Decryption Keys For HD-DVD Found, Confirmed

kad77 writes "It appears that, despite skepticism, 'muslix64' was the real deal. Starting from a riddle posted on pastebin.com, members on the doom9 forum identified the Title key for the HD-DVD release 'Serenity.' Volume Unique Keys and Title keys for other discs followed within hours, confirming that software HD-DVD players, like any common program, store important run-time data in memory. Here's a link to decryption utility and sleuthing info in the original doom9 forum thread. The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

A simple answer

[DiamondGeezer (872237)]

The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?"

Lawyers. Lots of them.

Re:Even simpler

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

If I remember correctly they can only revoke keys for future movies. All movies released when the compromised player was cracked can still be decrypted.

Re:Even simpler

[spisska (796395)]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

Ahhh. But only the player key can be revoked, not the title key for discs already in the wild. They could use different keys on all subsequently pressed discs of the same title, but that doesn't affect the titles already cracked. And they can't expect to do a recall of cracked titles.

Or they could revoke the device key for the software player, which would mean the software player gets upgraded with a new key, and newer discs can be cracked using the exact same technique. Otherwise anyone selling software players would be faced with the massive liability of having sold something that doesn't work as advertised.

Since this technique relies on using the title and/or volume key and not the player key, it will not be so easy to fix through the device key revokation system that's a part of AACS.

Round one definitely goes to the good guys. And I don't see how it's anything but a matter of time before AACS is as completely broken as CSS is. Even with device key revokation, it's just a cat and mouse game with newer titles and newer devices. And how will the MPAA and the device manufacturers react when people who pay out the nose for players and films are no longer able to use them?

No more software players?

[I'm Don Giovanni (598558)]

They could take a more drastic approach, and simply revoke the keys to all software players, since software players are too easy to extract keys from. The already cracked discs would still be available for piracy, but further discs wouldn't be playable on anything but hardware. That would definitely suck, and would render the "victory" as Pyrrhic.

Sit down, boy

[Rix (54095)]

You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about. No matter how well coded, any information used by a program is available to someone determined to extract it.

Who cares about existing titles?

[Overzeetop (214511)]

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Existing titles are chump change. Just make the next pressing with the new key. The flurry seems to center around release dates anyway, so no future discs will decode on the compromised player. They don't want to make it impossible, they simply want to make it difficult. Having to keep a key database updated is a pain in the ass. I'd go as far as to say that they don't care about an isolated crack - they'll "fix" it and go on, with updates from time to time. This is a s/w player, not a hardware player, correct? Just require an update.

The point is that they will make this about Piracy, and that its the Pirate's fault that you have to go download an update to get your machine to work. Not their fault (Say "Not my fault" in David Spade's voice an you'll get the idea). Most consumers will believe the newsvertisement they see on ther local station that blames those evil pirates for their suffering. If it weren't for the pirates, their stuff would work. Which can easily be spun at truth - pirates cracked the system, system must be safe or poor artists children will starve, so we had to change the system - all pirates fault. Your mother would fall for that, and you know it.

Right and wrong is irrelevant - it's who takes the blame for the mess that matters, and the industry has a lot of PR money to make sure the finger points at someone else.

Re:Who cares about existing titles?

[Kjella (173770)]

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Existing titles are chump change. Just make the next pressing with the new key. The flurry seems to center around release dates anyway, so no future discs will decode on the compromised player.

Yeah, right. Take a look at the prices for DVD seasons of for example Babylon 5 or Star Trek... they're incredibly expensive even though they're many years old. How much does Disney classics go for again? Besides, it's probably not like pirates are going to announce their player keys, they'll likely just release the titles.

The sad thing is that it'll work for release groups having decryption keys and pirates getting decrypted versions, while it probably won't work for average consumers who wants to do fair use like back-ups, format shift, non-HDCP screens and so on, because they don't have a disc from the same batch.

Re:Even simpler

[DamnStupidElf (649844)]

Revoke the key. It will happen each time.

Like I posted last time this crack was on slashdot, it's futile to revoke a key. Every movie released to HD-DVD before the key is revoked will still be readable with the known key, and within a few days or weeks another software key will be found to read all the newer movies. Additionally, true pirates who recover the key of a particular player are able to keep their discovery secret by not publishing the key, and they will always be able to rip new HD-DVD movies. There's no way to watermark movies based on the player key, because the entire stream must be encrypted with a single master key that the player key decrypts. There's no way for the media companies to discover which keys have been secretly compromised, even when movies are being released on the Internet.

