Posted by
Roblimo
on from the coming-soon-to-a-computer-near-you dept.
blount writes "An interview with LSDVD developers Paul Volcko and Gad Berger is on moviebone. Paul and Gad discuss DVD crypto, patent and trade secret issues, and their plans for an application supporting hardware and software DVD playback."
A friend of mine had the offending chip in his DVD player replaced with one that would work with all regions. So even if hardware region protection is implemented it ain't hard to get around it.
Re:Why all the secrecy on DVD specs?
by
Fizgig
·
· Score: 2
It would seem that way, but I remember my dad (a corporate lawyer) telling me the story about the guy who owned a taxi service and set up a corporation for every taxi cab so that if one made lots of damage, the most that could be sued for was the value of that one company, which was the value of the cab itself. Needless to say, he didn't get away with it. Dummy corporations set up for such purposes are illegal.
Re:why regional encoding? copyrights
by
daw
·
· Score: 2
The only reason they exist, IIRC, is because movies may have different copyrights in different areas of the world.
Not true. Actually region coding exists due to the fact that movie studios want to independently control the timing of releases in different markets. They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever. With VCRs this used to be taken care of by the serendipitous (from their perspective) incompatibility between PAL and NTSC; now that that technical brokenness has been fixed, they have built such brokenness into the system deliberately.
Re:why regional encoding? copyrights
by
Eccles
·
· Score: 2
They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever.
Note that a large part of the reason for different release dates is the cost of producing the films, and thus the reels of films shown in the US head overseas as theaters stop showing them. The upcoming digital methods of distribution and display may eliminate this expense and thus make simultaneous distribution possible, and region code less necessary.
I suppose one concern might be widescale pirating that occurs in some regions of the world, and thus the attempt to stop pirated DVDs flowing out of those regions. I doubt this would have much success, though, the sellers would just make US/Europe-encoded DVDs anyway.
-- Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I too got tired of rebooting, but I solved the problem in a somewhat roundabout manner. I had a spare box lying around, and my Linux box had a Hauppauge WinTV card, so I set up the spare machine with the Encore kit and Win98 right next to the Linux box, connected video out on the decoder card to video in on the WinTV card.
With autologon, scandisk disabled, and vncserver, I was able to get rid of the monitor and input devices on the Win98 box and control it with xvncviewer.
So basically, the Windows box is now a standalone DVD player and the Linux box can function as a TV and remote.
Not very practical for most folks, but it sure is interesting. --
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
"Woefully short of other operating systems"
by
heroine
·
· Score: 2
The only reason it seems woefully short is that users don't accept the existance of commercial software on it. BeOS, which seems to have eclipsed Linux in 1/4th the time has a user base which is more accepting of commercial software so they're not woefully short. If you're willing to count commercial software, Linux becomes very competitive.
Re:Line is crossed when *gov't* says "illegal 2 mo
by
Fizgig
·
· Score: 2
Perhaps that was a bad example. I wasn't saying you bootlegged anything. I was saying that there are a lot of similarities between the legal protections/punishments provided by copyright and those provided in the case of the DVD specifications.
In both cases, someone gets access to something under certain conditions (you get your tape/DVD under the condition that you don't share it; they get the DVD specs on the condition they don't share it). You (presumably) said "Once this happens, it's not an industry cooperative consorium deal anymore." I was simply pointing out that enforcement of the contract between the DVD Forum and the DVD implementors is no different from the implicit contract between you and the company that produced the DVD/tape. I was just saying that it was not unconstitutional in any way, not suggesting that you bootlegged.
Again, you would not so much be in trouble (though DVD is laced with patent upon patent, so you would be in trouble if you implemented it). The company whose product you RE'd would be in trouble. Sorry for the confusion.
Does anyone know if that (#*$*#ing) regional encoding scheme used in DVD movies is implmented in hardware, and if there is a way around it?
Here in Australia, we are part of some useless (ie, non US & non Europe) region, so we can't get many DVDs (although it does seem to have improved in the last couple of months)
I'd buy a DVD player, if I could play US movies on it.
A DVD recorder would be even better, of course.....
You want the Creative Labs Dxr2 drive, and a utility called remoteselector. Much more information is available at: dvd underground
Re:Regional Encoding
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
Yep, you can get around the region code, because it is usually implemented in the decoding card only. A little application called Zone Selector helps you around it.
