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Work Around for New DVD Format Protections

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oops dept.

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."

4 of 466 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hrmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you really want to copy a blue-ray movie, there are easier ways, such as decrypting HDCP.

  2. Not equivalent to a direct copy by vijayiyer · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:hrmm by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm surprised that they haven't disabled the print-screen functionality in some way so that it's not possible to do this.

    For example, in OS X, taking screenshots is disabled whenever DVD Player is running. It's not particularly hard to get around (actually, it's almost trivially easy; yet another situation where I feel like Apple did just the bare minimum required to look like they care) using the Terminal or a third-party applet that calls the screen grab, but the normal hotkey is disabled.

    I assume that if this method becomes a popular way of ripping movies, that the ability to take screenshots on Windows will simply be similarly crippled (probably more thoroughly), or removed altogether under certain situations. ('Printscreen doesn't function unless conditions x, y, and z exist...')

    That's not to say that I ever think it will be impossible for a sufficiently motivated person to rip a movie (or indeed, circumvent any level of DRM), but that a simple-but-useful historical feature like Print Screen could easily become a casualty of the DRM war.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  4. Re:hrmm by nxtw · · Score: 4, Informative
    I don't know about your computer but on mine the printscreen function isn't exactly speedy, neither in Windows nor in Linux. I doubt 24fps or 30fps is doable with such a script. Right now DVDs can be ripped and transcoded faster than realtime.

    It takes about 1/10 of a second for me to hit print screen and paste the picture into Paint The screenshot resolution is 2560x1024. The blink in the cursor when the image is being copied is barely noticable. This is with a Intel Core Duo based system.

    That's all irrelevant though; if the image can be accessed so that print screen can put a copy in the clipboard, a program can access that image in memory and feed it into the video encoder directly.