In the best case, AACS will be fundamentally broken because of some oversight and all the player keys will be compromised, making key revocation laughable.

Re:Even simpler

[Tony Hoyle (11698)]

You can - all the HDDVD and BluRay players have internet connectivity. They can and do download blacklists in 'firmware updates'. Such updates are also pressed into future disks - so you can't even get away with never connecting the player. These can revoke both disk and hardware keys, so you'd have to replace your copy of serenity, or even potentially your TV if the keys for that got revoked.

The only question is whether they have the guts to do it.

Fantasy Land

[gravesb (967413)]

By admitting DRM is useless and treating customers like clients instead of criminals? Only in my mind, only in my mind....

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[HTH NE1 (675604)]

Many "customers" act as criminals then bitch and moan when they're being treated as such.

Only because exercising fair use is acting like a criminal. Except its only acting; it isn't being.

The actions of a criminal can also be the actions of a law-abiding citizen legally exercising his rights. It is to what ends the acts are performed that (are supposed to) define them as criminal.

I can swing my fists in the air as long as I like as long as I don't hit your nose. It's bad laws like the DMCA that would make swinging my fists in the privacy of my single-occupancy home a crime.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[The Master Control P (655590)]

"What is needed is a DRM that is advanced enough to be flexible enough to allow all "fair use" while curtailing piracy."

DRM will never be this advanced, because this proposal is fundamentally impossible, because it implies logically inconsistent outcomes. Either I can copy no part of the video for any reason, or I can copy some part of the video (no matter how small) for any reason. If I can copy any part, even screenshot by screenshot, for any reason, I can re-assemble it outside the player and the DRM is therefore useless. If I can't, fair use is violated.

DRM, in all it's manifold and perverted forms, can go to hell.

Re:Too many customers ARE 'criminals' though

[wolrahnaes (632574)]

But please do NOT pretend that DRM is broken primarily for "fair use".

I would argue that the majority of users breaking DRM are doing so exactly for fair use. More often than not, there's no reason for a pirate to break the DRM on a retail DVD because that work has already been done. Within mere hours of the discs arriving at stores (generally a few days before the official launch) and occasionally weeks or months earlier (see Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story) one person has ripped the DVD and released it in to the wild. That's all it takes. Once there is a raw DVD copy floating around, the DRM never has to be broken for piracy again. Because of this, DRM can't even stop casual piracy. The only people a broken DRM scheme has left to get in the way of are those who are trying to legitimately make fair use copies.

Like others in this discussion, I have a homebrew VoD system set up in my apartment. A media server with a few terabytes of hard drive space and a trio of TV tuners (two analog for cable and one OTA HD) stores all of my movies and every episode of my favorite TV shows. Thanks to this, my roommates and I have point-and-click access to all of those videos from every computer, Xbox, and Xbox 360 in the apartment. It's very convenient and I never have to worry about a scratched disc or missing a single episode. Thanks to DRM + the DMCA, every single movie on the server is technically illegal even though I can point at the shelf where the DVDs sit gathering dust.

There are commercial hard drive based DVD library devices, but they're overpriced (in to the thousands of dollars for a mere terabyte last time I checked) and nowhere near as compatible as my solution. The one I looked at would only stream to proprietary set-top boxes and even now I'd wager only possibly the Xbox 360 out of my current line up would be compatible with any similar products on the market now (due to its support for streaming DRM). None would support streaming to my modified Xbox and certainly not to any of my computers.

I would say the home media server is a substantial example of fair use which is legally blocked by DRM+DMCA issues. One like I have is trivial to set up (Myth + Linux + Samba or XP/Vista MCE) and works with a number of clients (I intend to test using my DS as a client once I get the adapter card which enables homebrew and I've already used a PSP as a client in the past). Everyone I know who's seen my setup wants to clone it and if it weren't for the legal issues I'm sure the market would be flooded with such devices.

"now how will the industry respond?"

[gerf (532474)]

"Hello, Doom9.com's ISP? Yes, this is Microsoft. We're auditing your sofware licenses."

"Hello, Doom9.com's registrar? You're being charged with violating the DMCA. Pretty much all of it."

