Slashdot Mirror
Watching DVDs in Linux HOWTO
IceFox writes "Last week CSS Disk encryption was cracked. Soon after the data encryption was cracked. With some hagling I got everything working and was able to watch DVDs in Linux. Sound, Video, the works. I wrote up a how to for anyone else that cares to do it." Its not quite ready for prime time. No sound and vid at the same time. Update by roblimo: Jens Axboe sent a link to his page, which contains additional Linux/DVD info.
The Matrix DVD isn't buggy, rather the players themselves arn't up to spec (ie: the manufacturers cut features to make a shipdate, because "who will ever use that overlay feature?").
:).
If the disc were buggy all of the players would exibit the same problems. Seeing how one thing is broken on one player, while another is broken on another indicates (to me) the player is broken in these instances.
For what it's worth the Panasonic A-110 is one of the few players I've seen that play it properly.
I'm still impressed that they used every last byte that the disc could hold... all 4.3gigs
1) 2^^16 attack on the CSS cipher itself Requiring 6 known plaintext bytes
2) A 2^^17 attack on the key generation, that will yield a deluge of player keys in a matter of minutes ( such as the randum nubers ). read here
3) Finaly A third crack that will decrypt a DVD without even knowing a single player key. This attack is more complex (2^^24)but will give a valid key in less than 20 seconds on a decent machine.
In short the CSS system was poorly designed, and has now been thuroughly been demolished.
quite right that current dvd doesn't support hdtv resolutions. But it's just a scaling problem. DVD's are usually encoded at 480p (480x640 frames @ 30 fps). Highest HDTV is 1080x1920 progressive or about 19.3 Mbps or 2.4 MBps (Most broadcasts will be in 720p which is only 8.8 Mbps) By comparison, my 10x DVD-ROM does 13MBps.
tcboo
Unless DVD decoders get very cheap ($5-10) it's better to use the CPU to do it. For several reasons:
1- Take that $50 you'll spend on a decoder and put it towards a faster CPU. It'll not only let you do DVD with less of a strain on the system, it'll speed up everything else.
2- Software decoders can be free.
3- Software decoders can be upgraded.
4- Software decoders can be portable across platforms.
5- Hardware takes up space, even a single chip is precious in the land of tiny laptops.
The only reason hardware decoders exist now is because CPU's weren't *quite* able to keep up. Now they are.
Some things need to have special-purpose hardware, like 3D video cards. DVDs do not. The frame rate won't ever need to increase. The resolution will stay the same.
When will people realize that JUST because its always been done that way in the past means it CANNOT BE DONE DIFFERENTLY IN THE FUTURE.
The telephone obsoleted the telegraph. Many people lost their jobs, many telegraph companies lost their only source of money. Do we still lament their passing?
JUST BECAUSE the current distribution methods of media won't give the CURRENT POWERS their money in the future. doesn't mean that there won't be alternatives in the future.
So what if the era 100-million-dollar movie ends? So what if the era of MGM or Paramount or Disney as film companies ends? So what if the era of the railroads ended? So what if the era of the Telegraph ended? As long as there is demand, there will be a replacement. Its safe to say that there will always be a demand for entertainment.
``I propose that to save the critically important telegraph industry we must make it illegal to transmit voice electronically over any wire.''
Or how about:
``I propose that to save the critically important post office, we must make it illegal to transmit any message electronically over a wire domestically.''
``I propose that we immediately discount that new foolish idea that some legistlators are proposing, called 'copyright', as it will let tyrannical authors prevent bookmakers from making books.''
Or, what was that one about british candlemakers protesting about how the Sun was screwing up their business?
The future is different from the past, just because its the past doesn't make it better, doesn't make it the only way that works.
The original DVD patch was done by Andrew T. Veliath and this is the patch linked on the HOWTO page. While it only worked on ATAPI drives, his interface and structure was good and I decided to integrate this in the standard Linux kernel but in a bus independent way. Current 2.3 kernels contain this code and it works equally well on ATAPI as well as SCSI drives (which is an important point, IMO).
In summary, if you are running a recent 2.3 kernel you are all set and there is no need to patch your kernel. If you are on a 2.2 kernel, get the patch from my page to get support for both ATAPI and SCSI drives.
http://www.kernel.dk
I don't really care if you have to spend more money than you'd like to, to get a CD you want. That's life. Yes, major labels have hideously overpriced the cost of CDs, but it's still your choice whether or not to buy them. Look, I'm all for the MP3 format, and I love to see artists distribute their content over the internet. What I can't stand, however, is when people decide that it's okay for them to pirate music that wasn't distributed by it's creators for free.
It's theft, plain and simple. I know that everyone thinks of the industry as being the big bad guy, and maybe they are. That doesn't make it okay for you to steal from them though. If you do, then you're just as bad as they are. Just because you don't like a musician or a company doesn't make it okay for you to violate their right to intellectual property. They can charge whatever they damn-well like for their products.
Look, it's not like music/movies are something you HAVE to have. If you don't want to pay their price then vote with your feet: take you business elsewhere. But don't reduce yourself to the level of a theif by pirating their material. It's unacceptable in any media: music, movies, software, or whatever.
