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Originally posted by as4u
New copy-proof DVDs on the way?

Published: February 14, 2005, 9:00 PM PST
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

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Content-protection company Macrovision is expected to release a new DVD copy-protection technology Tuesday in hopes of substantially broadening its role in Hollywood's antipiracy effort.

The company is pointing to the failure of the copy-proofing on today's DVDs, which was broken in 1999. Courts have ordered that DVD-copying tools be taken off the market, but variations of the software remain widely available online.

Macrovision's new "RipGuard DVD" technology can prevent much of the copying now being done with those tools and can help bolster studios' DVD sales even if it's not perfect, company executives say.

"Encryption standards either work or they don't," said Adam Gervin, Macrovision's senior director of marketing, "Now the cat's out of the bag. (DVD sales) are going to be one of the main sources of revenue for Hollywood for a long time, so why leave billions of dollars on the table when you can do something about it?"

The company could be hard pressed to break into an arena of the content protection market that has historically been managed by companies or industry groups closely associated with the Hollywood studios themselves. However, studios have been deeply concerned by the failure of today's DVD copy protection and might be willing to experiment with an alternative if it proves practical.

The original DVD copy-protection tools--called Content Scramble System--was developed by a technology coalition that included studio representatives and is licensed by a groupwith close ties to Hollywood.

A new coalition, which includes Warner Bros. and the Walt Disney Company as well as powerful technology companies such as IBM, Sony, Microsoft and Intel, is working on a new content-protection technology for next-generation DVDs. That technology called the Advanced Access Content System, which is not designed for today's DVDs, is being designed to allow movies to be moved around a home though a digital network.

The group has said little about its progress since announcing the project last year, but companies involved have said they expect to have it ready in time for the first expected release of high-definition videos on DVD late in 2005.

Macrovision does have a longstanding relationship with studios, however. The company is responsible for the technique that makes it difficult to copy movies from one VCR to another, and it has updated that technique to help prevent copies of movies being made using the analog plugs on DVD players.

It's using a new version of that analog guard to create copy protection for video-on-demand services, and will be included in new TiVo devices and other set-top boxes beginning later this year.

The company's new product takes a different approach to antipiracy than it has taken for analog or audio CDs. Gervin said Macrovision engineers have spent several years looking at how various DVD-copying software packages work, and have devised ways to tweak the encoding of a DVD to block most of them.

That means the audio and video content itself requires no new hardware and isn't scrambled anew, as is the case with most rights-management techniques. Someone using one of the ripping tools on a protected DVD might simply find their software crashing, or be presented with error messages instead of a copy.

Macrovision's analog copy-protection business means that it receives pre-market versions of most major DVD players in order to test for compatibility, and it has been performing RipGuard DVD tests on these machines for months. As a result, the company says it is confident that discs encoded with its new product would be playable on all major DVD player brands and PC drives.

Gervin said that the technique would block most rippers, but not all, and could be easily updated for future discs as underground programmers find ways to work around RipGuard.

If adopted, the technology could be a welcome financial shot in the arm for Macrovision. The company has seen its revenues from DVD copy protection fall over recent quarters, and has increasingly been looking to other businesses to make up the shortfall.

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</a>http://news.com.com/New+copy-proof+DVDs+on+the+way/2100-1026_3-5576375.html?tag=nefd.top

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to me, as long as something can read a DVD, i think it will always be possible to burn DVD's

yup everything can and will be cracked(if its inportant) , you cant make something that someone cant hack , crack you can only make something that will hold them off long enough for you to make something better.

so eh this new dvd protection I say will be beaten within 10 days

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Macrovision Corp. today unveiled a technology that the Silicon Valley firm claims can block 97% of the DVD-copying software that pirates use, without interfering with a DVD's playability or picture quality.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is just the first of several companies expected to roll out new anti-copying technology that could help Hollywood studios battle piracy and boost revenues.

The company said its RipGuard system — which can be included in personal computers, DVD players and DVD recorders — plugs the "digital hole" through which unauthorized copies of DVDs can be easily copied — or ripped — on a computer and then "burned" to other discs or distributed through the Internet .

According to Macrovision, unauthorized DVD copying costs the studios about $1 billion out of the $27.5 billion that analyst firm Screen Digest estimated they collected from worldwide DVD sales and rentals last year.

"Macrovision RipGuard DVD is designed to dramatically reduce DVD ripping," Steve Weinstein, head of the company's entertainment technologies unit, said in a statement today.

