Next-Gen Ultra HD Blu-Ray Discs Probably Won't Be Cracked For A While (arstechnica.co.uk)

DVDFab, a software tool for ripping and decrypting DVDs and Blu-ray discs, will not be upgraded to support newer Ultra HD (4K) Blu-ray discs. Fengtao Software, which makes DVDFab, said in a statement that it "will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the Blu-ray Disc Association and the movie studios." AACS-LA is the body that develops and licenses the Blu-ray DRM system. AACS 2.0 has a 'basic' version that sounds quite similar to existing AACS, but also an 'enhanced' version of DRM that requires the playback device to download the decryption key from the internet. There might still be a hole in the AACS 2.0 crypto scheme that allows for UHD discs to be ripped, but presumably it'll be a lot tougher that its predecessors.

Comments

Pointless

[Diac]

As long as you can capture the raw video and audio output you can copy anything into your own format.

Re:Pointless

[ichthus]

Or, as the saying goes, "If you can play it, you can copy it."

Making Consumption Harder For Consumers...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one more case of DRM making life harder for the consumer. I live in a country with spotty, slow internet access. If I can't watch my movies without getting online, then I won't buy them.

Oh, just great....

[sbaker]

So now my DVD player has to be connected to the Internet? Now we have new and exciting routes for evildoers and opportunities for adverts and other junk to be inserted into our media. Then you have the joy that if the DVD manufacturer goes broke - or just decides not to keep supporting the format some years from now - then all of your DVD's would just stop playing?

The entire POINT of physical media is that I can play it anywhere - and that I own the content forever. If you break either one of those (and they just broke both of them) - then I might as well stream content online and save the need for a rack with 200 disks in it cluttering up my media room.

Forget it. If I have to put up with all of those things, I might as well use Amazon/Netflix/whatever to get my content.

Re:Oh, just great....

[Dutch Gun]

Remember DIVX (no, not the codec), the failed attempt at rented content on physical media that required a physical connection to the internet to play? Welcome to DivX 2.0, still Hollywood's wet dream of never letting you actually own any of your own content.

Well, physical media is going to eventually die out anyhow, and increasingly stringent DRM is going go help the process along. Honestly, I don't think Hollywood will mourn its death that much, as streaming video falls right in line with its "perpetual rental" model.

Re:Because now no one even cares about ripping DVD

[slaker]

I still get discs from Netflix, especially for big-budget special effects movies where I'd prefer to have a high bit-rate/high fidelity rip rather than a 2GB file from YIFY or the like.

There are also parts of the USA where high bandwidth internet connections are simply not available. My cousins, who live in central Illinois, visit their local video store probably three or four times a week and can only dream of having a 3Mbit DSL connection that would allow them to watch a 480p Youtube video in real time.

Re:We've heard this before...

[Blaskowicz]

Our machines are faster but not 2^64 faster

Re:We've heard this before...

[delt0r]

And yet the internet if full of blue ray rips. DRM doesn't work. You can't keep something locked up while at the same time give everyone a copy of the key. Or a key. If you can watch it you can crack it, without all that much encryption cracking.

Re:We've heard this before...

[dgatwood]

Additionally, most movies just don't benefit from Ultra HD.

You misspelled "" (the empty string). As in: printf("Additionally, movies ""just don't benefit from Ultra HD.");

Fewer and fewer people are buying physical media at this point, choosing to pay a small fee to Netflix et al for a continuous supply of new content. The few who still do buy physical media are mostly those behind the technology curve, which means they mostly don't own Ultra HD TVs or players. As a standard, Ultra HD is basically stillborn.

Sure, many people buy an Ultra HD TV if they're replacing hardware, simply because other aspects of the image quality make them a better purchase. (The resolution is irrelevant at normal viewing distances, and this is true regardless of the size of your TV, because your eye exhibits angular resolution.)

Similarly, many people will eventually buy an Ultra HD Blu-Ray player as they displace the standard models price-wise. Unfortunately for the studios, almost nobody will replace their existing players until the hardware breaks, which means that it will be a really, really long time before the studios can stop shipping new movies in normal Blu-Ray format, which will still be rippable. And most people will continue to buy their movies in that format, rather than have to deal with multiple copies of each movie for their various players.

This brings me to the main reason why these discs won't be cracked for a while: nobody actually cares. Everybody knows that there's little real-world benefit to the extra resolution, and the extra size of the underlying data can be considerable, depending. This means:

• No movie pirates will care whether it is possible to rip them, because they'll prefer the smaller and less battery-draining (but otherwise functionally equivalent) Blu-Ray format anyway.
• Nobody who buys movies and wants to make backups will buy the Ultra HD discs in the first place, so they won't care about whether they can back them up. (And even if they did, assuming the new Digital Bridge feature catches on, this isn't likely to be a significant target market for ripping software.)

In short, these companies are engaging in an insane cat and mouse game to "protect" intellectual property in a format that is likely to be purchased by a fraction of a percent of movie viewers even in the best-case scenario, and that would still be watched by about that same fraction of a percent even if the movie studios made unencrypted Ultra HD ISOs available for free in torrent form. Nobody cares about Ultra HD.