"Hello, little tiny country? This is the MPAA, and as official representitives of the US government, we're asking you to hand over all people involved in this post on Doom9.com's forum. If you fail to respond, we'll enact sanctions on your country and drive you into the dark ages. Just look at North Korea for an example.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[MostAwesomeDude (980382)]

Um, as The Pirate Bay has demonstrated already, there are three wrong with your supposition. First off, ICANN does not and will not revoke domain names at the behest of the government. As long as Doom9 has backbone (and this hasn't been their first time in this type of situation), they're not gonna crumple.

The second thing is that they might not be located in the USA. The whois dossier shows that the domain was registered by (anonymous) proxy, and it's entirely possible that he's not American. If his servers are physically located outside of the USA, then he can't be legally threatened by civil suits, and he's not subject to DMCA. (However, this is a hypothetical, and since he refuses to host DeCSS, it is my guess that he is somewhere in the USA.)

The third thing is that the website is http://www.doom9.org/ [doom9.org] , not doom9.com.

Re:"now how will the industry respond?"

[cdrudge (68377)]

Doom9.com: "Hello Microsoft. We are a domain squatter. We have no idea what you are talking about. Besides. We run Linux."

Microsoft: "Crap. We sued the wrong company. Refile for doom9.NET"

Doom9.net: "Go fly a kite. We run Linux as well so you have no authorization to do an 'audit'. And go fuck yourself with the DMCA. US laws don't apply in England."

Microsoft: "Shit. Wait. Why the hell do we care if HD DVD are cracked. That's the MPAA's problem."

Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?''

I think at least the Blu-Ray camp will switch on their intergalactic megaphones and tout how Blu-Ray was superior all along. This whole format war is childish enough for that.

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[pyite (140350)]

You are correct, sir. The attack vector is the same, keys being exposed in insecure memory in the decoder/player. The encryption of AACS itself is unlikely to be cracked as it's AES, and AES is very nifty and well studied. Even if the key searching approach fails, there *are* possibilities that some sort of attacks could be waged on the AES implementation which might be vulnerable. (For instance, I wrote AES for MATLAB. It's highly likely that my implementation could be exploited for various reasons, such as cache timing attacks.)

Re:Blu-Ray Rules Supreme!

[onemorechip (816444)]

I'll say your nom de plume is appropriate. There are two ways to reconcile these positions logically. One is that it is not the same Slashdotters making both claims (we have diversity of opinion here, in case you failed to notice). The other way is that the "competition" the first claim refers to is between corporations, not between formats. The former fuels markets, the latter fragments them. It's true that the latter is a consequence of the former, but it is not an inevitable consequence. For instance, nearly all books published in English today have the binding on the left side, even though there are many publishers competing for your cash.

We have a Winner...

[dalmiroy2k (768278)]

You have Pr0n, cheaper hardware and blank media than Blu-ray and now you can "backup" movies, HD-DVD will be the winner of the HD format war, at least here in Argentina, Brazil or other developing countrys where piracy reigns...

The crypto in HD-DVD reveals the key

[TechyImmigrant (175943)]

I took a look at the spec for the HD-DVD encryption. The data is encrypted with AES-128 in CBC mode. The spec states clearly that the IV is a fixed constant. CBC required the IV to no only be unique, but also random. Not making it unique and random leads to a leak of key material. I assume that this is the weakness through which the keys are being extracted.

So rejoice. The HD-DVD media keys will be free.

Wait!!!

[sulli (195030)]

Don't release the crack until after the standard is settled! Now all the studios will go Blu-Ray only.

The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Opportunist (166417)]

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.

The point is to create as much damage as possible, so the industry learns that the only one hurt by DRM are they themselves. Revoked keys mean more work, more expense, more hassle and dissatisfied customers who have to jump the hoops. This will in turn create more awareness for DRM and the problems it creates.

We have to teach the studios that DRM is a failure. That it only generates hassle and problems for their paying customer and is no barriere or even a deterrent for the pirates. For this, the customer has to be the one hurt, too. Learn the easy or the hard way, learn about DRM by investigating or by having your tools stop working.

Yes, that's not the usual gentle way of teaching. But appearantly some people don't learn 'fore it starts to hurt.

Re:The response will be the dumping of HDDVD.

