about-electronics.eu

ARS Technica: The first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie has appeared on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.

This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64.

The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD and was released in a manner designed to put the onus of cracking on the user, not the software.

To extract an unencrypted copy of the HD DVD source material required obtaining that disc’s volume or title key separately, which the software did not do. However, a key was later released on the Internet, and a method for extracting further keys is allegedly available as well.

Additional sources: HDTV Blogger

read more

Playfuls:”A hacker which goes by the name of Muslix64 claims on a forum that his “saga’ of breaking the AACS protection (considered unbreakable) only lasted 8 days..”

“The implications of this already-tested bypass-method are numerous, but perhaps the most important are linked to the HD DVD vs. Blu Ray battle. This could mean that Sony’s investment in PS3 (with the famous Blu Ray optical drive attached) will become the company’s biggest blunder, since consumers will likely prefer HD DVD instead of the Blu Ray. But that could also mean that major movie studios (who are interested in keeping their intellectual property protected) will either go towards Blu Ray (despite customers’ preferences, of course…) or they will make their products even more expensive, since money invested in new DRM mechanisms need to be recovered…”
More at Playfuls.com

read more