Perhaps the interviewer was asking the wrong questions, but it doesn't sound like they have anything but big plans. All they key software seems to be being developed as part of other projects and they have a group of programmers just waiting to rubberband a Perl/Tk, or similar, wrapper around it all.
I don't think so. The MPEG implementations of Linux are just the public ones submitted at the MPEG comittees, and are just proof of concept ; some have tweaked them to get something useable, but it is more likely to segmentation fault or be sloooooow, than not. Linux is far behind the quality of Windows Players. The other problem is patents. I think Paul Volko is overly optimistic: they do apply to software, and yes, the MPEG contributors do want money for them. They have a whole company to manage the MPEG patent portfolio, and they claim royalties even per stream. For me this was a show-stopper when I considered contributing.
Volko says that the unlocking code was ripped 'almost verbatim' from a Windows DVD player. I assume that this is okay becasuse 1) he mentioned it and 2) it's just a plain ol' generic hardware unlocker that can only really be done one way (since it obviously wasn't written in perl). Or am I missing something? BTW: woohoo!
why regional encoding? copyrights
by
tuffy
·
· Score: 2
I'm surprised, but not displeased, to see that there are DVD players with modifiable regions (short of using a soldering iron). The only reason they exist, IIRC, is because movies may have different copyrights in different areas of the world.
From the producer's standpoint, different regions cost them more money because they have to produce seperate versions of the same product. So I'm sure they'd rather just produce one version if they could. Instead we wind up with discs that are "for sale in US or Canada only" or some such nonesense.
In short, I think this is more the work of the Big Bad Lawyers rather than the work of the Big Bad Producers. The moviemakers *do* want your money for their product, after all.
--
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Linux is always lag behind ...!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
If you browse thr' the/. archive, you'll find pattern like this : (1) The only reason why I keep Windows{200?,9?} is that I need to use * which is not available on Linux. (2) I can't get rid off of Windows{200?,9?} because I need to... (3) I have to setup a dual boot machine because I need to use Windows{200?,9?}... * -> {USB hardware, OCR software, Office suite, real games, Palm Pilot HotSync stuff, or any other new software/ software...} I've been using Linux for 2 years and I still come across these problems from time to time. I'm really frustrated. Please don't tell me this is so because the manufacture of so and so don't support Linux! Don't need to tell me something about Oracle, Borland, Adaptec... I also read/.
they didn't tell me it'd be /.'ed!
by
davek
·
· Score: 5
Well, its nice to be in the group and not be told that there's an interview. O well, I wouldn't have had much to say anyway, and I'm in France. Bummer.
Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.
One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).
Re:they didn't tell me it'd be /.'ed!
by
innerFire
·
· Score: 2
we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
Great! So I can already watch The Matrix on DVD!
UDF support in 2.3.17 (read only)
by
geirt
·
· Score: 2
This was written to the kernel list about a month ago:
The module has been tested by a diverse group for some months now, with no reports of meltdowns, so it's probably safe to include in the 2.2 source tree. It was included in the 2.3 tree in version 2.3.17.
I can say from observation that UDF use, in the form of DirectCD written CDRs, has become very widespread across businesses. Having at least read-only support in the Linux kernel would be a definite plus.
Unfortunately, write support will have to wait, as the write support in this driver doesn't work with CDR/CDRWs yet.
Dave Boynton
dave@trylinux.com
-----
Looks like UDF will be supported in 2.4.
--
RFC1925
Re:Maybe I'm Missing Something
by
Sontas
·
· Score: 2
You are right to a certain extent. We do have some "big plans". We will not, however, necessarily be depending on other people's code to produce the second phase program (software decoding support). We already have a IFO parser all but done. VOB handling code is underway. And we have DVD specs access, which will allow us to work on the DVD Navigation API while we are getting the licensing we need to distribute the program. So we have more than simply "big plans", I would say. We will be opening up a web site soon that will go into what we have and what we are working toward specifically. We've also been active in the Livid project mailing list and helping on a "community" level.
