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Linux DVD One Step Closer 118

Posted by justin++ from the need-dvd-drive dept.
Matthew Pavlovich, head of the new LiViD project, has released source code (from an anonymous source) to allow CSS unlocking on DVD drives. This means people with DVD drives (only IDE at the moment, SCSI soon) will be able to copy the raw, encrypted, MPEG off the disc. Once this software is refined, all that will be necessary to watch DVD movies under Linux will be a hardware decoder or a special software decoder (which would have to be non-free).
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Linux DVD One Step Closer More

Linux DVD One Step Closer

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  • >Here in the U.S., DVDs typically cost as much or a little bit more than audio CDs

    He was talking about drives, not discs. At least in the U.S., a decent IDE DVD-ROM drive, like the slot-loading Pioneer 103, costs a little over $100 most places.
  • What if I buy a machine with software already installed ? These are shipped ready-to-run, and don't present all the EULA screens that the setup programs offer. Nobody could prove I even saw a license agreement, let alone approved it.

    What if I borrow a machine ? A EULA might forbid resale of the software, but not temporary use by another person of that machine.

    IANAL, but I didn't think you could enforce a contract that wasn't approved by both parties.
  • who did the clean-room implementation. They also picked up a *huge* insurance policy to cover anyone who licensed it from them.

    The original compaq licensed IBM's bios.

  • > The original question asked about a mkdvdfs,
    > which implies they want something like being
    > able to simply put an MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 encoded
    > video stream onto the disc and expect it to be
    > played with standard DVD software as a DVD

    Yes, that's what I was asking...doesn't have to be in "streaming" mode, though (in case that's what you're assuming). I would be perfectly happy requiring 4+G of scratch space for the creation of the image, on magnetic media, before getting burned to the DVD.

    But, yeah, a program that could take a menu file (say, an HTML file), a list of different video files (mpeg, quicktime, whatever), and build a complete image that a DVD-writer could write to a consumer DVD player-readable disc.

    Would be cool, no?
  • What if the software that was pirated, that way the R-engineer would have been guilty of breaking the copyright law, and pre-broken the "agreement" was already broken, logn before he started to work on the software...

    Last time I looked the crime of pirating didn't
    carry any punishment worth speaking of...

    But then again, IANAL.
  • Consider that the vast majority of DVD purchases are for people with standalone DVD players. They are the ones driving the market for DVD, and as long as that fact remains, anything that happens in the PC movie-playing arena won't matter one bit to the companies producing DVD discs. The outcome of some battles is predetermined, and we've already lost this one.

    - A.P.

    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • "Here" is Norway. "Here" is the place where I think people are joking when they say that they can get dual PIIs for $400. "Here" is where such a machine would cost about five times that much. At least. *sigh*

    /* Steinar */
  • The original compaq licensed IBM's bios.

    I'm pretty sure Compaq also did a clean room reimplementation. IBM didn't license their BIOS to anyone, at least in the early days.

    Phoenix was the first to sell the BIOS as their primary business.
  • Posted by Napalm4u:

    Well i think that the only way that you can legally reverse engineer software is if you use publicly posted information. No SDK's No Searching through DLL's.

    The only example i can think of is between 3DFX and about a million glide wrappers. All those people with TNT'S want to play Glide only games.(TNT's use Direct3d&opengl) Glide was made by 3DFX. And so their stopping all the glide wrappers.

    *Except* Creative which made Unified a wrapper made from publicly availible information. Granted it only plays a few games but its an ongoing project.

