally be circumvented by a nerd with a soldering iron.
Hollywood is spending millions on making it more difficult to emulate an authenticated player, but it's fundamentally futile. You only need to circumvent the authentication once. From then on, you can release software that can do it for anyone that wants it, as long as there's a player on the market that gives you software access to the encrypted content.
If you have an uber screen of gold-plated doom, why the fuck are you getting pirated stuff?
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
While I'm not arguing that they are bullheaded enough to try this, it does show that "we have already won"
I don't expect AA execs to understand this, or even if they do, to stop pursuing the 'patching' of these holes, but there is essentially no way for them to win other than simply sell us discs that do not have the movie/music on them.
Let's take up your example, they ban prntscn. Now I'll run your DRMd dvd under QEMU, fullscreen and have my opensource OS prtscrn. Or maybe I'll have another comp run your dvd and hook my OS on it and capture with an x11 tunnel. You'll ban opensource OS's? Maybe I'll take out my handcam and film my screen. Sounds like to much work for a too low quality? Quite. But what I'm trying to illustrate is that no matter what they do, the only way to stop us is to sell a disk that does not contain the sold data on it. And once copied by any person, anywhere, the information can be copied further. And from this point it goes on the terms of the person that did the copying. If I prtscrn your movie I can release it in any format, without DRM if I choose. And doubleclicking a movie on a p2p prog is a whole lot less trouble than holding a cam to the screen. Unlike software, which also contains logic, media is solely information. Crack once, play anywhere still goes for them.
And all this leads back to a law that no amount of legislation can change: Information is copyable. This isn't a law made by a dude at some point in history and one that can be overturned by bribing judges. This is a law of our universe. When you change the value of pi, we can talk about changing this law.
Not saying that we should let our guards down, but this fact does give me a good feeling.
When DVD's first hit the market and DVD-ROM drives became availible for PC's, this was the same approach used in the first-gen DVD rippers... This is preaty close to the "Analog hole" circumvention of DRM, all you really need is a multi-plexer coming off any decent HD home theater setup and run it straight into a tuner card on your pc - Tada! - frame capture without the sore print screen finger.
Wherever i go, There i am.
Hehe, your ending signature-not-in-signature-space sounded like a funny unexpected insult. :-)
I found another gigantic hole. I could potentially put a camcorder in front of the monitor or tv and press play while recording. That would record both the sound and the video at the same time. Egads. is the MPAA and RIAA gonna make it illegal to have a television or computer monitor now.
I've been trained as an artist. Oh God, that means that I could potentially draw the frames that I see by hand. AHGHRRH!!! Help. I hear the MPAA, FBI, and RIAA beating down my door. They are coming to rip my eyes out!!! Help!
You really don't have a clue do you?
This is a backdoor better than some backdoor bandits porno movie.
Its direct access to unencrypted data in perfect form, ready to encode into whatever you want. Hell, this saves them some effort during transcoding hahaha!
Also, if you think ANYONE will be pressing the print screen key even once, its amazing you visit slashdot. The printscreen key just activates a *function*, computers automate functions, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh as to what happens next.
In the case of this described "hole", a screen print? This becomes the DRM's worst nightmare? If they succeed in lobbying the PC industry and others and get this hole blocked, all of a sudden a long-accepted practice, i.e., screen printing, becomes suspect and may even be taken away as an option because it is potentially used for pirating
In theory, this is relatively easy to fix (although I don't agree that it should be "fixed"). Unfortunately, apple has already done something about this in OSX.
My friend was doing a project for art school and he wanted to paint a collage of madusa's head from Clash of the Titans and Golem from Lord of the Rings... so, being that he didn't have a DVD drive in his computer, I popped the first DVD into my powerbook and when I tried to take a screenshot of the scene he wanted, OSX blocked my cmd-shift-3 keystroke and told me to close DVDPlayer before doing that.
Luckily, I knew about the screencapture commandline command and that one let me capture the frames from the movies that he wanted. And what's to say that the DVD you're trying to take screenshots of wasn't a home-burned DVD of your friend's wedding or similar?
