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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."
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.
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)
They took my tilde, now I cannot cheat in Half Life 2! NOOOOOOO! But honestly, no one's gonna printscreen an entire movie.
The concept of taking full-blown movies of your desktop is very old and is used a lot for computer training programs, it would be incredibly simple for one of those recording programs to record the video and audio of a playing movie and save it without the copy protection.
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.
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.
And that don't have any output.
So long as it's possible to get output, it's possible to produce a nearly-perfect digital replica of any content.
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.
I can see the videophile's system of the future: a video driver card with an external analog output plugged into a video capture card, plus a bit of software to repeat the process of playing the movie and averaging the frames until the desired quality is reached. Instant (ok, maybe 1 day turn-around) DVD/Blur-ray/HDTV-quality non-DRM'd video.
We've hardly begun to scratch the surface of means for making DRM obsolete. People who invest in DRM Just Don't Get It(tm).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Now with virtualization technology, where the OS is running virtually, or in VMWare, you'll be able to do a "Print screen" at a higher level than the OS, so it shouldn'T be a problem.
I'm your huckleberry