    But, not many more games are going to be glide only so its only for old games& N64 emulators!
  • hm, I guess I'm confusing 'mpeg playback' with decoding. Here is the stb velocity 128 [stb.com] spec sheet.
  • As impressive as PC speakers (or those little TV speakers, for that matter) try to be these days, the awesomeness of 6 *digital* channels of a DVD's soundtrack is totally lost there. But that's easily remedied if you've got a receiver and speakers within arm's reach, as the cramped college dorm crowd can attest to. Not to mention being able to really crank those MP3's...
  • The windows EULA says you can not reverse engineer. It also says that if you do not agree to the terms of the agreement, you are entitled to a refund. How many people actually got refunds? If microsoft doesn't honor their side of the agreement, legally you don't have to either.
  • I thought pirating could cost you in the 100s of thousands of dollars. I'd say that's worth speaking of.
  • of course then there are just freaks like me whose girlfriend won't let them, uh I mean don't
    want a tv in their house.....

    "That's not a TV, that's a monitor!" Heh.

    Of course there's the poor bastards whose daughters, wives, cats, and so on monopolize the theater. The convenience factor of slapping the film up on one screen and getting some work done in the other is pretty high, whereas the effort of clearing out babies, livestock, and spouses just to pop in a DVD is pretty steep.

    Speaking of which, you going to stop by to watch Taxi Driver, or what?
  • I was at a carshow a couple of months ago and among the sights was a car fitted with LCDs in the headpads of the front seats (thus allowing those in the rear to watch them) in the trunk was a PlayStation which was cracked to allow playing of DVDs in it. All this was connected to a "normal" car-radio unit (and a big one too) which had its own LCD. Now THAT'S something for the kids on long car trips :)
  • They didn't protect it when Winamp came out, and they didn't protect it when the Rio came out, so on what legal basis can they demand royalties now?
  • the voodoo3 6-trillion or whatever supposedly has hardware dvd encoding built in. and at only twice as much as i'd be willing to pay for it, too.
  • i don't own a television, as the content really sucks, and materialism is a bit boring. so movie watching is only viable through dvd on the computer.
  • to wanting to watch movies on your PC. Granted, I like to see Linux support for as many devices as possible, but I've always wondered why people like to watch movies on their computer. Someone clue me in, isn't it more convenient to sit around a 27" TV set with a bunch of friends and watch a movie than to huddle around a 17" monitor while sitting in your desk chair? What am I missing?
  • Yes, the people who run across it are not at fault, but the person(s) who put the code there in the first place are at fault. I'm wondering if there is a way for them to get the information out without being held liable for anything. A way around the RE clauses of software licneses.

    And you are right, you can not patent an idea. As that statment applies to CSS: CSS is not patented technology. I'm guessing this is because the techniques used in a software or hardware implementation of this are already patented and/or in the public domain. Not to mention if they patented it they would have had to publicly release the information on how it was done, which is against their ideas, apparently, of how to secure data.
  • Leo Schwab of Be wrote an interesting editorial about shrinkwrap licenses:
    http://www.microtimes.com/157/shrinkwrap.html

    (It is a bit old, but good nonetheless)

  • Would be cool, yes. And it would indeed require the 4-16 gigs of imaging space depending on the size of the disc you wanted to produce. While I don't think this could be implenmented as a file system (it's already been said that the FS and the dvd data layout are two seperate things) a linux based dvd authoring tool could be developed. Again, fee and open sourced are not likely due to the need to get NDAs for the DVD spec and pay for it. Unfortunate but the only way to go right now.
  • being able to watch VCD/DVDs on the PC is a great boon to us college students - we don't necessarily have a living room in our dorms, nor could we easily fit a 27" TV into our own rooms. Meanwhile, a 17"/19" Monitor (with a TV card) doubles as a TV and micro home theater :)
  • Could we not create a limited version of WINE that was just for running the windows DLL(s) for unincoding DVDs. since this would be a very limited emulater/thunker. It should be much simpler to write than a full functioning emulater/thunker.
    Then a person (having a legal copy of the DLL(s)) could play DVDs. This would mean not having a complety GNU/empowered/free system, but in hopes of creating a lack of market for the propritay product and freeing the code.
  • Well, if your computer has a video card with SVHS output which leads to a 35" TV...
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

  • ... Under linux their is a hieghtened fear of someone reverse engineering the code (which appears to be founded) ...