So, in my feelings, all this DRM and copyprotection bullshit really encroaches on fair use. It's not just an opinion, it's a fact. It's lame that they make it so hard to print frames from your favourite movie. It's lame that they make it so hard to convert movies into a format that you can watch on the devices that you want to watch them on. Next thing you know, they're going to try to prevent you from inviting your friends over to watch a movie at your place (RFID tags embedded in everyone's skin to make sure that you paid to be able to view the content on the screen).
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
I have an ignorant question about these encryption schemes. If the hardware can decrypt it, why can't software decrypt it? They are deploying this hardware, so someone can determine what the algorithm is. Using brute force techniques we should be able to crack the keys, right? I'm curious what makes this encryption so challenging to crack compared to other encryption schemes.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
This is an analog hole. Lawmakers better get to work on finding a way to legislate this kind of piracy tool out of existance, before all of the pirates in the world exploit it and cost the hard-working and honest MPAA another $250 billion in lost revenue.
So it is somehow the fault of the CD manufacturer that you can't take care of your CDs? Substitute any other object for CD and see how pointless your argument sounds..
"I bought a new car and kids/brothers/whatever scratched it up. I believe I am entitled to have my car replaced."
I have a novel idea - if you spend $50 for a game CD, take care of it.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I think the answer's pretty simple: disallow Shift keys and PrintScreen keys on devices that can play DVDs. This could be enforced by a simple "flag" embedded in the content.
I feel this idea is worth studying and would like Jack Valenti to give me a grant of $10,000 for this purpose. I am completely convinced that this measure will stop unauthorized copying for at least a day and a half.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It doesn't encroach on fair use, it tramples over it with the subtlety of a panzer division.
Blitzkrieg isn't just for the military, you know!
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
Why are they going thru all this bullshit for such shitty movies? Most movies now are not even worth downloading, the best anti piracy is mediocracy.
this is the lamest thing I have ever seen
We had a virrtualization story just four stories back, i'm thinking it wouldn't be that hard to modify an open source virtualization solution so that the video and audio output devices can be captured from.
Virtualization. In other words, "rootkit". Take that, Sony!
Anyway, we users DON'T need such rootkits. It's the "smart sheep" argument. Only one needs to find the hole, the others will follow. And with "follow" i mean "download".
Your last line is the key. He's NOT paying $50 for the CD. The CD is like the box a computer comes in. If the box gets damaged should your computer stop working?
Note that you CAN do anything you want with your car or computer. You can make changes to it, take it apart, make a backup copy, whatever you want. It might be expensive to do so, but it's perfectly legal. In fact, I believe manufacturers were recently required to release their trouble codes to make it easier for independent mechanics.
First they came for my printscreen key, but I was silent, because I don't print my screen. Then they came for my tilde key, and I was silent, because I don't play Half Life 2. Now they've come for my enter key, and I can only be silent.
MPAA has begin suing movier goes and DVD buyers (again) for remembering specific frames seen in movies and specific lines spoken by actors in movies. MPAA insists that this is the only way to plug the analog (brain) hole.
This is not a practical method. Now it MAY be able to be taken advantage of, but I doubt it. You may be able to record the audio in another file, but getting everything to sync is going to be a pain.
Gorkman
And any game manufacturers offer replacement CDs if you scratch them - since you did buy the game license, they will replace the media it came on. Or you could just do the easy thing I recommended - take care of it from the start. If your brother is a moron who destroys things, don't borrow stuff to him. Duh. Nobody takes personal responsibility for anything anymore - it is just to convenient to blame someone else...
"But this one goes to 11!"
--> slashdot
This is only vaguely ontopic, but are there limits to how many people can "own" a DVD (or the license to watch the DVD, or whatever)?
I ask because if my wife and I purchase a DVD with our collective funds, am I the owner? Is she the owner? Or are we both the owner?
What if 100 people all contributed a nickel and bought a $5 VHS tape of a movie? Can they each make a copy of it? Do you have to own majority share in the VHS to make a copy?
What if 10 million people each paid $1 and all agreed to purchase a certain bundle of films and music that was valued at $10,000,000? Clearly SOMEONE must own it, but who?
