bit-tech.net | Slysoft's AnyDVD HD ignores copy protection

Firehed 20th February 2007, 17:08

I wouldn't have even considered buying either format until this came out. Optical media for content is dead to me. First thing that happens is that it gets ripped and then encoded to a format that I can actually use. I don't see why I should plan to do anything different for HD content. In my... um... impartial testing, bit-torrent downloads et al never have things set up the way I like anyways (free/stolen or not, I'm still anal about that kind of thing).

In other words, three w00t!s for Slysoft :)

kenco_uk 20th February 2007, 17:15

Grammar error - 'off of' could really do with changing to 'from'.

What about ripping a hd-dvd and shrinking it down in a lossless format, losing all the other language soundtracks you don't want? It'd probably take up at least half the size, if not less.

mclean007 20th February 2007, 17:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenco_uk
Grammar error - 'off of' could really do with changing to 'from'.

Yup, that particular phrase really gets my back up as well.

Quote:

What about ripping a hd-dvd and shrinking it down in a lossless format, losing all the other language soundtracks you don't want? It'd probably take up at least half the size, if not less.

Doubt it. If you're talking lossless, you're not going to reduce the video size at all. You might save a few per cent by removing extras, cutting off the credits, getting rid of trailers / anti-piracy propaganda etc., and removing additional sound tracks, subs and menus, but really, the size of HD movies (I'd guess 80% minimum) is predominantly down to the actual video and primary lossless multichannel audio track.

If you're willing to sacrifice some video quality, you could easily pummel the size down, especially if you downscaled to SD, but what would be the point in that? I guess you might get better results re-encoding to a 700MB/1.4GB XVID file than you would with a DVD, because re-encoding from a higher quality original will reduce generation loss, but I would suggest that with anything bar the shoddiest of DVD transfers, the effect will be marginal at best.

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Slysoft argues that piracy is of relatively little concern for the HD world. HD movies require 30Gb to transfer, which is a pretty massive download. In order to then burn the disc, a person would also need an HD-DVD drive and blank discs, which don't come cheap. Effectively, the cost of mass piracy far outweighs the cost of simply buying the discs legally, so the benefits of AnyDVD HD shouldn't cause a big dent in sales.

Yeah, for now. When DVD first came out in the 90s who would have thought seriously about storing a library of movies on their HDD? And who had DVD burners? You could legitimately have made the argument that home piracy was not a real threat with the technology of the time. Technology marches on, and you can now get affordable HDDs that will store 100 uncompressed DVD rips, and it's almost impossible to buy a PC without a DVD burner. I suspect that 5 years from now it will be quite plausible and economical to make perfect home rips / copies of HD movies.

Edit: I'll add that in the 90s very few home users would have entertained the idea of downloading a 4.5GB DVD-R image over their 56k narrowband connections. Now it's a pretty trivial overnight / couple of days download for most people with (A)DSL. I suspect this trend will continue as well, and while I double we'll see such a quantum leap in bandwidth as the 56k -> ADSL increase, neither is the difference between 4.5GB and 15/30/25/50GB (single / dual layer HDDVD / single / dual layer BR) particularly large in the grand scheme of exponentially increasing storage / bandwidth.

Buzzons 20th February 2007, 17:55

Just a question : why does every one make out that it is MSs fault for the copy protection-- hollywood forced it on them, as well as hardware manufacturers and the like... so its not really microsofts fault (and didnt this happen in OSx/OSXI as well?)

Bursar 20th February 2007, 18:02

Quote:

The project basically nullifies the HDCP requirements that Microsoft was forced to put into Windows Vista

koola 20th February 2007, 18:04

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Originally Posted by Buzzons
Just a question : why does every one make out that it is MSs fault for the copy protection-- hollywood forced it on them, as well as hardware manufacturers and the like... so its not really microsofts fault (and didnt this happen in OSx/OSXI as well?)

They had the power and muscle to say No. M$ are a joke

Buzzons 20th February 2007, 18:08

so did all the companies that make stand alone players, screens, gfx cards and the like..

EQC 20th February 2007, 18:52

so how does this relate to all the hacking news about "cracks" to AACS?

Does this mean that Slysoft is using the exploits found by the hackers?

Or does Slysoft have some other means of stripping the DRM?

Does this make the previous hacking efforts pointless -- as now the hackers can just figure out what Slysoft did and copy it?

IIRC, the various hacks were just to fake the encrypted keys...but stripping the DRM entirely sounds much more useful.

Redbeaver 20th February 2007, 19:22

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Slysoft argues that piracy is of relatively little concern for the HD world. HD movies require 30Gb to transfer, which is a pretty massive download. In order to then burn the disc, a person would also need an HD-DVD drive and blank discs, which don't come cheap. Effectively, the cost of mass piracy far outweighs the cost of simply buying the discs legally, so the benefits of AnyDVD HD shouldn't cause a big dent in sales.

couldnt agree more...

bilbothebaggins 20th February 2007, 20:04

Ok, allow me to not get it :)

There's this content industry that invents various copy-protection measures (be it DVD / HD).
The manufacturers of playback devices and software implement these. (apparently?)

Then there's Slysoft. They just ignore the cp scheme and allow the user to actually use the content she's paid for.

