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Slysoft (of AnyDVD Fame) Closes After Increased International Pressure By AACS (myce.com)
jlp2097 writes: It looks like the recent activities by Hollywood studios and the AACS LA finally led to the closing of Slysoft Inc, creator of the popular AnyDVD HD tool for creating personal backups of BluRay/DVD/etc. Slysoft Inc's website confirms the closing due to "recent regulatory requirements". The final nail in the coffin has also been confirmed with slightly more details in their forum: "this is final. Slysoft is gone." Sad to see them go — it looks like legitimate buyers of BluRays will now have to find other sources for backing up their property to HTPCs and NASes.
I'm astonished that they lasted as long as they did. They always seemed to avoid trouble with a certain stylish insouciance.
Ironically, though, I never bought it, rather I just got cracked copies off kickasstorrents.
Well that's a bummer. Who's going to take up the torch against the terrorists? Is there another program that does something similar?
Point out this case to them. Point out the total value to the economy of things like the iPod and other personal digital music players. Point out that this is vastly more than the total music and movie industries combined. Point out that laws surrounding DRM have ensured that no one could release a portable movie player that let you rip your DVDs / BluRays and so an entire industry has been unable to exist. Ask them why they hate job creation so much.
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They should just open source the product before they go :)
Well, if they can't make money off it anymore we will gladly accept it uploaded to git hub.
Momento Mori
MakeMKV. You're welcome.
Many PCs (including my own HTPC) running software such as XBMC and MediaPortal depend on slysoft to play legit BluRay discs. I guess next time they update the BluRay encryption, I'll just have to download a pirate copy instead, because I won't be able to play the legit discs.
While you can argue piracy, the USA it is perfectly legal to make backup copies of commercial media you legitimately own. Very important for owners of old DVD, VHS tapes, laser disks and so on. Once nice thing about linux is it's a lot harder to just "shut down" because it's world wide and the USA is the most anal when it comes to copying laws. It's inverse is China where it's apparently unfashionable NOT to copy things..(and in many cases sell the copies..). Anyway, there are reasonable policies when it comes to backups of things we purchase but in the USA, the business are trying to require people to purchases their media more than once if possible. We gotta rethink these IP laws as they don't encourage innovation as much as they promote lazy fat cats to just rest on the laurels of a single creation for not only their lifetime, but the lifetime of their descendants.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
You can talk when it's your life on the line.
Unitl a "cracked" version is all over the torrents?
Please can someone post a (no-malware) mirror installer?
Liar.
Purchasers of content on media like BR simply want to be able to enjoy that media when, where and how they want and not be tied to TVs attached to BR players ramming 20 minutes of fucking commercials down their throat before they get to see what they actually bought the disk for.
And they want to safeguard the content on the disk that they paid for against the hazards of the fragile media that is being forced on them.
The commercials say "own it on Blu-Ray today" but the laws (bought and paid for by the entertainment industry) say "pay for a limited license to view the material as defined by the large entertainment companies and which can be revoked if they feel like it... today!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I start caring about Hollywood as soon as they give a fuck about me being able to actually view their crap without jumping through 100 hoops for no other reason than "we can make you".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This isn't "Hey, I want to download HOT NEW MOVIE for free instead of paying for it." It's "Hey, I bought a Blu-Ray of HOT NEW MOVIE but would like to view it on my computer, my tablet, my phone, etc. Why can't I rip the file and use it for my own use?"
Yes, some people will use the rips to upload them for others (totally illegal), but we shouldn't ban technology based on "some people will use it for illegal stuff." If we did that, then all computers would be banned on the premise that some people use them to commit crimes.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Money talks and bullshit walks. You don't get anything by writing letters.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
But that wouldn't really achieve much. The main feature of Slysoft's solution, was not the software itself (which is certainly impressive) but the fact that they would update the software with new encryption keys every few weeks, often within days of a new encryption key being used.
AACS has a huge inventory of keys which can be used. Slysoft had managed to find an exploit in either a hardware or software player, which allowed them to extract the key when a newly released disc requested a previously unknown key ID.
I wish I had mod points to give the parent poster. I'm so sick of the "it won't do any good" cynicism posts like those above. You know what REALLY won't do any good? Sitting on your ass doing nothing except crying "woe is us" on Slashdot.
Do you know how we got to the point where a lot of elected officials don't care what people think? People sitting around grousing about how elected officials don't care what they think. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you're going to simply tune out of everything going on and not care or hold people to any standards, then really, why should anyone care what you think? I know if I were an elected politician, I wouldn't give a damn what people think who don't bother to let me know, or even vote. Why would I even waste my time?