Are there any laws about this? I can't seem to find any online (I think my searching skills are for crap on this one), but it seems like a very interesting question.
I suspect much of the cost of the hardware and the media will be paying off the development of this DRM scheme and buying enough silicon to decrypt the data. Furthermore I suspect they'll try the price increase trick which was done with CDs... tapes and vinyl stayed the same cost, and for years CDs were 150% the price per album that people were used to paying.
All in all, are people really going to be willing to pay high prices for HD over DVD quality? There'll be some, but frankly I'm skeptical that it'll take off at all. If the new DRM scheme is successful, it'll be interesting to see the effect on sales. If people really do have to pay to get the content, wouldn't it be an embarrassment if the marlet decides that the crap hollywood is putting out simply isn't worth it? Could be the opening the indie film makers have been waiting for. They could buy up the "old" DVD fabrication plants for cheap and really get in on the game. The result might even be in improvement in quality of product for once.
Wouldn't screencasting software be of use here? I've successfully used Camtasia Studio to remove the Windows Media DRM from time-limited content that I'd paid for, although the output files were huge.
I think the better way of cracking system like this is to virtualize the PC. This way not even the OS knows that you are redirecting the output to a file.
This is the whole problem with integrating consumer entertainment media (CD's, DVD's, etc.) and general-purpose computing devices. General-purpose hardware with general-purpose operating systems are good at lots and lots of things. That's why people buy billions of $US worth of computers and software every year. But these general-purpose devices don't fit the expected distribution conditions for entertainment media companies - they can't handle an environment in which the consumer can change the use of the media. The DVD and CD players work just fine in this model - they just play the media.
But the machine with the keyboard is trouble because of the keyboard and the general-purpose OS environment. Microsoft started down the road to DRM-friendly media-player-only operating systems with Windows Media Edition, but this version of Windows still maintains all the existing Windows functionality.
This could work out well if an enterprising OS vendor merged cheap PC's with a media-player operating system to create single-purpose appliances. But the general-purpose OS genie is out of the bottle and hardware isn't cheap enough yet (no $50 computers, plenty of $50 DVD players) for people to give up web-browsing and text editing and email so they can have a dedicated media-player. So these two worlds are joined and general-purpose computing is already suffering.
-don
There are a few differences between cars and CDs:
* Cars are not for kids, CDs are.
* Cars are still useful after you scratch them (at least for transportation), CDs are not.
* Cars are not licenced, they are bought.
* You buy the car to use the car itself, you buy the CD to run the game that is *inside* the CD.
* The car manufacturer does not restrict what you can do with your car - you can show it to anyone, take pictures od it and publish them on the internet, sell it, rent it, lend it, use it in another country, fill it with gas from any company - anything provided that you comply with applicable laws.
Note what has has already happened for Adobe PDFs. If the author is paranoid enough, he can set the security level so you can't print, can't select text in the normal way, etc. Which is a pain whern you actually need to quote a few lines, or copy a string exactly. There are ways around it, of course, the print-screen discussed here for instance; and the notorious AEPBR to strip hte restrictions away, that got Dimitri Sklyarov in trouble, but the latter fails on newer versions.
Whenever I see a car analogy explaining a digital concept I reach for my gun. The point is that the cost of the physical media (of a CD or DVD) is trivial, a few cents. 90% at least of the money you pay is for the use of the information encoded on it. The cost of manufacturing a car is a large part of what you paid. But if you love car analogies, it's like they've made it illegal to paint your car; and have got selling touch up paint made illegal as well. So you can't mix up a pot and touch up the scratches yourself, you have to live with it or buy a new car.
Thank you Captain Obvious. I was merely substituting "cars" for "CDs" to show the argument had no teeth. The original conversation had nothing to do with cars.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Your concern about CRT is incorrect at this point. All released HD DVD and Blu-ray titles don't use the analog downrez techology ICT (Image Contraint Token). Most of the studios have indicated they don't have any short-term plans to do so, either.
Also, it doesn't downrez to 640x480. It goes to 960x540, which is quite a bit more pixels.