Note however that we may be approaching Arron Holtzman and Joachim Koenig about working out some kind of special license (non-GPL) so that we can do two things:
1) Contribute back any optimizations that we make to the codecs. 2) Be able to not publish the full version of the codecs which may end up haivng CSS code weaved into them.
This all remains to be seen, though. We havce a few other things to get finished up first, before we start getting into some serious work on the software playback codecs.
- Paul Volcko
Re:Why all the secrecy on DVD specs?
by
Fizgig
·
· Score: 2
It's not the government; it is an organization of corporations, which are not bound by the constitution (at least not to the extent that the government is).
The DVD Forum came up with the DVD Spec. They then sell it to companies under NDAs for quite a bit of money. But built into the NDA that you have to sign to see it is the requirement that you make your player play only one region and don't let people reverse engineer your software (it has to be hard). If either one of these fails, you are in breach of contract with some of the largest corporations on the planet and will be in some serious trouble. It's only by their good graces or because they don't care enough yet that they haven't gone after the guilty yet.
You would not be in any more trouble reverse engineering the stuff than you would REing any random program. It's the company which didn't obscure its program that gets in trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine had the offending chip in his DVD player replaced with one that would work with all regions.
So even if hardware region protection is implemented it ain't hard to get around it.
It would seem that way, but I remember my dad (a corporate lawyer) telling me the story about the guy who owned a taxi service and set up a corporation for every taxi cab so that if one made lots of damage, the most that could be sued for was the value of that one company, which was the value of the cab itself. Needless to say, he didn't get away with it. Dummy corporations set up for such purposes are illegal.
The only reason they exist, IIRC, is because movies may have different copyrights in different areas of the world.
Not true. Actually region coding exists due to the fact that movie studios want to independently control the timing of releases in different markets. They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever. With VCRs this used to be taken care of by the serendipitous (from their perspective) incompatibility between PAL and NTSC; now that that technical brokenness has been fixed, they have built such brokenness into the system deliberately.
They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever.
Note that a large part of the reason for different release dates is the cost of producing the films, and thus the reels of films shown in the US head overseas as theaters stop showing them. The upcoming digital methods of distribution and display may eliminate this expense and thus make simultaneous distribution possible, and region code less necessary.
I suppose one concern might be widescale pirating that occurs in some regions of the world, and thus the attempt to stop pirated DVDs flowing out of those regions. I doubt this would have much success, though, the sellers would just make US/Europe-encoded DVDs anyway.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
With autologon, scandisk disabled, and vncserver, I was able to get rid of the monitor and input devices on the Win98 box and control it with xvncviewer.
So basically, the Windows box is now a standalone DVD player and the Linux box can function as a TV and remote.
Not very practical for most folks, but it sure is interesting.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
The only reason it seems woefully short is that users don't accept the existance of commercial software on it. BeOS, which seems to have eclipsed Linux in 1/4th the time has a user base which is more accepting of commercial software so they're not woefully short. If you're willing to count commercial software, Linux becomes very competitive.
Perhaps that was a bad example. I wasn't saying you bootlegged anything. I was saying that there are a lot of similarities between the legal protections/punishments provided by copyright and those provided in the case of the DVD specifications.
In both cases, someone gets access to something under certain conditions (you get your tape/DVD under the condition that you don't share it; they get the DVD specs on the condition they don't share it). You (presumably) said "Once this happens, it's not an industry cooperative consorium deal anymore." I was simply pointing out that enforcement of the contract between the DVD Forum and the DVD implementors is no different from the implicit contract between you and the company that produced the DVD/tape. I was just saying that it was not unconstitutional in any way, not suggesting that you bootlegged.
Again, you would not so much be in trouble (though DVD is laced with patent upon patent, so you would be in trouble if you implemented it). The company whose product you RE'd would be in trouble. Sorry for the confusion.
Does anyone know if that (#*$*#ing) regional encoding scheme used in DVD movies is implmented in hardware, and if there is a way around it?
Here in Australia, we are part of some useless (ie, non US & non Europe) region, so we can't get many DVDs (although it does seem to have improved in the last couple of months)
I'd buy a DVD player, if I could play US movies on it.
A DVD recorder would be even better, of course.....
