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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
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.
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.
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HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
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
Printscreen?
Give me a break, somebody please send a HD-DVD/Blu-ray drive to DVD Jon so he can start doing his stuff.
and you would still have to rip the audio stream and add that in
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.
Not with a beowulf cluster!
(sorry, I couldn't NOT do it.)
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
This doesn't work well even with regular DVDs. Ever think of Macrovision?
English is easier said than done.
Of course you don't hit print screen yourself, you get a macro package to do it for you and automate the whole thing.
Cheers,
Ian
If you spill soda in the exact spot right under the Print Screen button, it becomes much easier.
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.
Whatever happened to the "I bought the DVD, I should do what the fuck I want with it"?
+5, Truth
Or I can get one of these
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.
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.
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!
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.
Do you really think that no one will write a quick script to do this automatically???
Stephen Colbert on race: "While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad."
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!
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
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.
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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.
Wait, HD DVD and BluRay aren't cracked yet? They've been out for weeks... Come on, you lazy hackers!
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.
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.
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**
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.
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!
You can't create an "exact digital copy" via this method unless you store the file in an uncompressed format
May I add that, even if you did the above, it would still not be exact in many cases, since screenshots are usually taken after the player has filtered the video (brightness/colour adjustments, deinterlacing, etc.), so you'd see a lot of irritating variability between different rips. Someone who downloads an unauthorised copy for free may not care so much, but it'd hardly be ideal for things like personal backups of your discs.
How is DRM going to keep it to background level noise when one crack is all it takes to spread it to the internet?
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. It's bad enough I am forced to watch the blue FBI screen everytime I watch a DVD (actually, on most anime, they are smart enough not to include that from what I have seen, but not Hollywood), and be dragged through several commercials if they are really sadistic - sometimes I have the feeling that the companies are intentionally promoting copyright-infringement with these tactics.
That may change with TPM, but I have given up so much media by this point (TV, most Hollywood movies, RIAA Music, etc) that I won't bother buying anything more than anime unless they start producing an inferior product and blaming the audience for lousy sales. My time can be better spent learning, coding or doing some sport in the future.
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.
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.