My video compression blog
If the movie was actually good enough to make me consider this, then I think I wouldn't have any trouble spending the $25 to purchase the disc.
It was not a "car analogy" per se - I was merely substituting one object for another to prove a point. Feel free to substitute any other object for "car" if that word gets your undies in a bundle. Also, I was not explaining a "digital concept" - I was explaining a "personal responsibility concept" . (And your car analogy is possibly the worst I have seen in a while...)
"But this one goes to 11!"
Certainly, taking care of things is a good idea. However, CDs are delicate. Playing your CDs in your car is reasonable, but they can warp due to temperature. If your medium isn't in a form that's appropriate for my use either provide it to me in a form that is (free of charge, of course because I paid for the license to the content) or allow me to copy it into that format for my own use.
You're right -- game manufacturers offer replacement CDs. As they should.
Nobody's blaming someone else for their CD getting destroyed. I accept the blame. BUT there are two options. Either I bought the content with the exception of the right to distribute it, in which case I should be able to do what I want with it so long as I don't distribute it, OR I bought a license, in which case it's the manufacturer's responsibility to make sure I always have access to that content.
I think it's a non-issue. People have been enjoying HDTV movie content for a couple of years now and the leap from DVD to HDTV isn't all that huge so by the time these formats even get a chance to take off, we'll be ordering our movies ITunes style through our cable providers.
www.wildpad.com
This is a cute technique, but another insanely obvious way is to just "cam" your HD-DVD with your HD-Camcorder. They may have Department of Homeland Hollywood Gestapo Protection Officers stationed in the public theaters with machine guns ready to cut down any would be cammers, but this otherwise brilliant technique of using police and draconian prison sentences to enforce Hollywood's bidding sort of falls apart when the theater is in a private lving room. Moreover, this cam situation offers a far better chance of a good quality rip than a theater situation. The cammer will be able to set up a tripid and do a few test runs to make sure the edges aren't being clipped. The lighting will be easily controlled and evenly adjusted to result in a color matched capture and there won't be people in the audicance talking or standing up in front of the cammer. The audio can be ripped directly from the system resulting in a product very hard to distinguish from the "real" thing. Basically, High-Def should result in a huge increase in the quality and quantity of files available on P2P networks despite all the ridiculous wastes of money and time that the foolish studio execs have been suckered into by the protection racket hustlers who no doubt are well aware that it is all a pile of bullshit.
youtube.com is beneficial to society? How is a collection of crap videos beneficial to society. Gonna cure world hunger or something?
Half 1080 (960x540) is only 25 percent more pixels than full-screen PAL DVD (720x576), although they are likely to be slightly less artifacted pixels.
Does this mean that someone has actually bought these things ?
At least something good came out of it since they found a flaw, but as with DVDs I'm going to wait for the system to be broken before I buy a player myself. (And yes, I have bought heaps of the copyright mafia's movies on DVD, however I want to be able to use tools such as AnyDVD to skip annoying ads and trailers on disks when I watch the stuff I have paid good money for)
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
But if the PC's Blu-ray Disc or HD-DVD player detects that the operating system is running virtualized, or if you have your computer's Trusted Platform Module turned off, then the software will decode at 960x540 at best or refuse to run at worst.
Five words: Ecks. Box. Three. Six. Tea.
This is just one link in a long chain where player software is incrementally subverted. The software gets deployed to the user! It is inevitable that it will be picked apart. Eventually someone will use what they have learned from the player software, to rip a perfect unencrypted stream without any lossy decode/reencode step. It's merely a matter of time.
Why this isn't obvious to everyone concerned, I have no idea.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Is it really feasible to snag the raw pixel data and recompress it in real time? Of course it is, but Joe Public doesn't have hardware to do that. Someone could make a converter box, but it might be hard to buy one in the US.
Define "end". The "end" of the MPAA digital restrictions management system is the human eye. Replace that with a high-definition video camera pointed at the monitor and synchronized to the monitor's refresh rate. In piratese, they call this a "telecine".
