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Blu-ray BD+ Cracked

Posted by kdawson on from the bigger-they-come dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."

4 of 521 comments (clear)

  1. I'll know it when I see it by AchiIIe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Slysoft has made this claim before. It turned out to be bogus. The crack allowed a user to copy a BD to the harddrive and play it back from there using only a specific version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD (3319a), but not to transcode, otherwise manipulate the content or play it back from a burned BD-R or BD-RE. (Wiki)

    Now I'd like everyone to remember that BD+ is not an `algorithm` per se. It's not a DRM one way function. BD+ is a virtual machine and a blu ray disk is a full fledged program that runs under the VM and can even run native code to patch and upgrade the virtual machine.

    This is akin to running a java application that can inspect the java VM.

    It's a cat and mouse game for now.

    *Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B

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    Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
  2. Re:pwned by mstahl · · Score: 5, Informative

    The copy protection is meant to prevent you from backing up your only copy of the disk to another device, which falls under fair use. Also, you cannot format-shift because of the copy protection. If you buy an HD movie and want to downsample it for use on your iPod, you can't unless you get past the copy protection.

    The studio's line works just fine if you're okay only watching your movies in your Blu-Ray player and only if the keys to the disks are still valid and only if you even still have a blu-ray player years from now. If you buy a movie you should be able to enjoy it howsoever you see fit as long as that doesn't involve charging people money to view it or selling copies you've made from it.

    Seriously. You must be new here 'cause I might just be modded redundant people have been over this so many times on Slashdot.

  3. Re:pwned by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are a variety of reasons HD DVD was better from an end-consumer's standpoint, though not necessarily a studio's:

    1. It was more affordable
    2. It supported combo disks, meaning people buying movies could buy them safely in the knowledge they didn't have to upgrade every player in the house to HD DVD in order to play it
    3. It supported non-encrypted discs, meaning smaller studios had access to the format without the need to pay AACS fees that would significantly increase the cost of the media, and also meaning free content was possible
    4. It had everything two years ago that Blu-ray's BD Live and Profile 1.1 supports (but few Blu-ray players are capable of.) An HD A1 can do all the PIP, etc, features that are being announced today for future BD players
    5. For encrypted discs, "managed copy" was a compulsory feature, allowing manufacturers to produce movie jukeboxes, systems to copy movies to hand held devices, etc, safely in the knowledge that no HD DVD disk could ever be pressed that wouldn't be able to be a part of such a system
    6. There was one copy prevention system, AACS, which was a known quality and relatively uncomplicated. BD+ is a nightmare, several legitimate players have difficulty with it.

    The only real downside was the lower capacity, and with an HD DVD disk topping out at 30G (there had been a plan to increase that to 50G without increasing the price of the players by adding a third layer), capacity for an ordinary 1080p movie was never really an issue. I hear they had trouble fitting a lossless soundtrack on the Transformers HD DVD, one of the rare occasions the capacity was stretched, and there's some evidence that wasn't true either. My 2001 HD DVD has gorgeous quality, a DolbyHD lossless soundtrack, and a whole bunch of features, all on one single sided double layer disc.

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    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  4. Re: BD+ Cracked by oni · · Score: 5, Informative

    cat and mouse game is too much effort for the pirates

    Just to be clear, pirates aren't the ones playing that cat and mouse game. When you see a street vendor selling pirated copies of Star Wars, he's selling actual Blu-ray discs. He made bit-for-bit copies and he didn't need to decrypt anything to do it. The fact that Blu-ray is encrypted didn't do anything to prevent the pirate from stealing the content.

    Decryption is needed by people who want to *gasp* watch the discs they legally purchased at BestBuy.