Something New?

[Parodic Productions]

Hiya. Quick question. I just bought a copy of Murder Princess, and was about to rip it for footage. Before I click anything on DVD Decrypter, though, I notice that single DVD has over 80 GBs of video in there. Wow.

I noticed this before with Wall-E before, only that was just 40 or 60, can't remember. Now, even with my new computer, that's a lot of hard drive space to fit on a pc. I've never seen a DVD with that much carrying space before. Saw a couple with 8 GBs of space once, forgot to buy them. But never anything this massive. And I know it's a DVD and not a Blu-Ray.

Anyway, to the point, is there some kind of new DVD material that I don't know about yet? I'm pretty confused and concerned by all this, because this feels like Funimation and others are taking stronger actions against people like us who rip these things often for the vob files. Anybody know about what might be going on? Sorry if I'm out of the loop on anything. Let me know if there's any info on this. Thanks.

[gotenks794]

Perhaps this is answered in this thread.

Seems to only be a fix on mac, unfortunate for those without one.

(I did something helpful! YAY! )

[Parodic Productions]

Thanks. Unfortunately, this link isn't very useful for me, me being completely Macless. And, for that matter, Appless. I don't even own an Ipod.

Also, doesn't explain what this new encryption is exactly. I mean, I remember none of the ADV Film DVDs even had an encryption on them. Just what kind of encryption is this?

Still worried what this means for AMVers in the near future.

[Parodic Productions]

Sorry, double post. Damn, no edit. But, Christ, I've been out of the loop for too long.

This new DVDFab or something sounds reasonable. I should download that with the new AMVapp thing they've got now. Maybe that will help work. Hopefully.

Not right now, though. I'm at work.

[Qyot27]

It's a tactic known as copy obfuscation. The DVD standard supports CSS and Macrovision as its methods of encryption, but the standard is somewhat 'loose' - in other words, to be compliant, there have to be certain elements the players can read. And with those elements in place, you'll probably not have any trouble playing these discs on a regular DVD player (although there are reports of some players choking on discs that aren't rigidly standard).

Obfuscation works by essentially exploiting that player reliability, by putting fake files into the directory that cause software to trip up even while the instructions in the proper elements ensure that standalone players are fine, or physically corrupting sectors of the disc in strange ways or so on and so forth. Decryption software tends to not be as loose as an actual player is - they expect the elements to be there in a defined way, and often really don't like it when there's something out of the ordinary. As some obfuscation techniques have come to light (ARccOS, for example, which is the sector corrupting I mentioned earlier), the newer decryption software has adapted to handle them, but because they aren't part of the official DVD encryption standards, these methods are more of a wild-card and have to be specifically overcome.

It's sort of like the difference between a compliant Red Book Audio disc, and the non-standard CDEXTRA/Enhanced CD format, or any Audio CD that has DRM on it. The Red Book standard doesn't have DRM provisions, but companies have sometimes deviated from that standard intentionally. This stuff isn't to be confused with adaptive copy protection measures like AACS or BD+, as those encryption types are part of the Blu-ray specifications in the first place.

[Parodic Productions]

I see. I think I've got the gist of it. It's still pretty complicated, but at least I know what's generally going on now. Thanks for the info. Appreciate it.