    Why would the code be any easier/harder to reverse engineer because of the OS? It's all opcodes to me... :)

  • The primary advantages of DVD is NOT the movies, and thats not why I own one. I own one because I honestly feel that it is the distribution media for games/software in the near future. Bundled with my DVD player were a couple of DVD games that I must say were an improvement to their CD counterparts. Mostly they involve cinematic sequences combined w/ the game itself.
    But since I'm not a gamer, that wasn't that big a deal. As the other individual stated, there is a big advantage for college students or people who live with other roomates. When there are three people in one house with different social circles, different viewing tastes and one television. Finding the time to play a DVD movie for you and your friends/[girl|boy]friend is not easy. It easy to sit on your bed and watch a DVD movie from your PC, since it is YOUR PC.
  • Single sided/Single layer = 4.9GB
    Single sided/Double layer = 8.5GB
    Double sided/Double layer = 17GB (8.5 x 2)

    FWIW

  • It's not what you're missing, it's what you've got, namely a 27" TV with (presumably) good speakers. My TV is a 15-year-old 15" set with a speaker. Yes, you read that right, one speaker. Bye-bye stereo. That makes my computer visually equal and aurally far superior (Cambridge Soundworks subwoofer, baby!) to my TV. Why waste a pile of money on a goot TV setup and a good computer when you can combine the two into one and save yourself the trouble and money?

    And yes, have a had friends over to watch movies on my computer, and we had a blast


  • A DVD player on a laptop has also proved to be a great thing for our young kids on long car trips. Beyond that, I agree, I'd rather watch movies on TV or at the local megaplex.
  • > What are the laws regarding reverse engineering,
    > specifically reverse engineering a piece
    > of software that has a specific clause in
    > it's usage license not to reverse engineer or
    > dissasemble the code?

    IANAL.

    In Europe, the law explicitly overrides those agreements, and states that you CAN reverse engineer to make a compatible product.

    That is clearly the case here.

    But I don't know where the reverse engineering was done.

    -- REW.
  • Yes, exactly. According to "Triumph of the Nerds", Compaq did RE the BIOS.



    pbs transcript [pbs.org]


    "In Compaq's case, it took l5 senior programmers several months and cost $1 million to do the reverse engineering. In November 1982, Rod Canion unveiled the result."




  • That laptop+DVD idea is great, but at least last time I flew they didn't allow you to use even CD players and you could use your laptop only if you disconnected your CD-ROM. I seriously doubt they would allow DVD drives, either.
    I don't really know why this is so but that's how it was.
  • Even more so for UK students. We have to pay the BBC for a TV license, if we have a TV (or any other way of receiving TV signals). If I watch just DVDs, and not VHS videos, and so don't have a TV around, I can save myself about $160 a year!
  • The only reason DIVX was never cracked was because half of the encryption system sat within a centralized server that DIVX players dialed into periodically. With DVD all the decoding is done locally, and if the docoding can be done in software (which it often is, under windows, anyway) then that code can be RIPPED and ported to other platforms. Period. The Law? Fuck the law. Someone will do it regardless and post it to USENET and ftp servers in countries where US law is meaningless, and the SW will spread and no one will be able to stop it. The secret nature of DVD decoding is already doomed and has been since day one when software was released to do it. If they really wanted to keep it secret, they'd have had a better chance if they kept all the decoding in hardware. But it's too late now. The genie is out of the bottle. Now, it's only a matter of time. And I think this is what was really intended. Electronics makers want to sell players. And the way to do that is to make players that can play as many discs as possible. The who region encoding thing makes no sense.Why has the industry never made a big deal about import audio CDs? Why should video be treated differently?I think the region thing was just stuck in to appease Hollywood into supporting the format. By the time it's broken, the format will be entrenched and all will be well at that time.
  • I've briefly reviewed the claims and they're pretty broad. The only obvious circumvention strategy is to avoid the "greater than real-time" transfer of compressed audio to the target device- not an attractive option. I haven't yet had time to review the preferred implementation, but unless this is really bad (unlikely) I think they've got something here. However I suspect they'll make licensing proposals to Diamond et al that are quite reasonable, to avoid incenting them to file an invalidation action grounded on e.g. prior art.
  • Posted by _DogShu_:

    It doesn't have hardware DVD decode, unfortuneately.
    They call it "DVD hardware assist." What it really is is that it has hardware acceleration for windoze directdraw, which is how the DVDs are rendered.
  • Posted by _DogShu_:

    I have a computer with a DVD drive... but I don't have a TV. That's why.

    I'm even considering buying a TV tuner card. instant 15" TV for $70!
  • It felt good for me when I gave Windows (TM) the boot! In other words that is no longer an option here.
  • Now, if DVD drives would not be so expensive, we would all be happy (at least they're not cheap here). BTW, why would the decoder have to be non-free? Some patented algorithms? Again? (Will standard-makers never learn... Oh well, perhaps it was intentional...)

    /* Steinar */
  • Anoymous source? This all sounds somewhat fishy. How legal will it be to actually use that routine in any code that real people get to use?

    -awc

  • 3dfx (Score:1)

    by N1KO ( 13435 )
    Does anyone know if the voodoo3 can be used as a hardware decoder under linux? If so, would this mean that after the project is finished encrypted dvds could be played?
  • a dvd has the capacity of 2-4 gigs right?
    i'm guessing that not too many people are going to
    have their entire collection of dvds sitting on
    their harddrive. anyone have any status about
    www.linuxtv.org [linuxtv.org] ?
  • Chances are it will not happen, ever. There are legal issues that bind them from doing it. As I've said in the past, however, the next set of decoder cards to be coming out will most likely have linux drivers from the vendors (but most likely not open source).
  • I understand the problem with decoders for reading commercial DVDs, but IIRC, it is also possible to write non-encrypted DVDs. How far off is the Linux community from a mkdvdfs program, so I can shove all those cool Star Wars trailers onto a DVD I can watch at home?

    After that, the next big step would be video-capture cards....then a hook-up to TiVO...
  • Or C) Somebody hacks the whole damn thing, and make's a free software decoder.... I don't think it's illigal to make a free DVD viewer, only a DVD decoder->raw image.. (Which would make it possible to encode in say mpeg format..)
  • My impression is that the decryption algorithms for DVD are kept as a big secret to prevent movie piracy (which as most of us know is becoming the next big thing on the net). In order for Linux to get a decoder, it would have to come from either (a) hardware or (b) some group who has access to the decryption scheme.
  • 'Cause they haven't ... yet.
  • This needs to be established as of yet. This code was released before anyone checked into the legal end of things. I'm sure Mathew P. and the source codes "creator" will be contacted to cease and desist distribution of this code. The anonymous source (who isn't entirely anonymous, as far as I know, as he made himself known on other forums) will be at the most risk here for legal problems. Best idea now is to download the code. Get it spread around as widely as possible. It may not be able to be used legally when all is said and done, but at least it will be out there for others to work with.
  • I don't know about the voodoo3, but displaying
    video with a voodoo1 3dfx card is slower than using a standard bitblt with normal 2d graphics hardware. The 3dfx "accelerator" is a hardware polygon renderer, and drawing texture triangles with light shading and fog won't help speeding up MPEG decoding.
  • Not many. But I'm sure tons of people would love to get a movie they haven't seen -- for free -- recompressed as a Star Wars trailer-guality quicktime video...
  • The Linuxtv.org project is ongoing. Final arrangments are being made for manufacturing. Dirvers are in the works. And the coders for the project are keeping people informed of their status through the LinuxDVD mailing list. To see the archives or join the list go to:

    http://linuxdvd.corepower.com

  • Re:How about a free encoder for writing? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    --I don't think DVD-RAM is compatible with home players right now. Hence, I don't think that such a program would be much good to you except as an archive device (which is always entertaining).