To get the subtitles, you do another Print Screen run with the video player's subtitles turned on. Extras are merely additional titles that can be played in separate Print Screen runs. To get the audio, you put the player into matrix surround output and play the audio over an analog stereo cable into a second PC's line in.
Digital encrption just takes time to crack. A formula and a program to run it. It used to be daunting to think about all the power you need in a computer to achieve this but now all you need is a linux cluster of all your friends gaming rigs and even the most sophisticated encryption will be layed open for all to see.
Hey, how much are digital x-ray "plates" running these days? I want to build a home CT device.
No. There is more than one way to draw something on the screen: GDI, DirectX window, or DirectX overlay. Most productivity apps (that is, everything but fast action games and video players) use GDI, which the screen capture apps easily pick up. An "overlay", on the other hand is a hole cut out in video memory using a special "magic pink" (#FF00FF) color to display a video in a separate frame buffer "behind" the main screen buffer. Have you ever tried recording a video using screen capture and got only a blank space because the video player uses a DirectX overlay? The new Protected Video Path in Windows Vista is like that but even stronger.
Matrix surround, line out, line in.
Allowing people to take screenshots is obviously a bad idea in general. How often can you take a screenshot of your computer screen without including copyrighted material? A Firefox logo here, a Windows start button there. Of course I already wrote about an even bigger hole here.
With some driver/hardware combinations when you take a screen shot of a playing video, all you get is the chroma key box.
The way that works is that wherever the video is to be shown, the player software sets the pixel color to a specific color, like a TV 'Green Screen' (used to be Blue), I've seen dark purple or hot pink used for video card chroma key.
So, you hit print screen, you get a dark purple square.
The video output hardware then replaced all of that one shade of dark purple with the hardware decompressed video feed.
In a 'trusted' video playback situation, the OS may not even have access to the output video stream.
You are a fucking idiot. One of the stupidest fucks ever to disgrace the human race.
You cannot easily make spare copies of those items. There is no option to make a backup on your own. For CD/DVD media, it is a very simple matter to make a spare copy.
Your analogy is as stupid, misguided, and pointless as your own existence.
D2AA2D set ups have yet to be "foiled" by copy protection of any kind. The cheapest version of do it yourself D2AA2D converters:
1) Project the movie on a white screen in a dark room.
2) Record the movie with a camera.
I would like to add. This type of behavior by the industry would make someone think along these lines: "Any movie I purchase that is ecrypted to the point of going to extreems to watch it, WILL be posted on the web the next day". Not that I would do anything illegal like that.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I predict that the industry's next move will be to require every player to use digital watermarking to encode the devices serial number into the image. I doubt it will have any real impact however.
800 minutes + time and wherewithal to setup the scripting, download tools, avoid detection by the RIAA/MPAA/NSA. ..
To gain a permanent (illegal) copy of a movie I really only want to watch once or twice.
Seriously. I have a library of DVDs, I have bought legitimately, as I am sure most American consumers have. And frankly, if it's not something I haven't seen before, I can usually think of a lot of things I'd rather be doing with my time than re-watching a movie. Even a really, really good one. And if I want to re-watch something, aw hell, why not shell out the $15 for my own copy to sit on my shelf in my family room and collect dust for 5 years until I feel like maybe watching it again?
I guess I just don't understand the impetus behind movie piracy. Sure. These HD DVD's aren't going to be $15. They'll be something like $60, right? And they'll RENT, of course, for - I'm guessing, the same $25/mo. memberships that you get other DVD movies for right now.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"DRM is less than useless right now because all it succeeds in doing is annoy real paying customers and teaching them the cracked versions are better after all."
Okay, folks, here's how you deal with DRM. It's really easy, so listen carefully and you'll never have to deal with DRM again!
First, don't buy the movie or pay to see it in a theatre. Second, don't pirate the movie. Third, don't even bother to see it at a friend's house, regardless whether he/she bought it or pirated it. Fourth, just don't see the movie, period!
Our consumer society needs to get over this perceived need (desire, really) to participate in contrived money-making schemes that are presented as "culture." One way to recognize contrived nonsense advertised as the biggest thing to ever happen ever is to see of the authors/producers/etc. put DRM into place. Putting DRM on something means they are privately convinced their product cannot stand on its own merit.