I vote in every election and primary I can. I do write to my Congresscritters. I tell my friends what I think about stuff going on and the people who are in and running for office. And yeah, sometimes it doesn't do any good, especially being a liberal in the Bible Belt South. But you know what? At least I'm trying. At least I'm not just whining about problems. And sometimes, people actually do make a difference, especially at a local level. You don't have to save the world, you just have to care. If you don't, then it sucks to be you, but stop trying to piss on the parade of those who do.
By the way, for those of you in the "it doesn't make a difference" crowd, by all means, keep sitting on your asses. Your apathy gives people like me disproportionate say over things going on, so you know, thank you very much for that.
Decoding both DVD and BD are "known things". AnyDVD was not the only product doing it.
Two important parts to doing BD, though - One is having a valid key to get past the AACS, and being able to replace it when a version of AACS comes out that revokes your current key. If your key has been added to the revoked list, simply putting a disk in the drive with that version of the list essentially "bricks" the drive for reading ANY Bluray disks until you change your key.
The second is being able to implement the BD+ interpreter to fix up deliberate errors introduced into the video... And it changes periodically.
Where the companies that sell such products get their "market lock-in" is keeping up these changes. AACS is easier than BD+, from what I read, because you don't always have to change your key when a new AACS revocation list comes out, but the BD+ programming can and does change multiple times per month.
What was so illegal about this software? There seems to be a bunch of options for ripping BLue Ray and DVDs, as well as extracting video files.
Bush, Rubio will have pre existing condition come back + alot more HB1's to take our jobs as well.
Virtual clone drive was the only image mounting program worth a damn on windows.
If the MPAA works anything like the RIAA, very little if any of the money you pay for your discs ends up in the actual artists' pockets.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I buy the blu-ray of a movie I like, then download it off a pirate website. I don't even own a blu-ray player. It's just that I have a home media server and would prefer to have movies in a format I can stream throughout my house. But Hollywood insists on only letting you stream movies over the Internet. No simple way to have a local copy which plays on all my devices.
At first I borrowed a friend's BD drive and tried ripping the blu-rays and re-encoding the movies to a smaller size (raw rip of the LotR trilogy was nearly 200 GB). After struggling with merging the two-disc parts into one movie file and keeping subtitles synchronized, I threw in the towel and just downloaded it from a pirate site. Someone much better at video encoding than I had already licked those problems, plus his encode was smaller yet higher quality than mine.
So I ditched my plans to buy my own BD drive for ripping, and now I just pirate the movies after buying the blu-ray. Though I'm not sure you can really call it pirating, since I own the blu-ray which by Hollywood's insistence that I'm buying a license not a copy means I'm licensed to own and view the content. What does Hollywood think will happen to folks who used Slysoft's software to rip their own discs now? If the lack of updates means the software won't be able to rip future blu-ray releases, those folks are going to start doing what I'm doing - buying the blu-ray and downloading the movie from a pirate site. Only some of them won't be as honest as me and will quickly realize they don't really need to buy the blu-ray in the first place.
BTW, this inverts the backup argument. The blu-ray disc becomes my backup copy, safely stored in its case. Heck, I haven't even removed the shrinkwrap off of most of them. Though I prefer to think of them as a physical certificate of the license to the movie, and my backup would be downloading the movie off the net again.
I bought AnyDVD, and completely support SlySoft... I never once copied a DVD or BluRay in violation of any copyright laws. I agree there are far too many people who simply want stuff for free, but that doesn't mean AnyDVD wasn't a great product that worked well for legitimate uses.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I know I downloaded a copy pretty recently. I don't know if it was the last version though. I just had a feeling not too long ago that I should go grab this while it was still running (I believe there was a previous story on /. just a couple weeks ago that talked about DRM and RIAA/MPAA suing them all out of business).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
This is the same logic that means you are stuck with a two party system, (the stooge on the left or the stooge on the right) don't vote for the independent, that is like throwing away your vote. Vote for the person you believe in most, it is not like vote counts for that much anyway. If enough people buy into this nonsense it becomes true. If Donald Trump has a personality you either like or hate, if you hate him you will vote for anyone who runs against him.
NO. The content on the disc is paid for licensed. Commercials bring no value. Give me the movie for free and I'll consider it OK to have to push the mute button on the commercials. Besides that, I'll get Cheetos dust on my fancy NSA sponsored smart-remote....
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
If we can no longer make legal backups of our own discs, the only feasible alternative is to just pirate them all. No DRM, no ads, no unskippable crap... no bullshit. If the disc is damaged, just burn it again... or, keep the video file as part of a digital media library and gain the ability to stream it from anywhere. I see 0 value in physical media anymore.