  • The inability to get the raw scrambled data off the disk was cited as the major reason you can't use a Windows player with Wine to watch DVD movies under Linux.

    Now all that is needed is to export the raw stream through Wine with the right API. That part shouldn't be secret, so there's no longer any big stumbling block for DVD under Linux.

    (And of course, this will allow for easier use of debuggers to reverse-engineer the code.)
  • DVD-RAM is not compatible with current players and most DVD drives. And a mkdvdfs isn't likely to be coming around in the form you are thinking about. Even DVD-RAM uses standard DVD Spec format for disc layout. As such a disc has to be imaged and then burned (the format has a lot of pointers to disc areas that need to be static before anything is put to disc). As such, authoring software will be needed and will most likely not be free unless someone figures out the DVD Spec on their own. Otherwise the specs need to be bought at US$5000 (US$500 each additional copy).
  • Well, if they reverse engineered it, it should be legal. In order to protect the CSS algorithm, they did not patent it, since that would require it be published. Instead, they hid it under an NDA. But there is no legal protection for it, other than copyright on the documentation under NDA. As long as they didn't work from that, there is nothing the CSS group can do about it.
  • A dual-sided, dual-layer DVD has 15.6GB of storage.

    Kyle

    NP: Loreena McKennitt, Book of Secrets
    --
    Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
  • I just bought an ATI Expert 128 (or something like that) for a machine I was building, and it claims to have DVD decode onboard. They didn't send the software ( you have to register to get it) so I didn't try it out.
    BTW I bought an IDE DVD drive for that machine for $100, so they're getting affordable.
  • So does that mean no prior art can be demonstrated, thus anyone can patent it? Maybe AudioHighway?

    Sinan
  • The voodoo1 is a 3d only card, which obviously makes it not very good for DVD decoding. The voodoo3 on the other hand has built in 2d components as well so you can use it as a regular graphics card and play video files. From what I'd read though the quality of DVD's sucks on a voodoo3 so your better off getting something like an ATI card or a dedicated DVD decoder board.
  • i was speaking to someone at a MUG once who claimed that software liscenses were not valid in Texas, because Texas state law prohibhits contracts which do not have an expiration date. Since the software liscense does not have an expiration date, it would then be invalidated.

    I'm not sure he was correct, but if he was it would seem to say some interesting things. For example, that since i'm in Texas i wouldn't have to follow the terms of the liscense agreement. I wouldn't be able to make illegal copies, since that violates copyright law, but if i tried to reverse-engineer MS Word in some way that would be legal.

    Even if it wasn't true about the expiration dates, i'm sure there are lots of little similar loopholes in various places that you could use to circumvent software liscenses.

  • Donīt expect too much out of this (Score:5)

    by kju ( 327 ) on Thursday July 15, 1999 @04:43AM (#1801635)
    Yes, it is true, we have now all needed parts for software decoding of DVDs, but any software doing so will be illegal and/or non-free.

    1. CSS
    The information about CSS was obtained by reverse engineering some DVD software decoder. Reverse engineering is nearly everytime prohibited by license agreements, and for example european law allows reverse engineering only for software compatibility issues. So the CSS source was not obtained in a legal way, and it is at least a very problematic issue if we may use this source however. Im unsure if CSS is also protected by patents.

    However CSS licensing is for free, but this will likely permit a opensource decoder.

    2. MPEG-II

    MPEG2 decoding software is available (Reference Decodec of the MPEG Simulation Group), but MPEG2 is subject to licensing with MPEG LA (www.mpegla.com). The license fee is $4 per copy.

