August 2nd, 2006
HD-DVD, Blu-Ray Copy Protection Defeated by “Low-Tech High-Tech” Method
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
What do I mean by Low-Tech High-Tech method? It was cracked not by trying to crack it, but by brute force, according to the German technology magazine c’t. Essentially they used the PrintScreen feature to capture the film, frame-by-frame. Since there’s no real Flash in our world, the only solution was a script.
The screen capture feature of the operating system allowed each frame to be digitally captured exactly as it was displayed on-screen. Since it would be impractical to sit around advancing movies frame by frame and hitting PrintScreen all day, a script was used to automate the process. Each frame resulted in a 2 MB image. The computers used were fast enough to capture 30 frames per second, enabling real-time capturing of the movies without dropped frames. For a 90-minute movie, this is 162,000 frames, or approximately 324 GB in total storage, so if you try this, make sure you have lots of free hard disk space! The sound tracks must be captured separately and then re-synched with the video, so this is by no means a trivial process. Source: Ars Technica
We Say: Toshiba has admitted there’s a “security” issue, and obviously they’ll try to figure out a way around this … but once again it proves that it’s pretty tough to come up with something truly uncrackable.
Ikaruga says:
“For a 90-minute movie, this is 162,000 frames, or approximately 324 GB in total storage”
“The sound tracks must be captured separately and then re-synched with the video”
Uh, so how is this a crack? Doesn’t seem to be very practical.
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:50 am
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
HD-DVD, Blu-ray Copy Protection Defeated By “Low-Tech High-Tech” Method
Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes: What do I mean by Low-Tech High-Tech method? It was cracked not by trying to crack it, but by brute force, according to the German technology magazine c’t. Essentially they used the Print Screen feature to capture…
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:20 pm
David Johnston says:
lkaruga, this is definitely a crack of the DRM because it gets around the technology that is supposed to stop a movie from being copied. Using a script to get all the screenshots is fairly trivial. The only “hard” part is syncing the audio to the video, which really wouldn’t be all that difficult for someone who really wanted to make a copy.
August 3rd, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Bill M says:
For Joe Average (like me) this is a waste. Even if I had the disk space, I am not going to spend the time. The video pirate will be all over this, it means they can still sell illegal copies for a buck and turn a profit. More proof that DRM is fool’s gold, except for the DRM vendors.
August 4th, 2006 at 8:17 am
Paul Higgins says:
Sounds to me like this is just a ‘crack’ for the sake of it, to prove it can be done. The amount of drive space and the synching makes it impractical for the average Joe. But rest assured, when the new technology superscedes todays, somebody, somewhere will crack it and sell the hardware/software to allow us to do it with a few clicks. The answer is, make the cost of the hardware and media at a cost that makes copying it uneconomical. I live in the UK and the cost of new films on DVD of £17.99, more or less, makes it worth paying pennies for blank media and renting a Blockbuster video for £3.95 and copying it. Not that I would, but it is just economics!
August 4th, 2006 at 10:47 am
GiM says:
Everything turn around DRM… For a pirate, buying 5 DVD units for 5 “area codes” is nothing, because it is his “business”. I heard of programs reading audio/video direct from cards and circumvent any “coding” solution. And then, 500GB also means nothing for a “business”, and then fly to a DivX or XviD, and problem solved. And I allways dream of HDTV resolution. My PC can handle it from 3 years ago, what I really miss is a HDTV tuner (really-really, a HDTV source)…
August 5th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Medvedik says:
March 29th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
aka_loshok says:
March 30th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Someone Gets It: DRM Does Not Stop Piracy | Etixet Tag Cloud Archive 10.000 Web Site Feed says:
[…] I’ve said it before, though perhaps not here … if someone really wants to pirate software, music, movies … well, those people will find a way to do it. Example here, where brute force defeats HD DRM. TG Daily has an interview with Jerry Pierce, senior VP of technology at Universal Pictures, and he says “So, DRM needs to give them some restrictions beyond what both the customer and we believe are the proper usage rules. That’s what we need to achieve. DRMs enable business models, they don’t stop piracy.” […]
January 7th, 2008 at 1:20 pm