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Prototype Hardware DVD Decodoer for Linux-needs help
Yohahn wrote in with some news on the DVD for Linux effort. A company has developed a prototype DVD decoder board that does the decryption in hardware, versus software, meaning the that the drivers could be released under the GPL. However, because the board is only a prototype, investors need to be convinced - head over to LinuxTv.org and vote in the poll to show support for this. Please-I'd like to fully use my laptop, and this is one of those areas Linux needs assistance in.
There are two things going on, decoding and decryption. Looking at the linux dvd page (which has been down for about a week, from what I can tell), it seems they have support for reading the DVD file format. So you can put your 17GB DVD in there and read the data to your heart's content. They also have alpha support for decoding the data and playing a movie from it, even in hardware (which is more efficient, of course). But that doesn't mean you can play a movie. The DVD forum also put a lot of time into cryptography. Unlike copying VHS to VHS, which degrades things, copying DVD to DVD should result in a perfect copy. It's all digital, so bit-for-bit copies should be just as perfect as the original, which would make for some nasty piracy. So the DVD Forum put cryptography measures in ther. I have no idea how this works! But in order to build a DVD player, software or hardware, you have to sign an NDA with the DVD Forum saying they get your firstborn if you tell anyone about the decryption process (obviously it's not that good if they have to keep it secret; maybe they're just paranoid). Every other computer DVD solution does the decryption in software--it's just easier that way. But you can't release the source to any of this, because that would be a violation of the NDA. So these people are putting the cryptography stuff in hardware so they can still release the source to the player. So it's this or a closed-source solution for Linux DVD.