Cryptography in Home Entertainment (2004)
mathweb.ucsd.edu
mathweb.ucsd.edu
You might have noticed that streaming is getting worse (more expensive, less selection, more ads, more fragmentation). For me, they crossed a breaking point, where I decided I'd just find something more convenient.
So, I went down to the local record store, where they have 10,000s of DVDs and Blu Rays in stock; many for $1 (DVD), $2 (BluRay), most under $5-10, and a few gems for $20-30. The prices are for a mix of new and used DVDs; some new DVDs are over-printed, and cost $1.
Problem half-solved. I looked around to figure out how to play these anachronistic shiny disks on my TV, and eventually settled on a USB BluRay RW drive (I guess you can get rewritable BluRays!)
I never figured out how you're supposed to actually use that drive to play movies. Instead, there's DeCSS from the article, then something comparable for BluRay. For the "easy" decryption, you end up downloading per-disk decryption keys for every disk ever printed.
For the more advanced stuff, they have this giant Java Rube Goldberg machine that xors glitches into the video stream. This gets applied at the factory, and then (on some hardware I guess you can purchase?) again via some complicated JVM stack that was originally meant to just render the scene selection menu.
[spoiler alert]
The easiest way to play those BluRays back is to just download the output of the Rube Goldberg machine. At some point the industry realized that scheme was dumb, so there's a finite set of glitch masks. The whole dataset for all BluRays that will ever be produced with this scheme is a few GB.
You might think that when I say "play", I mean "transcode + pirate", but it turns out that's not particularly practical. BluRays are multiple GB, and already compressed with codecs that are competitive with modern ones, so they don't shrink down like DVDs unless you're willing to lose a lot of quality.
So, yes, we have a growing collection of physical media. I target 20-30 movies / $100 when I go to the store. It's grand.
It used to be quite hard to get an actually actually unmodified disc image.
A "good" remux is actually the highest quality movie release available, usually, if you don't care about file size. A good remux will combine all the best parts of every possible release into one super-file. For one movie, you could have the best video quality be on a French UHD Blu-ray, the best audio quality from a different source, subtitles aggregated from various international releases and streaming platforms (and filtered/deduped for quality), chapter titles taken from an old DVD, and all available commentary tracks collected. Rarely you might even see a hybrid release where multiple streams are spliced together to fix some problem or another in one of them. You can look for releases by the CINEPHILES p2p group for gold standard examples, they get distributed fairly widely so you can probably find some.
To answer what you asked about extra audio tracks specifically (outside of full disc images)--usually non-English dubs are considered bloat and aren't distributed. Commentary tracks are kept. Audio description is a mixed bag, good groups will keep it.
VC-1, H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC)
Also, the studio paid a professional to peep at all the inter-frame pixels and turn the knobs right when they encoded the bluray. I might be able to get a perceptually lossless rip that's 25-50% smaller than the original, but it's just not worth my time.
The only downside is that I've noticed that the used DVD sections are definitely getting smaller. I guess fewer people are donating their collections these days.
I've bought a couple of DVD sets from Amazon, used, but the prices there aren't so competitive. Still it's nice to have physical media, with real/original soundtracks.
buy a bd player? i don't know why you would settle on a usb rw drive when you could just have a box that plugs in via HDMI and works
At some point nobody will make bd players any more. Several big companies have already stopped production.
Then you would have a useless BluRay collection after your own player stops working.
The solution is of course to rip off the BluRay discs as soon as you buy them. Then you can have a higher-quality playback on a PC (due to much faster random access and sequential access on an SSD) and you can recopy them forever when the available storage media will change in the future, so you will not lose what you have paid for.
come on man
people can complain about the dvd/bd scrambling restricting your freedoms and stopping you from making backups etc, and sure that's true
but if you just want to sit in front of the tv and watch a film you bought, idk what more you could ask for
Anyway, I bought a bluray player, plugged it in via USB, and it works.