[Iphtashu Fitz (263795)]

Quite simple. The content industry will simply dump the format, after all, there's an alternative. Now it's high time to show that BluRay is just as "consumer friendly" and break it for good, so there is no alternative left, and if the studios want to get their content to the customer, they have to accept that DRM is useless in their strife to protect their rights.

Except for the fact that HD-DVD is cheaper for the consumer, and also has the backing of the porn industry since Sony is prohibiting porn on Blu-Ray. So consumers will continue to buy HD-DVD players to watch their porn in HD and Blu-Ray usage will continue to flounder. Sales of mainstream titles on Blu-Ray will do poorly and the movie studios won't make any money. They'll either have to offer titles on HD-DVD or give up on HD sales altogether. On top of that, it's only a matter of time before Blu-Ray protection is cracked as well. IIRC, the Blu-Ray encryption is similar to HD-DVE encryption, so it shouldn't be all that difficult.

Industry response?

[Anonymous Brave Guy (457657)]

The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?

It will send in a few lawyers. After a while, they will realise that their impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things: the DRM will continue to deter casual copying to some extent, but will continue to be impotent in preventing anyone determined to make a copy and willing to spend a little time on the 'net to find out how (or download a pre-ripped version).

Meanwhile, genuine customers will get seriously annoyed at the fact that DRM in HD-world has now moved beyond a minor inconvenience or ethical question as it was with things like DVDs, and into the realms of seriously impeding their enjoyment of the product they have legally purchased. A consumer backlash will result, with the effect that DRM becomes a "dirty word" 2-3 years from now, and distributors drop heavily-encumbered formats and go back to what works: a mostly hands-off scheme that's enough to deter casual copying by schoolkids but nothing that risks seriously impacting the marketability of their merchandise.

On the same sort of time scales, on-line distribution will reach a critical mass, and the movie distributors will adopt a second, parallel strategy where cheap, legal, unencumbered downloads are the norm. They will make their profit from on-line users through many small incomes, rather than the larger one-offs represented by (HD-)DVD purchases today. This will render illegal distribution channels mostly irrelevant, and the damage due to illegal copying will revert to being low-level noise as it mostly was before they started their current crusade anyway.

Hey, it's a new year and everyone else is making crystal ball predictions. Can't I have mine, too? :-)

Again, this is NOT a crack!

[KonoWatakushi (910213)]

New disks can be pressed with new keys, and the compromised software player will have it's key revoked. As such, this is not a generally useful solution. AACS remains secure, and at best, we may see individual keys available for certain pressings of certain discs. This approach will never provide general playback as DeCSS does.

However, it is my understanding that the decryption process can be done by the TPM; once this is supported, the problem will be much more difficult. Make no mistake, the battle has only just begun. Before long, software based attacks may be rendered impossible.

Another version of serenity?

[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

Damn! I think there must be at least 3 different "scene releases" of Serenity in various flavors of high-def by now (1080i mpeg2 cropped to 16:9, 1080i mpeg2 OAR, 1080i h264 and 25fps OAR) So now there will yet another version floating around the net soon. These greedy pirates, always double-dipping or worse to try and get people to download the same movie multiple times!

/. paradise

[by Anonymous Coward]

1. Porn goes for HD-DVD
2. HD-DVD encryption is broken
3. The Pirate Bay will buy a country

Put them together and you have pirated porn in HD. Note to self: add KY Jelly and a pack of kleenex to the shopping list.

When will tech people starting getting

[zappepcs (820751)]

comedy awards? This is hilarious. Spending all that money on DRM, implementing new media, only to have the encryption cracked before launch day (practically) must be like trying to nail jello to the wall using $100,000 nails. (Has Mythbusters tried nailing jello to a wall yet?)

The real question is not how they will respond, but when will they learn?

youtube demo removed

[1 a bee (817783)]

muslix64's youtube demo [youtube.com] linked from the original post has since been removed. Instead the page seems to claim that the content of his video is somehow owned by Warner Bros.:

This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. because its content was used without permission.

Sad, but funny...

Re:youtube demo removed

[Yonder Way (603108)]

Maybe so, but it's still available on google [google.com].

the lesson here...

[buhatkj (712163)]

is never underestimate a hardcore geek with a little equipment and a decent block of vacation time....

people have been xeroxing books for like 40 years and nobody ever made such a stink as the mpaa and riaa have. their whole thing is so wrongheaded, if they would spend all those legal fees and lawyer salaries on hiring better directors/writers/actors their profits would skyrocket. its not piracy that loses them profits, it's SHITTY PRODUCTS.

