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Linux DVD One Step Closer
Matthew Pavlovich, head of the new LiViD project, has released source code (from an anonymous source) to
allow CSS unlocking on DVD drives. This means people with DVD drives (only IDE at
the moment, SCSI soon) will be able to copy the raw, encrypted, MPEG off the disc. Once
this software is refined, all that will be necessary to watch DVD movies
under Linux will be a hardware decoder or a special software decoder (which would
have to be non-free).
>Here in the U.S., DVDs typically cost as much or a little bit more than audio CDs
He was talking about drives, not discs. At least in the U.S., a decent IDE DVD-ROM drive, like the slot-loading Pioneer 103, costs a little over $100 most places.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
By the time that comment was posted the version available for download was without license. It was later changed to include the two files "license" and "gpl.txt". Just look at the date staps of the files in the tar archive (unless they get changed after this posting as well)
But true, the assembler is a much bigger problem. And even bigger than that is the fact that the code is stolen, by reverse engineering.
What if I buy a machine with software already installed ? These are shipped ready-to-run, and don't present all the EULA screens that the setup programs offer. Nobody could prove I even saw a license agreement, let alone approved it.
What if I borrow a machine ? A EULA might forbid resale of the software, but not temporary use by another person of that machine.
IANAL, but I didn't think you could enforce a contract that wasn't approved by both parties.
who did the clean-room implementation. They also picked up a *huge* insurance policy to cover anyone who licensed it from them.
The original compaq licensed IBM's bios.
> The original question asked about a mkdvdfs,
> which implies they want something like being
> able to simply put an MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 encoded
> video stream onto the disc and expect it to be
> played with standard DVD software as a DVD
Yes, that's what I was asking...doesn't have to be in "streaming" mode, though (in case that's what you're assuming). I would be perfectly happy requiring 4+G of scratch space for the creation of the image, on magnetic media, before getting burned to the DVD.
But, yeah, a program that could take a menu file (say, an HTML file), a list of different video files (mpeg, quicktime, whatever), and build a complete image that a DVD-writer could write to a consumer DVD player-readable disc.
Would be cool, no?
What if the software that was pirated, that way the R-engineer would have been guilty of breaking the copyright law, and pre-broken the "agreement" was already broken, logn before he started to work on the software...
Last time I looked the crime of pirating didn't
carry any punishment worth speaking of...
But then again, IANAL.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"Here" is Norway. "Here" is the place where I think people are joking when they say that they can get dual PIIs for $400. "Here" is where such a machine would cost about five times that much. At least. *sigh*
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Posted by Napalm4u:
Well i think that the only way that you can legally reverse engineer software is if you use publicly posted information. No SDK's No Searching through DLL's.
The only example i can think of is between 3DFX and about a million glide wrappers. All those people with TNT'S want to play Glide only games.(TNT's use Direct3d&opengl) Glide was made by 3DFX. And so their stopping all the glide wrappers.
*Except* Creative which made Unified a wrapper made from publicly availible information. Granted it only plays a few games but its an ongoing project.
But, not many more games are going to be glide only so its only for old games& N64 emulators!
hm, I guess I'm confusing 'mpeg playback' with decoding. Here is the stb velocity 128 spec sheet.
As impressive as PC speakers (or those little TV speakers, for that matter) try to be these days, the awesomeness of 6 *digital* channels of a DVD's soundtrack is totally lost there. But that's easily remedied if you've got a receiver and speakers within arm's reach, as the cramped college dorm crowd can attest to. Not to mention being able to really crank those MP3's...
The windows EULA says you can not reverse engineer. It also says that if you do not agree to the terms of the agreement, you are entitled to a refund. How many people actually got refunds? If microsoft doesn't honor their side of the agreement, legally you don't have to either.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
of course then there are just freaks like me whose girlfriend won't let them, uh I mean don't
want a tv in their house.....
"That's not a TV, that's a monitor!" Heh.
Of course there's the poor bastards whose daughters, wives, cats, and so on monopolize the theater. The convenience factor of slapping the film up on one screen and getting some work done in the other is pretty high, whereas the effort of clearing out babies, livestock, and spouses just to pop in a DVD is pretty steep.
Speaking of which, you going to stop by to watch Taxi Driver, or what?
I was at a carshow a couple of months ago and among the sights was a car fitted with LCDs in the headpads of the front seats (thus allowing those in the rear to watch them) in the trunk was a PlayStation which was cracked to allow playing of DVDs in it. All this was connected to a "normal" car-radio unit (and a big one too) which had its own LCD. Now THAT'S something for the kids on long car trips :)
They didn't protect it when Winamp came out, and they didn't protect it when the Rio came out, so on what legal basis can they demand royalties now?
the voodoo3 6-trillion or whatever supposedly has hardware dvd encoding built in. and at only twice as much as i'd be willing to pay for it, too.
