[ModBreak] The contents of this site are somewhat outdated and it will no longer receive updates, but it was actual when it was written a year ago. The first HD-DVD and Blu-ray devices have now made it into some rich folks living rooms and there is little to be done about the DRM now but hack it. Though this site has not yielded any result, at least I know several thousand people a month have read it and may have become a little bit wiser or at least learned something new :)

I will continue using the DRMadness.com domain as a Dr. Madness blog (planned, anyways), but I will keep these pages on here for future reference. [/ModBreak]

How it's used

This the part where it all comes together. The discs will be encoded by AACS and the players will be connected to your output devices using HDMI / HDCP. If you're playing them on a PC, PVP-OPM will be used as well.

So what's the big deal?

First off, you will need HDMI / HDCP compliant devices to play the content in high definition (yes, monitors too!). As I mentioned before, there's a big chance your current (even state-of-the-art) devices are not compliant, so you will have to replace them. If your devices are not compliant, you will get a low-quality version of the content or possibly nothing at all. In that case there really isn't any difference between playing a normal DVD on your normal TV, so why bother buying the HD versions?

Secondly, because of the way the HDCP blacklist and the AACS keys work, someone, somewhere, can for example hack the same model player you have. Your player models key gets revoked, and you will never be able to play discs that came out after the date your player was compromised. You'll need to buy a new player! The same thing goes for a hacker tapping into the HDMI / HDCP signal and copying the movie that way. If you happen to own that playback device as well, it's HDCP key can be revoked and it will never play high-definition again. Imagine your brand-new threethousand dollar 80" HDTV getting blacklisted!

Thirdly, we are forced to make expensives, not because of some real technical requirement, but rather because they want to push a copyright protection scheme that eventually wont really protect anything because it is seriously flawed. (See "Piracy" a bit down) - Related articles

Go back to: HDCP, AACS, PVP-OPM, BD+, ROM Mark

Proceed to: Piracy