"My time can be better spent learning, coding or doing some sport in the future."
Yes, and this is true for everyone.
Duh! You don't have to pay for it! Wow, do you need to be spoonfed everything? Think man! What a moroon!
Print Screen? This is definitely in the "dumbest" category.
This is exactly how PC DVD software playback protection was first defeated when DVD's came out. I remember hacks of Playback software that automated pausing the film and doing single frame advances with screen captures.
The resulting frames where then sent straight to an encoder so a compressed version could be generated.
The sound would be interleaved later with the compressed video AVI container by playing back the movie at normal speed and capturing the sound by looping the line out of the sound card into the line in and using a standard audio recorder program.
This was in the few months before the DVD encryption was cracked allowing easier / "pure" digital capture.
It's is very funny to see after years of development that a work around that was used ~10 years ago on PC DVD playback software still works today.
Yes there will be artifacts and noise fromt his method but if you are taking the 20+ Gb MPEG2/4 HD source and compressing to ~4 Gb of MPEG4 then you would be hard pressed to tell which were artifacts of this process compared to a "pure" digital trans-code / conversion.
My point was that it's not just an object you're buying. Every manufactired good has an intellectual property component -- design, research; but a game CD that's virtually the entire cost. For a car, it's mostly hardware.
In any case, analogies can't prove anything; they can only suggest. People start with "think of X as a sportscar..." and before you know it, you're not talking about X, but sportscars.
(And your car analogy is possibly the worst I have seen in a while...)
Thank you. I'm hoping to wipe them out by showing how absurd they are. Sadly, people never realise how absurd their own analogies are.
...like some dude is going to sit there hitting the print screen button 97,000 times. But wait, that gives me an idea! OB HACK: Overclock the repeat timer in the keyboard so that the key click rate is something like 100,000 a second and maybe this would work! And it would be WAY faster than using a ripper since it could just take a single key press to rip a whole movie!!! OK. So maybe this isn't such bad news after all! :)))
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"Sadly, people never realise how absurd their own analogies are."
Ain't that the truth!
It's like if you bought a sportscar, and then,...
"But this one goes to 11!"
I doubt very highly that the print-screen function would be removed entirely. I work in a FDA controlled company. Part of that FDA controlling is that we must write test cases to validate software. The output of those test cases are almost always a print-screen. -Aaron
The post made with 100% recycled electrons
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If the holes are closed before "mom and dog" buy the tech then the game is over. Us geeks are a ridiculously small minority of the population. We need "mom and dog" to care about the issue, and to do that requires blowing holes in the technology only AFTER MOM AND DOG HAVE SPENT THEIR HARD-EARNED DOLLARS ON IT. Until then, "mom and dog" simply cannot be educated on this issue. It is far too technical, far too complicated, and far too out-in-the-hazy-distant-future for them to understand.
1. Children enjoy watching movies over and over again.
2. Pack-rats are more entertained by growing their collection than by its contents.
3. L337 H4xoRs like the challenge of breaking the protection.
Unless they are also going to ban the pause button and frame-by-frame advance features, who cares about the ability to do this in real time?
I have to agree. This is brilliant, and rather amusing as well. While definitely not a task for the masses, it does show that sometimes the best solution to a high-tech problem is a low-tech answer. Scripting "print screen--paste--save" for some ungodly number of frames certainly qualifies as low-tech, even primitive. And yet, the brilliance lies in the simplicity. As for the amusing part--how many millions of dollars and thousands of hours went into developing locks that can be picked with the repeated and automated push of five total buttons? I'll sleep well thinking about this one.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
If they just start making the movies where only computers can view them, people won't want to copy them anymore. *hint: people can't view them*
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
When you use a completely different Latin phrase to the one you meant to try and look smart, that's not a fault of "grammar", that's a fault of "vocabulary", aka "ignorance". Way to be a grammar nazi nazi.
"Whom" is never used for the subject of a sentence. Idiots who make this mistake are irritating to whomever their poor victims are.