Somebody get our flag back!
Thats how they developed Compaq DOS 3.whatever,
eons ago... it was the first 100% compatible
DOS because of it.
i don't own a television, as the content really sucks, and materialism is a bit boring. so movie watching is only viable through dvd on the computer.
Why has the industry never made a big deal about import audio CDs? Why should video be treated differently?
Not sure where you're writing from, but it has in the US! To the point of lobbying for congressional legislation. Even for titles that are non-available in the US, yes. All their efforts made it a LOT harder to get imports a few years ago.
Which is why I order straight from the UK!
to wanting to watch movies on your PC. Granted, I like to see Linux support for as many devices as possible, but I've always wondered why people like to watch movies on their computer. Someone clue me in, isn't it more convenient to sit around a 27" TV set with a bunch of friends and watch a movie than to huddle around a 17" monitor while sitting in your desk chair? What am I missing?
Great, it doesn't even have a license in the distribution. Excellent, since that means more than just the Linux community can use it.
For appearant reasons, the BSD's don't want GPL code in the kernel.
Yes, the people who run across it are not at fault, but the person(s) who put the code there in the first place are at fault. I'm wondering if there is a way for them to get the information out without being held liable for anything. A way around the RE clauses of software licneses.
And you are right, you can not patent an idea. As that statment applies to CSS: CSS is not patented technology. I'm guessing this is because the techniques used in a software or hardware implementation of this are already patented and/or in the public domain. Not to mention if they patented it they would have had to publicly release the information on how it was done, which is against their ideas, apparently, of how to secure data.
Leo Schwab of Be wrote an interesting editorial about shrinkwrap licenses:
http://www.microtimes.com/157/shrinkwrap.html
(It is a bit old, but good nonetheless)
Would be cool, yes. And it would indeed require the 4-16 gigs of imaging space depending on the size of the disc you wanted to produce. While I don't think this could be implenmented as a file system (it's already been said that the FS and the dvd data layout are two seperate things) a linux based dvd authoring tool could be developed. Again, fee and open sourced are not likely due to the need to get NDAs for the DVD spec and pay for it. Unfortunate but the only way to go right now.
Could we not create a limited version of WINE that was just for running the windows DLL(s) for unincoding DVDs. since this would be a very limited emulater/thunker. It should be much simpler to write than a full functioning emulater/thunker.
Then a person (having a legal copy of the DLL(s)) could play DVDs. This would mean not having a complety GNU/empowered/free system, but in hopes of creating a lack of market for the propritay product and freeing the code.
These points are possibly invalid, and probably stupid, but.....
if the software was obtained without a liscense agreement (ie illegally (not reccommended), from a 2nd hand sale without documentation, or it was given to you without documentation)...
and finally.... if the person who reverse engineers it will forgo credit, then it doesn't even have to be legal.... it's easy to fob stuff off relatively untracably....
Why would the code be any easier/harder to reverse engineer because of the OS? It's all opcodes to me... :)
Single sided/Single layer = 4.9GB
Single sided/Double layer = 8.5GB
Double sided/Double layer = 17GB (8.5 x 2)
FWIW
__
ipsa scientia potestas est
"knowledge itself is power" - Francis Bacon
> What are the laws regarding reverse engineering,
> specifically reverse engineering a piece
> of software that has a specific clause in
> it's usage license not to reverse engineer or
> dissasemble the code?
IANAL.
In Europe, the law explicitly overrides those agreements, and states that you CAN reverse engineer to make a compatible product.
That is clearly the case here.
But I don't know where the reverse engineering was done.
-- REW.
The only reason DIVX was never cracked was because half of the encryption system sat within a centralized server that DIVX players dialed into periodically. With DVD all the decoding is done locally, and if the docoding can be done in software (which it often is, under windows, anyway) then that code can be RIPPED and ported to other platforms. Period. The Law? Fuck the law. Someone will do it regardless and post it to USENET and ftp servers in countries where US law is meaningless, and the SW will spread and no one will be able to stop it. The secret nature of DVD decoding is already doomed and has been since day one when software was released to do it. If they really wanted to keep it secret, they'd have had a better chance if they kept all the decoding in hardware. But it's too late now. The genie is out of the bottle. Now, it's only a matter of time. And I think this is what was really intended. Electronics makers want to sell players. And the way to do that is to make players that can play as many discs as possible. The who region encoding thing makes no sense.Why has the industry never made a big deal about import audio CDs? Why should video be treated differently?I think the region thing was just stuck in to appease Hollywood into supporting the format. By the time it's broken, the format will be entrenched and all will be well at that time.