Also, do modern bd players let you skip DVD trailers and fbi warning videos? My USB setup does...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
Some people were opposed to DIVX's 'phone home' PPV option, but the bigger issue was it seemed like a nasty format war was brewing. Then DIVX flopped quickly. Instead, the MPAA got the US Congress to "patch" CSS by passing a law.
Apple had an advertising campaign that you could "Rip. Mix. Burn." your CDs with a Mac. Obviously nerds could rip DVDs, but nobody ever could productize it like that.
As long as CSS was not broken, I bought neither discs nor drives, because I believe that only naive customers (to not say losers) are willing to buy any kind of information that cannot be protected from the certain eventual destruction due to the decay of its storage medium, by making copies of it on any other kind of storage medium.
After CSS was broken and the tools to read DVDs became available publicly, I have bought several DVD drives during the following years and many hundreds of DVDs.
So the breaking of the CSS was how the DVD industry got my money, and presumably the money of many others. They should have been grateful to the one who did this.
When you "buy" copy-protected information you are not really buying it. You are just renting it until the time when its storage medium will become corrupt, which is certain to happen, sooner or later. (Or until your reader becomes defective and you can no longer buy a replacement, due to obsolescence.)
The copyright laws are stupidly named and frequently stupidly formulated. Making copies not only is not a crime, but it is a fundamental right of the owner of any kind of information, being the only way in which information can be preserved.
Only the distribution of copies to third parties may be criminalized. While most stupid copyright laws claim that even making copies by the owner is a crime, that is not only unjust but it also not enforceable against any careful owner, so the laws are doubly stupid.
DVDs/BRs/etc were always a scam imo, unless it your favorite movie that you will watch repeatedly forever. For most people buying DVDs was just expensive PPV.
As they say, piracy is a service issue.
Also, this is a false history, and more of an ex-post-facto justification.
The original DeCSS was a VisualBasic program written by some W1nd0z h8X0r teenager. Not for any greater cause, just because they could.
If any I can just see C++ code which is pretty much portable because you can decouple I/O with ease, altough under Unix you would need to use ioctl's to command the DVD drive in a low level way.
https://github.com/cthpw103/decss
But for just decoding a dumped ISO Perl would be more than enough, from parsing UDF headers to unscramble the media.
It would last hours instead of 15 minutes under my Athlon 2000 but if would work the same.
The same with Nagra encoding and XawTV for some propietary channels in TV. You can decode any stream (and even extract subtitles) thanks to free software.
Even BTTV cards will still work. Go try that with Windows 7 and up. If you can find drivers, that's it. And working decoding software not messing up with DDraw based codecs and rendering.
I was there, and it was the free software the one who broke most of the chains. Propietary software today it's useless.
He released a tool for circumventing a protection measure. While already illegal to do in America, it wasn't made illegal in Norway until less than 2 years later.
> descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner
where
> a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
A sticker doesn't count as a "technological measure".
The disk key is small (40 bits) and I'm suspicious it's actually encoded as wobble frequency [0], like the PS1's copy protection scheme.
Because CD/DVD burners can't write wobble. Blank CDs/DVDs ship with a pre-made wobble in the pre-groove, which the burners use to determine the absolute position of the write laser.
Nor could you burn it onto a CD-R. It was there to prevent people from burning copies of games, not to prevent you from ripping the disc.
Of course, it was stupidly easy to bypass with a mod chip. They literally just sit there injecting the copy protection signal into the cd rom electronics, tricking it into thinking every single disc was blessed by Sony, burned or not.
In fact, the question of emulators wouldn't have been on the Sony engineers minds at all.
Because in 1994 (when the ps1 launched) there were no viable console emulators.
There were a few early prototypes, but they didn't produce 'playable results'. The first viable emulator (for any console) was arguably NESticle, released in April 1997. Things then moved rapidly, we see the first viable 16bit emulators in 1998.