Although the software used to rip discs is illegal in the United States, it has proliferated online since 15-year-old Jon Lech Johansen of Norway and his online partners wrote an early version in 1999.

The main challenge to combat ripping software has been finding a way to alter discs without rendering them unplayable on the more than 200 million DVD players already in homes around the world.

For Macrovision and other anti-piracy companies, the potential market is huge. With hundreds of billions of DVDs pressed every year, even a small licensing fee from the major studios would generate a significant boost to the company, which reported $128 million in sales last year.

Macrovision already is the leading supplier of technology to deter analog copying of Hollywood movies by VCRs, computers and other high-tech devices. That technology, which is widely but not universally deployed, renders the copied movie unwatchable.

But while analog copying methods are time consuming — it takes two hours to record a two-hour film — a DVD can be ripped in a few minutes. That's why technologies to stop digital copying, or at least make it much less efficient, would be valuable in Hollywood, said Danny Kaye, senior vice president of research and technology for News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.

"If it takes a long time and the frustration level gets too high, you're not going to prevent 100% of it, but you can stop the casual user," Kaye said. "Why not try?"

Fox is evaluating Macrovision's technology and several competing efforts, Kaye said. Macrovision marketing executive Adam Gervin said he expected some Hollywood studios to roll out RipGuard this year, although he declined to say which ones.

Ripping is merely one of several ways that DVDs are copied, either by bootleggers or by movie fans making back-ups of the discs they've bought. Although Macrovision executives say their suite of products responds to other forms of copying, too, some studio executives remain skeptical about the impact of anti-ripping technology.

The RipGuard technology would defeat the most popular of the ripping programs, Macrovision's Gervin said, by tinkering with the format of DVDs to make it impossible to extract data quickly from the discs. The technique confounds ripping programs without damaging computers, preventing the discs from playing or reducing picture quality, he said.

Consumer advocates said Hollywood had the right to put out unrippable discs. But such a move would ignore public demand for the ability to back up DVDs and take their movie collections on the road.

"It's swimming against the tide," said attorney Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates civil liberties online. "Consumers one way or another tend to get what they want."

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-021505dvd_lat,0,4828775.story?coll=la-home-headlines

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Originally posted by -dt-
yup everything can and will be cracked(if its inportant) , you cant make something that someone cant hack , crack you can only make something that will hold them off long enough for you to make something better.

so eh this new dvd protection I say will be beaten within 10 days

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true true. with hackers out there you can get anything and everything software wise for free and a lot of that software is to copy, clone, or whatever things that cost money anyway

its still bad if they make a way to realy stop it, my mate has a potable player that he has ripped his whole collection to, cost hima  lot would be a shame to not be able to put things on it

They will never stop people copying dvd's, there will always be a way found out...

Bah this is going to be cracked everything can be cracked if it was made by humans humans can crack it and that applies to everything...

There's such tools as DVD Decrypter out there that allows you to instantly unprotect and download the contents of a DVD onto your computer within a very small amount of time, then awaiting further ripping, I am not suggesting you use this tool for anything other than copying your home movies from DVD to your Computer. This is extremely simple, so when it doesn't work lots of people will be trying to find a way to crack it.
There are huge communities of "rippers", who make it possible for copies of movies and TV shows ASAP from the time it is on TV or out on DVD.
As soon as this new protection is out there'll be loads of people trying to bypass it, for a higher standard in the ripping community, the one who first breaks it will be famous to them. There'll be a lot of work on it. The only way to stop illegal rips and stuff spreading around the internet is to make a way for P2Ps not work. Cut off the snakes head, and the body will die.

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Originally posted by Anubis
The only way to stop illegal rips and stuff spreading around the internet is to make a way for P2Ps not work. Cut off the snakes head, and the body will die.

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But still with the internet being around ripping will still be out their as they can still get the files in question to other people. They can't stop they internet can they?

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Originally posted by Carltos Cool
But still with the internet being around ripping will still be out their as they can still get the files in question to other people. They can't stop they internet can they?

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The internet is a very good means of transferring large amounts of data to another person in any location on earth.
However with a way to block P2Ps it won't be as easy to just collect a file up whenever you feel like it, leave it for a while and come back and watch a movie.
Also servers that store movies will never take off, they can be easily shut down, where as a P2P is harder to shut down.
It will cut off the bulk of the problem, the rest can be controlled and won't pose a threat to them...