Analog Hole

[alexgieg (948359)]

Even if they one day develop a perfect DRM scheme full of unbreakable secure paths, it won't be possible to avoid someone simply removing the actual LCD screen, wiring the signals instructing which pixels should turn on and off to a 3rd party device, and recording the unencrypted content in raw format.

No piracy is being stopped by these means. They're and will always be utterly useless.

Digital Eyeballs

[Cassini2 (956052)]

Obviously, the only solution to the Analog hole is Digital Eyeballs. Everyone needs to have their eyes replaced with suitably DRM encumbered devices that are uncrackable. Then the high definition TV can be fed directly to your brain, the connection will be secure, and the MPAA will be rich!!!

Hash information

[Ougarou (976289)]

For when any of these services get killed, let the record state that:
MD5(BackupHDDVD.zip)= 484a73b61fb795d84e11d72614f77db0
SHA1(BackupHDDVD .zip)= c9f28f76ff4f1a8bfe74fa963466e8483da95eff
SHA512(B ackupHDDVD.zip)= 661a12808e64ec516b1eb9e493bf5de4a08223f2ee4258735d aa6a382a1d2e1fbe4b732bebd4133e5af0d968c0904d310f73 40e63edab7b69e1948b08
3dd2617
ED2K(BackupHDDVD.z ip)= 4860e9248663d52dc47bfc98d61ec6d7
GNUNET(BackupHDD VD.zip)= COD1504ECJM52QOUN7I97FQTSIG848VITP15GSQTL9L3GAGT5O FRSIRJ5FLT84PUBBODIQ60I16J23RJ83J3TMLNMQF1II5GGFEI C5O.COTARKV5PLT8MFC6E
BDF83IMEJI74A3H0QNTGMEGDS6P PO6AEFF75S439R2T731ODI37MP0HM3TQ27266N6FMK4PS8SDLC KNE3UIPD8

This talk is all fine and well, but, , ,

[Slugster (635830)]

If I can't get the crack printed as a Perl script on a T-shirt, I ain't interested.
~

Sesame open ..

[AftanGustur (7715)]

1828B68D292D2EA1E9EEA1C7044DC864FDBC3EB6=12 Monkeys |V|MM/DD/YY| 2662C05B5238B0C50BD1BDF693223712
1BAB7EEBB20C5425F5911E0272F07DD8F7208747=Aeon Flux |V|MM/DD/YY| A5F1A71839B666A68B1138B1DDDDEBAB
4ACABE525F5CBF77DAA43EA2B83E04918D5FA6D4=Apollo 13 |V|MM/DD/YY| 8BA9C422F93C9B4B4247814530B29C48
B9A62093767C0E7CB2BF16447A52E864A45FE50D=Batman Begins |V|MM/DD/YY| 423C48E5ABB185FC7FB8DB2BF764BEB0
A236F74A67CC51270E328F94BC6B4D905A628F9F=Casino |V|MM/DD/YY| A1DC17F6FA052A4BB4A0D66A7C49DBD9
4DF295764864556F3B44B71C0B8828DB80D84CA0=Chronicle s of Riddick |V|01/02/07| 69197293FCEF6F0ADE4BD33C4B1F132E
E34FBD5B8ABDC5312B38028002865BB3530AE3CE=Enter the Dragon |V|MM/DD/YY| 15C7F34076AED16E75637DC3BFDE84F8
419D740F2288CEE1EEB60613DAD9D74D7B63203B=Equilibri um (Jap) |V|MM/DD/YY| 343CE9EE7DCB4018AA064BA09FF19B6F
A6EF2686A417863FEC63D1F7824F9406DEEB5ACC=Fear & Loathing Las V |V|MM/DD/YY| 246D84CBD2B6F747B6962B53BE026BF2
0E75082678AAD5CD4410A28A662D6832D21EB325=King Kong |V|09/18/06| 802F78B1B20D1183638D84E1A96D6EDD
EBC08E19B2059140DFF133E2B953D3A1538D7669=Miami Vice |V|MM/DD/YY| 3CB25E9C23BED3A496D049B9FCD0915B
EDEA3051F5802CB7FF80A24DFE7C720705D36A0F=Mission: Impossible |V|MM/DD/YY| 10CA125A572A96AE6EB74F6574CCC24D
1DBFD499BC05FB33F14FB76BBDD847B79B190AEA=Mission: Impossible 2 |V|MM/DD/YY| 8FD8341028A8A300AA16D7F8CCAB7E89
AF4BC7D6A55B08E6175204CABE862ECBB33B1DED=Mission: Impossible 3 |V|MM/DD/YY| 11D6A8CD59494EF3D4EC4E9002E902F9
A85B0043201474AC56794EA4AAE2C35577752FB3=The Mummy |V|MM/DD/YY| D6984C6B80D56F96CAE369474345E2B9
EB7A44A88AE2AF4B14C0B69B5DD5C621DE988593=Pitch Black |V|MM/DD/YY| 9D82A55BF2DAC3995AD24B40B802D71F
BA3C0208848EA13383F34E9E5BB95BDF0D89F1C8=Red Dragon |V|MM/DD/YY| 80596E6D9A94D2A3FDB094B9BA2D0A0A
C8A57242AF4CB5C0D7848BDA10821F984DC656E0=Serenity |V|MM/DD/YY| D075568AE6BB0B3F85446927B3794C28
17C8312A7BEA25A08606F118AD265FD657161D0D=SuperMan Returns |V|MM/DD/YY| EC2EC7F847F6D304B3C26F121CA578DA
87A660A656EDD1E07F66DB1A7DE594028A9587E2=V for Vendetta |V|00/00/00| AE196597E6A87A04AE6A24655990A4A6
B32592B86E782DBAEB4801FC1CD1B64CB3FF94A3=World Trade Center |V|01/13/07| DA41B36D90C25E533EE84A307EB2D929