DRM is just waste of money.
Maybe Hollywood has some illusions on this matter as it's their money, but surely not Vole\Chipzilla. Even if they succeed and close the box - open boxes will be produced\exported\sold at Russia, China etc. It will especially give Russian tech a boost. what an irony.
So... what... pressing a button on my keyboard is a DMCA violation?
Yeah, just like good old email. I can't send a great many files as attachments because someone said they were "bad", mmm'Kay?
Well, Duh! opening packages from any unknown source is potentially deadly, so why haven't we all boarded up our letterboxes?
What's even worse is when a whole linux newsgroup starts supporting this type of censorship. WTF? How can some people misunderstand the meaning of "free" so completely???
"A/D conversion isn't perfect because of noise, but you can play back the movie/audio/whatever as many times as you want and average the noise away, or use fancier statistical algorithms to reclaim the original content, pixel-by-pixel, frame-by-frame. If you're worried about A/D bias, run it through multiple playbacks on different hardware. It just isn't that hard. Anyone who has worked in digital imaging (my own backgroud is in realtime x-ray) knows how easy this is."
Uh, huh. Did they also teach you in class that you can't get out what isn't there. Oh you can fake it. You might want to read shannon's paper when you get a chance.
Wait, WHAT game maker will hook you up with another copy for a scratched game? I'm not familiar with this. Honest question, I'm really very interested.
"Gratuitous complexity is akin to chaos" - True Vox
What about recording a VNC session, or playing it inside a VM? Im pretty sure vmware can record to flash, can it record to avi?
Let's say your script to advance a frame, save a screenshot to a folder takes 3 seconds. For a 90 minute film, at approximately 30 frames every second of movie, for 5400 seconds (162000 frames). One minute and a half for every second of screen time. 135 hours or 5.6 days to copy a movie that way. Any one want to do a calculation for the amount of disk space you would need just to save the screen caps without all that mpeg compression reducing the redundancy?
> screen printing, becomes suspect and may even be taken
> away as an option because it is potentially used for pirating.
Everyone.. switch your keytops around on Print Screen and Scroll Lock. That should keep the MPAA busy for a while.
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Then it won't be a perfect digital copy anymore. You'll have introduced more lossage in the video quality than the studios did. Even if your codec is better than the studio's, you're still adding lossage on top of lossage.
Better would be a perfect copy made of the original signal after decryption but before decompression.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Back before CD burners were available/commonly affordable, how many of us were happy to get a tape made of the same disc? The loss in digital to analogue conversion wasn't enough to keep people from doing it.
Today, people will happily take pretty high resolution (DVD or TV content) and resize/compress the heck out of it for playback on an iPod or other portable device.
I think for most of us, if we're paying for a product, we want it to work at its fullest potential. Whereas if we're not plunking down hard currency for an item that typically costs money, we don't care so much about quality.
DRM may temporarily or even permanently prevent people from making full-res copies of music and movies, but how many of us will really care about the nearly imperceptible loss of quality in a ripped/copied/pirated movie or music album?
Hell, if I were a movie or music label, I'd gladly GIVE away (over t'IntarWeb) acceptable, but lower quality digital copies of movies and music; while at the same time SELLING high resolution or best-quality versions of the same content. Use the freebies to discover the markets that will pay for the added features of the 'paid-for' version (such as liner notes, director commentary, reliable media, quality packaging, etc.).
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All of the bigger ones. You would have to check the indiviual companies for their policies, but for example, here is what Blizzard's http://www.blizzard.com/SUPPORT/?id=asc0133p replacement CD policy is -
Damaged or broken CD:
You will need to mail in the damaged or broken disk(s), and a $10 US dollar money order (per game) to the P.O. box listed below to cover shipping and handling costs. No personal check or cash will be accepted.
"But this one goes to 11!"
"One way to recognize contrived nonsense advertised as the biggest thing to ever happen ever is to see of the authors/producers/etc. put DRM into place. Putting DRM on something means they are privately convinced their product cannot stand on its own merit."