    3. AC3

    AC3 decoding software is available, written using public available specs. However AC3 is subject to licensing issues (and probably patented too). The price for the (one-time) licensing is said to be about US$ 20000.



    To summarize: We have all needed information for writing a decoder but we may not do so. Im sure that some people ignoring law however will publish such software, like happened with MP3 encoders, but the software will be very likely illegal to use.

    Some countries apparently do not allow software patents, which will increase the possibility of a legal decoder, but be aware, that you as a user of such software are also bound to your countries law.

    Be careful in what you are doing. If you want to do something reasonable try to convince some company to release a software decoder for linux or write a device driver for their decoding hardware.

  • It works with Toshiba SD-M1202 ! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Tested on kernel 2.2.5, works at least on Toshiba SD-M1201.
  • Right, I got a riva 128 with my machine a while back that supposedly had hardware mpeg decoder built in to play DVDs. I've never bought a DVD drive for my system so I've never tried this out. We get decent Linux support, and I'll run right out and get a drive!



  • Well, at school in my cell like dorm, I have a 20" TV. I personally find it more convenient to have friends over to watch movies on that, a fringe benefit being I can hook up VCRs and video game consoles. Also, with a stand alone DVD player when I'm at home I don't need to have a PC next to my TV. I guess it's all a matter of preference, I hate using my computer for anything aside from computing. That and I consider a stand alone DVD player more convenient.

    Steve
  • I like it 'cause I bought a DVD drive & decoder for $70, and just run the AV cables to my TV, which is right next to my PC anyway. And $70 is cheaper than $250.
  • That's grounds for breakup :) Is your girlfriend amish per chance?

    Steve
  • Your comment inspired me to go and do a little bit of web-browsing...
    http://www.advancedvisi on.net [advancedvision.net] lists a few DVD drives in the $70 (USD) and under range. Definately getting cheaper. :)
  • In reading a lot of the comments, I thought I'd do everyone a favor and clear up some of the misconception.

    1. We _do_ have enough to have DVD playback under Linux. The DVD module for the Matrox G200 series cards does hardware decrypting of the video and audio streams.

    2. CSS has two (2) parts to it. This only unlocks the disks and allows the encrypted data streams to travel to either a software decryptor or a hardware decoder.

    3. The Zoran chipset will decode raw, encrypted DVD and AC3 streams in hardware. Thus the system never has a pipe for the decrypted data.

    Any other questions are comments, let me know. Check the site and join the list.
  • No, I don't think the riva cards have hardware mpeg decoding capabilities.
    There are actually 2 operations involved:
    - motion compensation
    - inverse discrete cosine transform

    Only ATI cards feature both, and the S3 Savage has motion compensation.
    Others cards (G200/400's, TNT1/2) only have DirectX overlay support which accelerates things a bit for windoze software decoders.
  • Well, if you pirate a piece of software that costs in the area of $10, once, you are NOT going to get _ANY_ sort of punishment...
  • A few technical reasons why you should like the idea of PC-based DVD hardware:

    • You can watch movies of your choice on an airplane, instead of drivel like you've got mail (both ways on my last transatlantic flight). This will be particularly cool when I can get my hands on a Sony VAIO Picturebook + PCMCIA MPEG decoder card + IEEE1394 DVD-ROM... Still waiting...
    • You will be prepared, via software upgrades, for various audio/video codec standards. For example, instead of trashing your $399 DVD deck to get DTS capability, you simply apply the DTS patch to your software
    • Convergence of PC and high-definition main set. I like it, but that's my personal taste. My next desktop PC will have an S-video out and I'll use my TV as a monitor (while running a second head next to the entertainment center)
    • Decent ($300) codec boards can do line doubling and progressive scan display of DVDs when hooked up to compatible displays
    • It's easier to hook a PC up to a progressive display (like the Sony KL-W9000 display that can
      do up to 720p)


    There are actually quite a few attractive reasons to consider making your next DVD player a PC. Unfortunately, for the time being, it'll have to be a M$ or Apple system, it would seem...

