The war between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray entered a next stage with the announcements of Paramount and Dreamworks to publish their lineup exclusively on HD-DVD. Rumors soon spread around the Internet that both companies were receiving payments (Paramount $50 million dollars, Dreamworks $100 million dollars) from HD supporters to make this decision.
DVDFab HD Decrypter
DVDFab HD Decrypter is a free DVD and HD ripper that is able to copy the contents of a movie onto your hard drive even if that movie is copy protected. It can remove DVD copy protections such as CSS, RC, RCE, APS, UOPs and Sony ARccOS and even manages to remove AACS from Blue-Ray and HD-DVD disks which means that it should be possible to copy most DVDs and HD DVDs that you have to your hard disk without running into copy protection problems.
So, who is winning the HD war ?
I’m not that interested in the HD format war because I do not have a television that is HD Ready and do not plan to buy one in the near future. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I feel a little bit lost about the success or failure of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray players and movies.
I thought that I’m going to discuss it with each of you. What are your thoughts about both formats ? Do you think that Blue-Ray is in the lead, maybe because of the boost after the release of the Playstation 3 by Sony ? Or is it the HD-DVD format that you think will win this war.
AACS’s response to the publicity that they generated
You surely now what has happened during the last week. The AACS send some cease and desist letters to bloggers and website owners requesting the takedown of the so called HD-DVD processing key. The story more or less exploded on the web. The main reason for this was probably the way the admins of digg.com handled the affair. Their first decided to pull all articles posted to digg containing the key which lead to a furious reaction of the digg community who submitted so many articles about the key to digg that the founder of digg decided to follow the lead of his community and let it happen.
A number that inspired creativity
You might have heard that the AACS is sending Cease and Desist letters to websites who link to a forum thread at the Doom9 forum which has information about the processing key for HD-DVD movies. Instead of focusing on the free speech issues that arise in this matter I would like to point out to something interesting. This number made many users creative and I decided to publish all the interesting creative works that point to that number.
09 F9 11 02 T-Shirt
Did you know that you could get into really big trouble if you post the code 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on your website ? It is very likely that a takedown notice will be send to the owner of the website as soon as the RIAA, the AACS or some of their lawyers find your website. You might be wondering why they are making such a big deal about this code which only some users might identify as the code to rule them all.. aka the processing key that unlocks the content of every HD-DVD available up to this point.
HD-DVD Encryption has been hacked
The war between Blue-Ray and HD-DVD is still in the beginning which frustrates the consumers. One nail in the Blue-Ray coffin might have been added today by a guy who managed to hack the HD-DVD encryption. Being able to backup the expensive HD-DVD movies could win the format war. Most users will not be able to backup their HD-DVDs right away because the process sounds a little bit complicated and the author of the code did not reveal all the information how he managed to rip a HD-DVD movie but the source is available which means that many programmers will take a look and create advanced versions of it.