They used to. When I used to bother ( before I could just buy digital copies and Steam) it was a constant battle between them and slysoft. Maybe they don't bother anymore.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What's wrong with pre-existing conditions? It's not insurance if you are able to wait to buy it until after you need it.
I can't wait for my house to catch on fire then call the insurance company and demand they cover my house. And if I lose my house with everything I own in it, it can greatly destroy my ability to care for my self and family.
Hillary will also add a lot more HB1 visas too. Really, the ones most likely not to do it are Trump, Sanders, and Cruz
It's funny that people represent a long standing senator as some sort of "man of the people". He's as much part of the establishment as anyone. Regardless of his politics and his campaign slogans, he's simply not what he's pretending to be.
If you really want to vote for a 3rd party candidate, than just do that. Don't pretend the Senator from Vermont is some sort of maverick outsider.
See Ted Cruz for an example of "maverick outsider" senator. He's what that really looks like and it isn't pretty.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Are we having nominations for most retarded comment of the week? You should be right up there.
This is a tool for people that have a legal copy already.
There is no "entitlement" here except the basic expectations that come with property ownership.
You are simply advocating the position where only corporations have rights and the rest of us mere peasants aren't entitled to personal property right any more.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bush, Rubio ... + alot more HB1's to take our jobs as well.
With the democrats, we won't even need to have that program once they start legalizing anyone that crosses our border.
The entitlement crowd thinks everything should be free. They have no concept of how many people make a living creating their entertainment - they only care that they are entertained.
Please to explain why me paying $60 to $120 per DVD and BluRay a few hundred times over makes you interpret me as being entitled to free stuff?
Well done AACS! You have managed to crush a product that allowed people to rip DVDs in an age when DVDs are obsolete. Unfortunately, you've also crushed a product that is completely legal and allows us to mount DVDs that we have legitimately downloaded from software vendors! You have absolutely succeeded at the wrong goals entirely.
This is why I've joined the Free State Project. We're getting to 20,000 signers and 10% have already moved. In the years to come we'll have the first libertarian state where the goal of those in power will be to abolish laws rather than create them. It's pro individual-liberty anti-big-government. It might seem cold hearted to throw people out on the street, but that isn't the goal of libertarians. The goal is to keep government out of our lives. We can house those who are impoverished, feed the needy, and take care of ourselves without the government. The problem isn't that we can't do those things. The problem is government has taken away our abilities to do these things voluntarily. I can't afford to send my kid to a private school when the government steals a significant portion of my income that would've allowed me to do so. While the libertarian might prefer to abolish the public school system that isn't necessarily the same thing as ending the guarantees on education. A government could very selectively guarantee loans to those below the poverty line and relieve that debt at a particular future date should a person never be in a position to pay it back within a reasonable amount of time. There could be a 20 year period to pay back a 20 year debt after which that debt becomes the liability of the state.
If this holds up and there is no comeback, look for Netflix DVD and Redbox revenue to dry up faster.
Let's face it streaming video is nice, but the studios frack it up with there contracts that cause content to disappear from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. It is the absolute worst customer experience to add something to your watch list only to find it gone when you go back to watch it.
Slysoft should release a new version that has a plug-in architecture.
- the new version (as sold) will only rip unprotected DVD/BDs
- 3rd parties (cough, cough) can distribute plug-ins that have the decryption functionality
Ideally those plug-ins will be open sourced and given freely on the web.
What's wrong with pre-existing conditions? It's not insurance if you are able to wait to buy it until after you need it.
Because health insurance isn't like other insurance. If you have to change jobs, that means you need to change insurance, so now suddenly the new insurance doesn't have to cover the old condition? That's bullshit. That's why they outlawed it. The root of the problem is tying health insurance to employment, but I don't see the Repugs trying to fix that either.
If we weren't so busy trying to make insurance magically make outrageously expensive healthcare somehow magically affordable, perhaps it wouldn't be so important (just cover all citizens and be done with it), but pre-existing conditions frequently left people un-covered or trapped in a terrible job.
Alas, none of the republicans would be at all interested in joining the civilized world or even pushing back against the highest medical costs in the world.
While in theory the libertarians should try addressing the problem by removing the prescription and other laws so that someone might try to take care of it themselves or roll the dice with someone that doesn't have the expensive certification, in practice I don't hear a peep out of them about that anymore.
With the threat of deportation removed, the foreign workers will soon begin demanding reasonable American pay for an American job.
One of the 'P's in HIPPA is portability. When you left your old insurance, you would get a certificate of prior coverage which you would give to the new insurance company, which would block the pre-existing condition and waiting period bullshit. Though if you happened to have a diagnosis before you had any insurance, you were still fucked.
I think DVDFab is going to see a huge surge in sales. Too bad they don't have stock I can buy.