On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 10:42:35AM +1030, Lane, Richard M wrote:
| > I doubt it. Their case won't hold water in any reasonable country,
| > and Australia is fairly lenient towards reverse-engineering as is.
| > And it's a lot easier to duplicate DVD's *without* decrypting them :-)
| >
| Sorry, had to step in on this one:
|
| (dons nomex suit) /RANT
|
| It is NOT easy to duplicate encrypted DVDs.
It is for a professional.
| You CAN'T do it with
| consumer grade equipment. Many people say "you just copy the encrypted
| bitstream from the DVD to a new DVD, and tada! bitwise perfect copy."
No and yes, respectively.
| This WILL NOT work, for the same reason (more or less) that Playstation
| CDs can't be pirated with consumer grade equipment without modifying
| the Playstation, or couldn't just copy the King's Quest III 5 1/4" floppy
| back in the 80's. An encrypted DVD stores the encryption keys in a
| special track, and that track can't be duplicated on consumer DVD readers
| or writers. I don't recall if it's because the DVD player will refuse to
| hand
| you a bitwise copy of the special track, or because the DVD recorder is
| unable to record the track, but the end result it that copying an encrypted
| DVD using a normal PC is a perfect bitwise copy of the encrypted DVD,
| with no decryption keys on the copy.
This is for two reasons:
- consumer DVD-Rs has the key area preburnt with zeroes, thus not
available for the key data
and - consumer DVD drives are supposed to refuse access to certain areas
of the disc until a key negotiation has occurred between the drive
and the player control system
A professional pirate will
- circumvent #1 by obtaining (or producing) the same type of media the
publisher will be using in their factory
- read the "protected" tracks anyway - as a first cut you could
probably hack an ordinary drive's track counter to be off-by-one;
a professional might just replace the whole controller
Once you've got that mastering is easy - DVD technology was specificly
designed to be easy to adapt from a CD pressing plant to make adoption
easy.
| DeCSS was originally written by some German Crackers (note the C) who
| posted their l337 code to haxor / warez sites with instructions on how to
| use it to copy DVDs onto VCDs. It was originally written for pirating, and
| only ran on Windows.
A rather bald assertion. DeCSS was written to facilitate playback, not
piracy. I've yet to see any evidence to the contrary.
I gather DeCSS will give you a cleartext .VOB file and there are things which
will play cleartext .VOBs, like Xmovie.
--
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/
I remind myself that for every one opportunity for smiling there are 20
things that make you gloomy... - Frank Williams
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