Re:Blu-Ray?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Who needs Blu-Ray anyway?

That format has killed itself by Sony's arrogant attitude. History has shown that locked-in, porn-shy formats always loose.

HDCP is the biggest crime in consumer history yet, let's hope this development kills it before it really takes of. For me there are two choices:

1) HD content works with my current and future hardware setup
2) No HD content for me

It's about time those media companies learn what they are producing their precious content for.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[gnasher719 (869701)]

'' HDCP is the biggest crime in consumer history yet, let's hope this development kills it before it really takes of. ''

Every time I read a rant about HDCP, I conclude that customers (and content providers as well) have not the slightest clue what HDCP does.

At some point, after all the decryption, decoding, filtering and whatever else is done, your computer must send a signal to the monitor, which the monitor then translates into an image that you can see. This signal usually comes out of the DVI connector in your computer, goes into a cable, which feeds into the monitor or TV. Our paranoid friends at the MPAA or whatever abbreviation it is are afraid that you could catch the signal coming out of the video card, and record it.

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk. Well, I can't and no normal consumer can. There are people who could build stuff that could do it, but those people are probably happily building graphics cards for NVidia and ATI, or building DVD players.

Still, that signal had to be encrypted. So you have a chip just before the DVI chip (or integrated into it), and another chip in your TV, and they can negotiate to decide on a key for a cipher stream, and use that cipher stream to encrypt the signal on one end and decrypt it on the other end. Which means you can't record the signal coming out of your computer and turn it into a DVD. However, this has nothing to do with DRM whatsoever. Once this encryption is turned on, it stays turned on until the computer or the monitor are turned off. So if you read slashdot after watching a DVD, everything you see on the screen has gone through encryption and decryption. Doesn't matter, because you couldn't read the signal from the cable anyway.

Where the real effort is: First, the graphics driver has to check constantly that encryption works properly. That is not to make sure you don't steal the video signal (as long as encryption is turned on, you can't, and encryption doesn't turn itself off), it is because if the video card and monitor run out of sync then you will see nothing but snow on the monitor, and that makes for a very very unhappy customer. Second, all the commands from the OS to the driver are encrypted, and status reported by the driver is encrypted as well. Otherwise, a hacker could just pretend to be the OS and tell the graphics card to turn encryption off - and that's it! No, most of the work is not the encryption, but to make sure that the OS always knows whether encryption is turned on or off. And third, a DVD can request that high resolution is only used with encryption, so if the HDCP chip isn't there, the image is scaled down to lower resolution.

All in all, the whole HDCP stuff is complete nonsense. It prevents an attack from thieves in a place where you wouldn't attack. It costs money to add and implement. It doesn't hurt you as a consumer, except that you have to pay for the damned chips. It creates work for device driver writers. It doesn't protect contents. Anyone who can record 200 MB per second from a DVI output has invested some serious money, and a little bit more money will allow you to break into a monitor and get the signal from there.