I was with you up to this point.* If DRM sends that message, then what does locks on your doors say? "Hi I'm Mr homeowner and I'm not a REAL MAN(TM) able to defend what's mine by standing 24/7 with a REAL GUN(TM) to blow you away."
*Which BTW is from the same class of statements as "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't have a problem with government surveillance". In other words DRM has nothing to do with merit, and anyone who tells you different at best is naive, or at worst has an agenda.
Even if they encode it with an unbreakable cipher, even if they remove PrtScr, even if they lock out unsigned drivers and plugins, there will never, ever, be anything to stop me from putting a video camera in front of my monitor.
Not only that but no one seems to realise that this doesn't 'do' audio... where's my 7.1 surround?
I'm one of those complainers, and I'll tell you why: it's not the quality that's important, it's the principle of the thing. I have a Fair Use right to make an exact duplicate (for backup purposes, etc.), and I refuse to give up that right whether I can tell the difference or not!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You're not trying to infringe the copyright of it. You're merely trying to copy it to your media PC at full quality, as is your right by Fair Use!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
case...people with nothing better to do with thier time than save thousands of files one at at a time. Please...rate this post flame-bait. I'm beyond disgusted with the low-lives of the computerworld.
When will people learn that if someone can decode it in order to view it, they're just ONE step away from making a RECORD of whatever they saw? I mean it reminds me of those people who try to use javascript so you don't download pictures from their website.
Hey, if I can see it on my screen, that means I've already got it. I can figure out a way to make a copy.
And does all of this help with the pirates who just want to make exact copies of the discs anyway?
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Fortunately, the market is regulating itself. For example, Gnarls Barkley rose on downloads in the UK and are signed with a small Indie label - no major. See http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun20 06/sb20060628_285213.htm?campaign_id=search
AACS still suffers from the same critical flaw as CSS did, and indeed most other forms of DRM.
e
It violates Kerckhoffs' principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs'_principl
Secret algorithms or data that the consumer is not "meant" to see are still stored locally inside that little black player box you bought from wal-mart. And, more usefully, inside player software intended for a personal computer. This information is kept hidden only by security-by-obscurity mechanisms. There is a long history of people successfully extracting such information from executables or ROM firmware dumps.
It really is only a matter of time until this is cracked, just the same as CSS was.
Apparently Johansen, one of the people to originally break CSS, is already working on AACS circumvention.
Pshh, I've got a video camera and a tripod.
How do "camera killers" work, and how are they not visible to the human eye?
Then why are these companies being allowed to get away with copy protection schemes?
They may be easily crackable, but not by joe public, who is the most likely to need a backup copy.
As with most such security measures, copy protection schemes just hurt the legitimate users.
Those who can crack the schemes themselves, or know people who can, probably already use downloaded versions anyway.
And to continue the trend of a car analogy (even tho the first one made no sense whatsoever) look at codes on car radios.
I have a radio in my car, which has a 4 digit code that needs to be entered if the battery is disconnected, recently the battery was replaced and i spent a couple of weeks without a radio because that's how long it took me to find the business-card sized card with the code on it.
On the other hand, someone who steals car radios (or deals in radios stolen by others) will know methods of easily and quickly resetting the code... I've seen (and user) legit garages that do it in seconds, and car radios still get stolen even tho most have codes nowadays, so it's pretty clear the thieves know how to break these codes in a pretty trivial manner.
And then you have my grandfather, who managed to get his radio locked out (3 failed attempts) because the code supplied with his car, was not the code currently set on the radio (clearly the previous owner had mislaid the code and had it reset, because the serial numbers on the radio matched the car according to the dealer) was not the code written down in the car's handbook (which was the original code according to the dealer)...
Anyway he took it to a main dealer, they looked up the code that was supposed to be on that car (seems most manufacturers keep a database of radio cars linked to chassis numbers) and that didnt work, so they reprogrammed the code, reprogramming it took all of 5 minutes but he still had to pay for the service.
A radio without a code would have saved him a considerable amount of time, hunting around for the code, calling the guy he bought the car from, taking time off work to go down to the car dealer...
It would have saved a thief 5 minutes of his time.
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