There is an incorrect perception that copyright and patent and RE laws are universal.They are not.If someone in say, Taiwan, or some other non-Berne non-WIPO country REs the code and posts it to usenet, how is this illegal? Now I suppose it's illegal for Jow US Citizen to download and use this code, but the genie will be out of the bottle so to say, and it will then be impossible to suppres the knowledge anymore.
Posted by _DogShu_:
It doesn't have hardware DVD decode, unfortuneately.
They call it "DVD hardware assist." What it really is is that it has hardware acceleration for windoze directdraw, which is how the DVDs are rendered.
Actually, when using the ATI software decoder on the voodoo3000 the imagequality is quite good, but not perfect. Some strange things happen when an image is mostly primary colors (think a room lit with red ligth), the resolution seems to drop to about half the number of horisontal lines. From glorius progressive scan to crudely line doubled. Anyone know whats going on?
I am really for the zone-limitations in the DVD-Videos. Everyone knows that DVD-Videos are almost only f... american movies, that don't even worth the price of the disc. Hollywood movies suck since the beginning of the 90s.
-- A free guy who hasn't seen "Phantom Menace".
It felt good for me when I gave Windows (TM) the boot! In other words that is no longer an option here.
Now, if DVD drives would not be so expensive, we would all be happy (at least they're not cheap here). BTW, why would the decoder have to be non-free? Some patented algorithms? Again? (Will standard-makers never learn... Oh well, perhaps it was intentional...)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
I wonder why Creative Labs hasn't made so much as a statement about porting their Dxr2 and Dxr3 drivers to Linux.
Anoymous source? This all sounds somewhat fishy. How legal will it be to actually use that routine in any code that real people get to use?
-awc
Does anyone know if the voodoo3 can be used as a hardware decoder under linux? If so, would this mean that after the project is finished encrypted dvds could be played?
a dvd has the capacity of 2-4 gigs right?
i'm guessing that not too many people are going to
have their entire collection of dvds sitting on
their harddrive. anyone have any status about
www.linuxtv.org ?
I understand the problem with decoders for reading commercial DVDs, but IIRC, it is also possible to write non-encrypted DVDs. How far off is the Linux community from a mkdvdfs program, so I can shove all those cool Star Wars trailers onto a DVD I can watch at home?
After that, the next big step would be video-capture cards....then a hook-up to TiVO...
The inability to get the raw scrambled data off the disk was cited as the major reason you can't use a Windows player with Wine to watch DVD movies under Linux.
Now all that is needed is to export the raw stream through Wine with the right API. That part shouldn't be secret, so there's no longer any big stumbling block for DVD under Linux.
(And of course, this will allow for easier use of debuggers to reverse-engineer the code.)
I just bought an ATI Expert 128 (or something like that) for a machine I was building, and it claims to have DVD decode onboard. They didn't send the software ( you have to register to get it) so I didn't try it out.
BTW I bought an IDE DVD drive for that machine for $100, so they're getting affordable.
i was speaking to someone at a MUG once who claimed that software liscenses were not valid in Texas, because Texas state law prohibhits contracts which do not have an expiration date. Since the software liscense does not have an expiration date, it would then be invalidated.
I'm not sure he was correct, but if he was it would seem to say some interesting things. For example, that since i'm in Texas i wouldn't have to follow the terms of the liscense agreement. I wouldn't be able to make illegal copies, since that violates copyright law, but if i tried to reverse-engineer MS Word in some way that would be legal.
Even if it wasn't true about the expiration dates, i'm sure there are lots of little similar loopholes in various places that you could use to circumvent software liscenses.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
As the topic says...
Yes, it is true, we have now all needed parts for software decoding of DVDs, but any software doing so will be illegal and/or non-free.
1. CSS
The information about CSS was obtained by reverse engineering some DVD software decoder. Reverse engineering is nearly everytime prohibited by license agreements, and for example european law allows reverse engineering only for software compatibility issues. So the CSS source was not obtained in a legal way, and it is at least a very problematic issue if we may use this source however. Im unsure if CSS is also protected by patents.
However CSS licensing is for free, but this will likely permit a opensource decoder.