Executive summary: If you can't record a signal coming from the DVI cable, HDCP doesn't matter. If you can record a signal coming from the DVI cable, HDCP doesn't matter much either.

It does hurt the consumer

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

What about the early adopters, who bought high-end video cards without HDCP, or very nice HDTVs, also witohut HDCP? They now have to pray that somebody (Sony?) sees the light and doesn't trip the "artificially cripple old HDTVs" flag.

So, because the MPAA is afraid of an attack that isn't feasable, and may never be, they are forcing early to buy new hardware (for no good reason). I can't help but wonder if this wasn't a simple money grab -- force everyone to upgrade so they pay you twice for the same hardware.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[baadger (764884)]

Truth is, you can't. You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk

Yes, surely you can. For a start it's approximately 30 frames a second (it's 60 fields a second). That gives you a stream of:

(1920 * 1080 * 12 * 30) / (1024*1024) = ~ 712 Mib/s (megabits per second) or
about 89 MiB/s.

I would have though an array of high speed reasonably standard disk drives could handle that quite easily, after all consumer SATA drives have a theoretical 1.5 Gib/s interface.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Mad Merlin (837387)]

I would have though an array of high speed reasonably standard disk drives could handle that quite easily, after all consumer SATA drives have a theoretical 1.5 Gib/s interface.

More like 3.0 Gib/s (SATA2), but either way, it doesn't matter, modern consumer hard drives can't write faster than ~40M/sec. But if you put 2 or 3 of those consumer drives in RAID 0, you shouldn't have much trouble at all writing 89M/s, especially if you compress the signal before dumping it to disk. In a couple years it'll be even easier.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[grimwell (141031)]

Aye, my MythTV backend with the disk dump has two 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives [newegg.com] in a RAID 0 array. The frontend has three HDTV capture cards(two HD-5500 [pchdtv.com] & one HD-3000). A Lowly 100mbps full-duplex network link between the two boxes.

I'm able to record three HD streams at once via nfs(nfs ver3, ver4 cause kernel panic under that load). Playback of one of the three streams while it is being recorded isn't do-able but recording two and watching an earlier(yet to be transcoded) one all at the same time works.

An hour of 1080i is a little shy of 8.5GB. The network link is the bottleneck in my setup, the disk array handles the task without a problem.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[tjansen (2845)]

Actually you can already buy DVI capturing cards capable of recoding 1600x1200x60:
http://www.fi-llc.com/boards/Products/AccuStream17 0.php [fi-llc.com]
Real-time recoding of HDTV videos is not that far away on consumer PCs either. I doubt that it would be a problem in 5 years.

So if there was no HDCP, and there was no way to get the compressed signal, capturing the data would become a viable option.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Fordiman (689627)]

Unfortunately, dismissing the porn industry is what killed the technically superior Betamax. Without it, all they have is the rabid PS3 fans to bolster their film sales - and that's only if the gamers want to take a minute to watch a movie.

Re:Blu-Ray?

[Jugalator (259273)]

Has the same thing been done for Blu-Ray yet? I would like to see DRM on both systems being shown as being useless.

I agree, although it would be more amusing to me if Blu-ray DRM was broken with various key extraction algorithms in about 6 months or so, for it to reach the market better and give them less hope to just change details in the standard as a worst case scenario. :-) Makes me wonder if it's possible they'll do this with HD-DVD, or if it has reached critical mass alraedy, so to speak.

Re:

[ceejayoz (567949)]

Assuming they're a) in the US and b) not smart enough to cover their tracks, sure.

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Wonko the Sane (25252)]

Not every use of a copyrighted work is fair. BackupHDDVD is just as useful to pirates.

or to people who have monitors capable of displaying full resolution HD content, but are not permitted to because of a lack of HDCP

or people who want to watch movies they bought on their mythtv system

or people who like to buy movies and watch them, but don't run windows

Re:The fair use crowd?

[Opportunist (166417)]

And guns are just as useful to criminals as they are to law enforcement units and law abiding people protecting their home.

Re:Goodbye Software players

[flyingfsck (986395)]

No software - so how are you going to display the DVD - graph paper and a pencil? That may take a while.