Tyler Durden leaves the fight club and writes: > Do you have a reference? I don't remember reading that SACD was encrypted. > What I DO remember is that the reason there's no standard SACD or DVD-A > digital interface is because the Industry wants that digital interface to be > encrypted.
The detailed technical specs are apparently secret, but an overview of the multi-layered SACD copy protection is at http://www.sacd.philips.com/b2b/downloads/content_protection.pdf. If you don't like PDFs, most of the same information is at http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdaudio/dvdaud_sacd.htm. Alan Clueless writes: > Furthermore, people have come to expect that they should be able to play > whatever disc shaped media in their computer. At some point there will > need to be a software based player. Both of the documents above specifically deny that software based players will be allowed. I get the impression that the decryption will always be done in hardware, and if a PC is ever able to play one of these gadgets, it will be a Palladium system or something similar that can be locked down. Steve Shear writes: > If you believe the article "Myths and Misconceptions about Hardware > Hacking," > http://www.cptwg.org/Assets/Presentations/ARDG/ARDGHardware_hack05-28-03.pdf > , recently posted to the Content Protection Technical Working Group, access > to affordable commercial technology for reverse engineering has given > hardware hackers the upper hand. That's mostly about how hardware hackers can use modern chips and custom PC boards without spending more than a few hundred dollars. Fine, but it's a long way from that to being able to pull an algorithm and/or device key out of a chip which has been designed to make that difficult.