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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

How easy would it be to use libredrive, dd and ffmpeg to rip?

Probably pretty hard. It's not a transparent patch to the drive's normal read routines but a parallel low-level API. Then they wrap that in their own high-level userspace API libdriveio (which you'd have to patch dd to use).

And once you've pried the data out of the drive's hands you still have to decrypt it.

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=96988 https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=24312

Very easy but my understanding is you’d end up with an unplayable disc still because you need to perform decryption to get a file ffmpeg can play. That said makemkv does work on ISOs of discs made with a libredrive

I believe any DVD drive made in recent years won't support it. Some drives had bugs in their old firmware so that the drives can be used with makemkv, but it doesn't mean it is usual. They can fix the bugs. They can stop making problematic hardware. Even if you can find such a hardware, it might be more expensive than your CPU. Normally people won't invest much on it.

And, like what SGX is providing, if the film industry really want to stop pirating, they can. Then makemkv will be a history.

> if the film industry really want to stop pirating, they can.

I doubt that, if for nothing else the Analog Hole[0]. At some point in the chain, the video data has to be turned into usable information for a display panel and speakers.

They keep adding steps to the chain, moving the final step closer and closer to the end, but it is still possible to bypass. In the ultimate case, you could probe the display board directly and convert the raw panel voltages, but in practice there are many earlier opportunities.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

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