It's notable that the PS2 doesn't have any protection against ripping games either. The Sony engineers would have been aware of emulators by this point, but they might have assumed that emulation would be stuck in the 8/16bit era for the foreseeable future.
So it must have been a huge shock for the first viable 32bit era emulators to come out in 1999. Connectix Virtual Game station (Jan 1999), UltraHLE (Also Jan 1999) and Bleem! (March 1999)
Yes.. that's right. We went from the first viable NES emulator to viable PS1/N64 emulators in under 2 years.
I'm guessing the PS2 was a little too close to it's March 2000 release date at this point to slap on rip protection, but the Gamecube and Xbox were released 18 months later, and both had time to implement disc encryption schemes.
A few years later, months before the PS2/GC era, even at DC times (and good PC games) some PSX games were still emulated because they had tons of value, such as JRPGs. And, again, ripping PSX games to play them in emulators without risking to scratch the CD's was the same task as ripping them to play the games with a modchip.
Also, technologically JRPG's and survival horrors were nothing against Unreal engine based games so they paled against Deus Ex for instance, but man, Parasite Eve and Resident Evil looked good with just a bilinear filter and they ran in a potato.
On being a shock, not much, because somehow in my mind the PSX games were closer in architecture to a PC than a Game Boy ROM emulated on a PC, which looked like black magic, ignoring how the hell the nerd brainiacs dumped the cartridge content (I had no concept of EE burned ROM's in the day, or cartridge dumpers via the serial cable) to a PC. For the PSX, well, it was easier for obvious reasons, CD's were CD's, and again the 'look' of PC games and the PSX looked similar, so maybe they shared similar technologies on drawing/rendering.
Ditto with the N64, that was a bigger shock. How the hell did they dumped the content of the cartridge? Later I knew about Debian Woody, a bit of C, the concept of libraries (not just DLL's under Windows) and that the N64 and PC's with Linux with OpenGL shared some design and the rest was story. I learnt more about computers trying to write some emulator myself in Perl back in the day and with GNU/Linux than in any school...
Also I loved TV tuners for a similar reason. I could dump teletext, dump the EPG from cable TV's even with just plain TV tuners (the decoded signal went vanilla into the PCI bus, so NXTVEPG worked in the same exact way) and so on. And yes, I pirated TV channels for some brief time until everyone shared media in either DivX CD's and P2P networks.
But to understand Sony's development decisions, you really have to think in the mindset of an adult hardware engineer, in Japan, around 1992/1993.
And like I said, emulators did not exist. At all. The primary method of piracy was actually the game backup device [0]. We didn't really see them in the west, I'm not surprised you missed them, but they were rampant in Asia.
They were floppy drives that plugged into your carriage based console, SNES MegaDrive etc. They could dump any cartridge game to a floppy disk (or two in the case of the largest 2MB games). And then load the dump back into a pool of battery-backed RAM, which the console would see as a cartridge.
Owners of such devices could share the floppies, or copy the files off and share them across the internet.
These devices are why most cartridge game from the 8bit era, 16bit era and N64 (yes, there were N64 backup devices too) was already floating around the internet long before we had viable emulators.
And it's also what Sony Engineers would have been thinking about when they were designing their copy protection system. They didn't really see the need to prevent ripping (besides required cryptography hardware was expensive and actually considered to be controlled military technology, subject to strict export controls until 1996).
And Sony didn't see the need to prevent rips; All piracy devices at this point required the game to be played back on an actual offical console (ignoring Chinese NES clones), so all they needed to do was could close the circle by making the PS1 refuse to play any copied disc. No point ripping if they couldn't be played.
Of course, in retrospect this was a complete failure. Turns out mod chips for the PS1 were stupidly simple, cd burners rapidly dropped in price, and emulators quickly became viable.
Newer drives I bought will refuse reading what they won’t decide themselves (e.g. wrong region).