If pirating movies and music becomes a wide-spread practice (right now MP3s aren't quite as ubiquitous as they could be) then the movie and music industries will have to hike their rates for people who actually have a conscience. And if those people can't pay the price then said industry will be shut down. Period. If people aren't willing to pay for movie, then no one is going to spend 100 million on special effects to create it.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Oh by the way the Matrix has a differnt code that isn't int he source yet.
Here is the number:
{0x28, {0x53, 0xd4, 0xf7, 0xd9, 0x8f}};
or for the codeers:
struct player_key player_key = {0x28, {0x53, 0xd4, 0xf7, 0xd9, 0x8f}};
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Read the description in NTK of how the crypto on a DVD is organised: the whole disk is encrypted with a single random key, then the key is itself encrypted several times, once for each DVD manufacturer. Your DVD player will have only one of these manufacturer master keys built in, so the corresponding encrypted key needs to be on the disk for you to read it.
The nasty bit is this: the idea was that if a given key is leaked, they simply stop using it on newly pressed disks. Bang: the key in *your* brand of DVD player was leaked, so now neither you nor anyone else with a player from that manufacturer can play new disks. This threat has never been carried out.
Fortunately, they screwed up the crypto: master keys can be brute forced in a few days. Basically DVD locking is dead; they'd have to come up with a forward-and-backward incompatible "DVD Plus" format to rescue things now.
However, this is so far the industry's best effort at a universal copy-resistant format; as the tide turns our way, it might hopefully be their last.
--
Xenu loves you!
I accually have a player in the works that will be done by the end of next week. It works to the LinuxDVD API specs, so as soon as this is converted into the standard the player will be able to work :) Read above for the two companies that are releasing DVD hardware cards in December. Yes other companies need to too. HOPEFULLY they will use the API that is allready in place. I player is allready skinable etc. :) If any of you patition them or even inquire ask them to follow the API that is allready in place. standards standars!
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
There is no objective pricing of entertainment. If I say it is worth $2 to me, then who can argue with that?
The studios and me. That was my point. Bargaining works like this:
A) Widgets! Get your widgets right here! Only $100!
B) I'll pay $2
A) $50
B) $2
A) $25
B) $2
A) Screw you. I'll taking my widget and going home.
You removed the studios' ability to say the last part. It would be one thing if you said "I'm not willing to pay $18 for that album" and sucked it up and went without. But when you say "I'm not willing to pay $18 for that album; I'm stealing it instead", what incentive does the studio have to lower the price? Sure, a FEW people might buy it instead (you claim you would, but are you sure?), but most would not and they would lose more money (I suspect they could lower it some and gain more from people who abstain, not pirates).
When you say "It's worth $2 to me" that means you're willing to pay $2 and if it costs more you won't have it. It does not mean that you will give the person $2 for the item. A subtle difference, but consider. How much is fetchmail worth to me? I'd say $25, maybe a little more. Does that mean that's how much I pay for it? No. Likewise, the album/movie may be "worth $2" to you, but the studio has no evidence that you won't just steal it anyway, so they won't sell it for $2.
Does anyone just sit back and enjoy the hack anymore? It seems everyone wants to jump 20 steps ahead all the time. At least take a few seconds to give credit for the hack...
Here we have a person/group of people who complete a not so trivial task and the first thing people hit them with is, 'gee, is that all, it wont clean my room for me?'
At least give them a day to bask...
Or has the time come when none can rest and all must push for world domination by next tuesday at the latest?
Anyway, congrats to those who hacked...
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
You're way off :)
:)
The CSS stuff (which is where this breakthrough was) is NOT PATENTED
If they had PATENTED it, we would have had working (but illegal) stuff last year. Instead, they kept it a TRADE SECRET. That has no legal protection, but it means it took an extra 12 months or so to get free code which works.
For the player, no-one can legally make a FREE (as in Beer or as in Speech) player. You have to pay per-copy fees for at least some of the component technologies (AC3 comes to mind) in a player.
However, just because it is ILLEGAL to make a free player, doesn't mean no-one has
Anyway, the key breakthrough (CSS) means there's no major difference between "DVD Video on Linux" and "MPEG 2 on Linux", except a few silly add-on features. I can live without subtitles if I have to.
Let's face it. No matter how much we push the code, no matter how much we optimize the routines, no matter how fast our machine is, there is *no* way a software decoder, open source or not, will outperform & look better than a hardware decoder.
After we get the Linux-DVD project on the road to completion (now that CSS & Data encryption have been cracked, and a makeshift player has been put together -- way to go IceFox, a "snowball" effect is almost sure to start...) Within a few months, we should see quality (hopefully) GPL'ed players emerge. But there's something that really irks me. We need to concentrate on the manufacturers of hardware decoders. Creative has given somewhere between a very poor to slightly poor effort to bring drivers for it's DXR series of decoder cards to *NIX systems. They've opened up the SB Live drivers, but what of the DXRs? We need to e-mail, petition, press (not harass, just make our voices heard) to open up the source for the hardware decoder drivers. Many of you (including me and my DXR3) have a $70-$150 card in our computers that if we were to delete Windows, which some of us have, would become worthless to us. This is a shame -- and should be our next challenge to overcome.
Way to go on the software. Now we need to get the hardware.