I don't think so. The MPEG implementations of Linux are just the public ones submitted at the MPEG comittees, and are just proof of concept ; some have tweaked them to get something useable, but it is more likely to segmentation fault or be sloooooow, than not. Linux is far behind the quality of Windows Players. The other problem is patents. I think Paul Volko is overly optimistic: they do apply to software, and yes, the MPEG contributors do want money for them. They have a whole company to manage the MPEG patent portfolio, and they claim royalties even per stream. For me this was a show-stopper when I considered contributing.
Volko says that the unlocking code was ripped 'almost verbatim' from a Windows DVD player. I assume that this is okay becasuse 1) he mentioned it and 2) it's just a plain ol' generic hardware unlocker that can only really be done one way (since it obviously wasn't written in perl).
Or am I missing something?
BTW: woohoo!
From the producer's standpoint, different regions cost them more money because they have to produce seperate versions of the same product. So I'm sure they'd rather just produce one version if they could. Instead we wind up with discs that are "for sale in US or Canada only" or some such nonesense.
In short, I think this is more the work of the Big Bad Lawyers rather than the work of the Big Bad Producers. The moviemakers *do* want your money for their product, after all.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
If you browse thr' the /. archive, you'll find pattern like this : (1) The only reason why I keep Windows{200?,9?} is that I need to use * which is not available on Linux. (2) I can't get rid off of Windows{200?,9?} because I need to ... (3) I have to setup a dual boot machine because I need to use Windows{200?,9?} ... * -> {USB hardware, OCR software, Office suite, real games, Palm Pilot HotSync stuff, or any other new software/ software ...} I've been using Linux for 2 years and I still come across these problems from time to time. I'm really frustrated. Please don't tell me this is so because the manufacture of so and so don't support Linux! Don't need to tell me something about Oracle, Borland, Adaptec ... I also read /.
Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.
One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.
And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).
Carpe Diem,
-Dave Klint
new Dream Theater Oct 26. Giddy!
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
------
From: Dave Boynton, dboynton@worldnet.att.net
Subject: UDF filesystem patch for 2.2.12
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 02:08:43 GMT
I've made a new UDF filesystem patch for kernel 2.2.12. You can get it at: http://trylinux.com/projects/udf /udf-latest.tar.gz (about 70k)
The module has been tested by a diverse group for some months now, with no reports of meltdowns, so it's probably safe to include in the 2.2 source tree. It was included in the 2.3 tree in version 2.3.17.
I can say from observation that UDF use, in the form of DirectCD written CDRs, has become very widespread across businesses. Having at least read-only support in the Linux kernel would be a definite plus.
Unfortunately, write support will have to wait, as the write support in this driver doesn't work with CDR/CDRWs yet.
Dave Boynton
dave@trylinux.com
-----
Looks like UDF will be supported in 2.4.
RFC1925
You are right to a certain extent. We do have some "big plans". We will not, however, necessarily be depending on other people's code to produce the second phase program (software decoding support). We already have a IFO parser all but done. VOB handling code is underway. And we have DVD specs access, which will allow us to work on the DVD Navigation API while we are getting the licensing we need to distribute the program. So we have more than simply "big plans", I would say. We will be opening up a web site soon that will go into what we have and what we are working toward specifically. We've also been active in the Livid project mailing list and helping on a "community" level.
Note however that we may be approaching Arron Holtzman and Joachim Koenig about working out some kind of special license (non-GPL) so that we can do two things:
1) Contribute back any optimizations that we make to the codecs.
2) Be able to not publish the full version of the codecs which may end up haivng CSS code weaved into them.
This all remains to be seen, though. We havce a few other things to get finished up first, before we start getting into some serious work on the software playback codecs.
- Paul Volcko
It's not the government; it is an organization of corporations, which are not bound by the constitution (at least not to the extent that the government is).
The DVD Forum came up with the DVD Spec. They then sell it to companies under NDAs for quite a bit of money. But built into the NDA that you have to sign to see it is the requirement that you make your player play only one region and don't let people reverse engineer your software (it has to be hard). If either one of these fails, you are in breach of contract with some of the largest corporations on the planet and will be in some serious trouble. It's only by their good graces or because they don't care enough yet that they haven't gone after the guilty yet.
You would not be in any more trouble reverse engineering the stuff than you would REing any random program. It's the company which didn't obscure its program that gets in trouble.