    (My next non-portable system will be a stereo component with DVD, 3Dfusion card, multi-boot Win9x/Linux/OpenBSD/BeOS, IEEE1394, 512MB RAM Dual oclocked celeron, TNT2 with S-video output, just as soon as I can get a MPACT board that does 24-bit color in 720x480 MPEG decode...)
  • Because everyone knows that in a couple of years MS is going to have to release their new OS on a dual layered dual sided DVD due to the fact that it will be too big!
    But seriously, with a dual sided/layerd DVD being able to hold ~17 Gigs of information there are quite a bit of possibilities. The idea of movies came mainly from the home entertainment industry, it started out as just an extra bonus for the computer industry.
    We can only take CD's so far, and I think this is a way to prevent what happened to the floppy disk. What I mean from that is apps that take more than 7 floppies to install, sometimes upwards of 40. By building a new standard NOW it will prevent having obsolete technology in a shot time. A good example of way to many CD's was the game Phatasmagoria, which had 7 CD's, and it came out something like 4 years ago.
  • It was my understanding that the Wine approach hadn't worked yet because of the mechanisms built into the DLLs and dvd player programs to help prohibit debugging and dissasembly. It is not clear that this code would allow anything to be made that would now allow the Wine approach to work. In order for it to work some kind of middle man process would need to be stuck in between the DVD drive and the player software (software would establish a conneciton with the middle man as would the drive). Even then, it may be that the DLL that the win32 app is using for this simply can't be run properly under wine, so even this middle man approach wouldn't work.

    DVD under linux is still a while off.
  • Why not just use 'doze??

  • Dude, as I understand it, most normal DVDs use UFS, which I believe is a bit experimental anyways, but is available in the current kernel. Whether there is a mkufs or such software available, I haven't checked. See Freshmeat.

    That isn't an encoder, simply the base file system for the DVD standard (like iso9660 is to CD).
  • we will update the linuxtv.org [linuxtv.org] website tomorrow with some info about the DVD file format.

  • Reverse Engineering (Score:4)

    by Sontas ( 6747 ) on Thursday July 15, 1999 @03:25AM (#1801660)
    What are the laws regarding reverse engineering, specifically reverse engineering a piece of software that has a specific clause in it's usage license not to reverse engineer or dissasemble the code? Are there any ways around a reverse engineering clause of a software product? Could someone, for instance, dissasemble a DLL or EXE in windows and figure out how it works. Then take their knowledge (not in electronic code form but written english/spanish/swahili(sp)/etc or through speaking) and pass it on to someone else who could then make a software product from that information. Would that constitute breaking the reverse engineering clause?
  • We do not have everything needed to play an encrypted DVD. This CSS code does not provide the ability to decrypt the information, only to unlock disc. An encrypted blocks of a DVD disc are not even readable until the drive goes through an authentication process. That process is what this CSS code helps perform. We can not read decrypted data yet to feed to the MPEG-2 and AC-3 decoders.

    On MPEG-2, you are right. Use in a system requires a $4 per device/software-copy royalty.

    AC-3 is patented in both software and hardware. There is public AC-3 code available, produced by Arron Holtzman, but the legalities of that being offered publicly in an unlicensed form is unknown. It constitutes an implementation (under Dolby's licensing structure) and as such is potentially in need of a $10K one time licensing fee. Use of that AC-3 code/implementation in a system (hardware or software application) would require that the hardware or software producer pay a one time fee of $10K plus a variable royalty on each device/software-copy sold/distributed.

  • You can copy DVD already, go here (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    dvd.da.ru/

    download PowerRip, and for windows you can
    re-encode DVD movies back intopure free mpeg2 or quicktime or mpeg1 or mpeg4 or AVI or anything or RAW

  • Flame me for not completely understanding if it's a patent, copyright, both, or someother issue (breaking the encryption?) issue...