2. MPEG-II
MPEG2 decoding software is available (Reference Decodec of the MPEG Simulation Group), but MPEG2 is subject to licensing with MPEG LA (www.mpegla.com). The license fee is $4 per copy.
3. AC3
AC3 decoding software is available, written using public available specs. However AC3 is subject to licensing issues (and probably patented too). The price for the (one-time) licensing is said to be about US$ 20000.
To summarize: We have all needed information for writing a decoder but we may not do so. Im sure that some people ignoring law however will publish such software, like happened with MP3 encoders, but the software will be very likely illegal to use.
Some countries apparently do not allow software patents, which will increase the possibility of a legal decoder, but be aware, that you as a user of such software are also bound to your countries law.
Be careful in what you are doing. If you want to do something reasonable try to convince some company to release a software decoder for linux or write a device driver for their decoding hardware.
Tested on kernel 2.2.5, works at least on Toshiba SD-M1201.
Didn't Compaq do just that (have one group look at the code and another rewrite it) to break IBM's lock on the BIOS market a while back? I thought that was how all the clones eventually passed IBM.
In reading a lot of the comments, I thought I'd do everyone a favor and clear up some of the misconception.
1. We _do_ have enough to have DVD playback under Linux. The DVD module for the Matrox G200 series cards does hardware decrypting of the video and audio streams.
2. CSS has two (2) parts to it. This only unlocks the disks and allows the encrypted data streams to travel to either a software decryptor or a hardware decoder.
3. The Zoran chipset will decode raw, encrypted DVD and AC3 streams in hardware. Thus the system never has a pipe for the decrypted data.
Any other questions are comments, let me know. Check the site and join the list.
No, I don't think the riva cards have hardware mpeg decoding capabilities.
There are actually 2 operations involved:
- motion compensation
- inverse discrete cosine transform
Only ATI cards feature both, and the S3 Savage has motion compensation.
Others cards (G200/400's, TNT1/2) only have DirectX overlay support which accelerates things a bit for windoze software decoders.
Because everyone knows that in a couple of years MS is going to have to release their new OS on a dual layered dual sided DVD due to the fact that it will be too big!
But seriously, with a dual sided/layerd DVD being able to hold ~17 Gigs of information there are quite a bit of possibilities. The idea of movies came mainly from the home entertainment industry, it started out as just an extra bonus for the computer industry.
We can only take CD's so far, and I think this is a way to prevent what happened to the floppy disk. What I mean from that is apps that take more than 7 floppies to install, sometimes upwards of 40. By building a new standard NOW it will prevent having obsolete technology in a shot time. A good example of way to many CD's was the game Phatasmagoria, which had 7 CD's, and it came out something like 4 years ago.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Mediamatics says that they use a CSS (software) module from IBM that performs decryption. ...?
What's it going to take to get someone to reverse engineer this? $5K? $10K?
Dude, as I understand it, most normal DVDs use UFS, which I believe is a bit experimental anyways, but is available in the current kernel. Whether there is a mkufs or such software available, I haven't checked. See Freshmeat.
That isn't an encoder, simply the base file system for the DVD standard (like iso9660 is to CD).
What are the laws regarding reverse engineering, specifically reverse engineering a piece of software that has a specific clause in it's usage license not to reverse engineer or dissasemble the code? Are there any ways around a reverse engineering clause of a software product? Could someone, for instance, dissasemble a DLL or EXE in windows and figure out how it works. Then take their knowledge (not in electronic code form but written english/spanish/swahili(sp)/etc or through speaking) and pass it on to someone else who could then make a software product from that information. Would that constitute breaking the reverse engineering clause?
dvd.da.ru/
download PowerRip, and for windows you can
re-encode DVD movies back intopure free mpeg2 or quicktime or mpeg1 or mpeg4 or AVI or anything or RAW
Could this software be written for free in Sweden the same way that BladeEnc has "amnesty" from the oppressive IP laws?
Just a thought......
-james
Once all those next gen consoles come out with DVD movie playback capability, expect the price to go down....
Current DVDs (the large majority of them) use a Bridge format. MicroUDF and ISO9660. This allows current ISO9660 file systems to use them without any problems (assuming they have a large enough address space built into them) but will maintain compatibility once full UDF based ones start coming out and players start using that filesystem to access the discs.
This has absolutly nothing to do with the data layout of DVD-Video data, though. That requires that all the data that is going to be written to disc be known before the files start to get written. The original question asked about a mkdvdfs, which implies they want something like being able to simply put an MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 encoded video stream onto the disc and expect it to be played with standard DVD software as a DVD, this is not a real possibility. That is what I was pointing out.