    Could this software be written for free in Sweden the same way that BladeEnc has "amnesty" from the oppressive IP laws?

    Just a thought......

    -james

  • Re:Reverse Engineering (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In most of Europe it is explicitly allowed by law to reverse engineer for the purpose of ensuring interoperability, and any clause in any license or contract that deny you that right are automatically null and void in most of the countries that allow reverse engineering.

    However, it's important to do a fully "clean room" reimplementation, such as you suggested above. The reason isn't laws related to reverse engineering, but copyright law: You must ensure that you can prove that the people that wrote the actual code didn't copy parts of the reverse engineered program.

    So reverse engineering is ok if the DVD encryption stuff is only protected by copyright, and not patents are involved.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Re:Donīt expect too much out of this (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    AFAIK, most European countries have laws that allow for reverse engineering for any compatibility issues, including ensuring that your program can read and decode the file formats of a competing product.

    The only issue I can see in that regard, is whether or not they did a proper clean room implementation.

    Also, the laws that European countries have on reverse engineering typically explicitly make any license clauses disallowing reverse engineering null and void. So what the license says about reverse engineering is something you can ignore completely.

  • of course then there are just freaks like me whose girlfriend won't let them, uh I mean don't want a tv in their house.....
  • I'm no lawyer, but...

    At least in Norway I believe it is legal to reverse engineer a program if your intention is to make your own program compatible with the existing piece of software. If I understand this correctly, that means you are allowed to disassemble winword.exe trying to figure out the .doc file format if you intend to write a .doc loader for your own word processor.

    Then again, I might be completely wrong.
  • From what I've learned through speaking with people at Sigma Designs (Hollywood+ and the DXR3 chipset makers) linux drivers are not going to be coming out for current or past generation decoders because of CSS and AC-3 decoding being done in software. Under linux their is a hieghtened fear of someone reverse engineering the code (which appears to be founded) and their appear to be significant differences between how Windows and Linux handle libraries/DLLs. These differences have thus forced them to not release linux drivers for linux. There is also a problem with in-house development experience with Linux (at Sigma Designs).

    Companies seemingly do not want to put out any DVD decoder based product on Linux that has software decoder/decryption involved.

    There are alternative DVD decoder vendors (this LiViD project aims with Matrox addon and standalone cards) which don't have this problem of software decoding and are in fact releasing programming information.

    A note, the Creative Labs Dxr2 does not have any software based decoding/decryption so it is possible that they could release binary drivers for that product if they chose to. But they keep citing a NDA problem with C-Cube (the chipset makers of that card). If someone can get licensing from C-Cube, Creative labs would probably work with them to get Linux drivers for the DXR2 out.
  • Current DVDs (the large majority of them) use a Bridge format. MicroUDF and ISO9660. This allows current ISO9660 file systems to use them without any problems (assuming they have a large enough address space built into them) but will maintain compatibility once full UDF based ones start coming out and players start using that filesystem to access the discs.

    This has absolutly nothing to do with the data layout of DVD-Video data, though. That requires that all the data that is going to be written to disc be known before the files start to get written. The original question asked about a mkdvdfs, which implies they want something like being able to simply put an MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 encoded video stream onto the disc and expect it to be played with standard DVD software as a DVD, this is not a real possibility. That is what I was pointing out.
  • It is a royal pain to boot to Windows simply to watch a DVD movie.
  • I have heard similar things from others about the RE laws in Europe. And I think you are right that it is intended and used for file format compatibility and that kind of thing. As such I dont' see how REing the CSS mechanisms in a DVD player would be considered legal. You are not maintaining any kind of compatibility. The only way I can seeit being able to be legal under that law is to claim you did it for maintaining compatibility with other DVD authoring software. Even then, one could only legally RE the encryption algorithm used and perhaps where on the disc one has to place the disc and title keys.

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