The content industry doesn't take counter measures?

How can this hold / be legal / work ?

Tyr 20th February 2007, 21:13

So, I can play HD content on my non HDCP 1920x1200 notebook screen!!! YAY!!! Now if only nVidia could do HD video I'd be happy. Hardware decoding produces horrible artefacts and noise!

DXR_13KE 20th February 2007, 21:53

2 cents say that they will be sued soon.

Kipman725 20th February 2007, 22:19

sly soft are located on an island where the DMCA dosn't apply. Rember the law that made breaking DVD copy protection ilegal and caused the best ripper to no longer be devoloped?

DXR_13KE 20th February 2007, 23:14

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Originally Posted by Kipman725
sly soft are located on an island where the DMCA dosn't apply. Rember the law that made breaking DVD copy protection ilegal and caused the best ripper to no longer be devoloped?

are you sure? i mean... look at pirate bay and allofmp3......

Tyinsar 20th February 2007, 23:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Article
Slysoft argues that piracy is of relatively little concern for the HD world. HD movies require 30Gb to transfer, which is a pretty massive download. In order to then burn the disc, a person would also need an HD-DVD drive and blank discs, which don't come cheap. Effectively, the cost of mass piracy far outweighs the cost of simply buying the discs legally...

The same was once true of CDs and DVDs. Eventually the bandwidth will increase and the cost of burners & blank media will drop.

Aankhen 20th February 2007, 23:52

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Originally Posted by mclean007
I guess you might get better results re-encoding to a 700MB/1.4GB XVID file than you would with a DVD, because re-encoding from a higher quality original will reduce generation loss, but I would suggest that with anything bar the shoddiest of DVD transfers, the effect will be marginal at best.

With XviD, perhaps, but I'm very interested in H.264 rips of the HD formats. H.264 rips of DVDs aren't much better (compared to XviD) as it stands, mostly because they're limited by the source material.

r4tch3t 21st February 2007, 02:48

I for one will never use the original disks to watch a movie, just too much chance of skipping etc. I would much prefer to buy the movie, rip it and then watch it from my HTPC. DRM is useless. Way to go Slysoft.

Phil Rhodes 21st February 2007, 03:24

Oh, wow, Binky, look. That Took A Long Time.

P

Redbeaver 21st February 2007, 04:07

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Originally Posted by DXR_13KE
are you sure? i mean... look at pirate bay and allofmp3......

piratebay, yes, but whatabout allofmp3....? they got sued.... didnt seems to stop them. :(

mclean007 21st February 2007, 10:42

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Originally Posted by DXR_13KE
are you sure? i mean... look at pirate bay and allofmp3......

Completely different - pirate bay offers a tracking service that enables the unauthorised download of content protected by copyright. Okay, they don't actually host the content, but the principle stands.

Allofmp3 does directly host content that (the RIAA claims) it is not authorised to offer for download.

In both cases, pirate bay and allofmp3 are offering users unauthorised copies of protected content. In total contrast, Slysoft (as I understand) has only made a tool which enables someone to strip the DRM from protected HD discs. If you only used it to back up your own discs to your media centre for streaming around your home, would you be doing anything wrong? Morally, I'd argue that the answer is clearly no, and in many countries (including the US - if we ignore laws precluding the circumvention of DRM, personal copies for fair use are legitimate), the legal answer is also no.

Let's take an analogy. Allofmp3 is selling copies of old skool analogue music tapes at a dodgy car boot sale. The pirate bay is an organisation that puts people in touch with other people who have copied tapes for swaps. Slysoft is just making tape recorders.

My understanding of the DCMA is quite limited, but I believe it prohibits the reverse engineering of software in order to strip out DRM. The DCMA is an enactment of the US legislature, the jurisdiction of which stops (regardless of what they may think) at American borders. As such, unless you live in a country bound by the DCMA or a similar law, you can reverse engineer software to your heart's content, as Slysoft has done. On the other hand, most countries do have laws preventing direct infringement of copyright, so setting up a pirate bay / allofmp3 type service is a lot more controversial.

mclean007 21st February 2007, 10:54

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Originally Posted by Tyinsar
The same was once true of CDs and DVDs. Eventually the bandwidth will increase and the cost of burners & blank media will drop.

Look up 12 posts dude. You're late to the party! :D

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Originally Posted by Aankhen
With XviD, perhaps, but I'm very interested in H.264 rips of the HD formats. H.264 rips of DVDs aren't much better (compared to XviD) as it stands, mostly because they're limited by the source material.

Okay, I'm sure H.264 rips will look better with HD source than with DVD, but my point stands. My point was that you won't get ANY lossless compression out of an even half-way decently encoded video file of any format (kenco_uk was suggesting that you could losslessly compress an HD movie to half its size).

If we're talking lossy compression, then of course the newer, more advanced codecs will likely produce better results than the older ones. However, to compress an HD movie lossily and maintain the HD resolution and acceptable quality, we need to face the fact that file sizes are still going to be pretty big. 50% might be realistic, I don't know, but that's still way above the 10GB mark for a 2 hour movie. You will have to compress quite aggressively, with some pretty horrendous artefacts, I suspect, to make a full HD movie (i.e. ~2 hours in 1080p), recompressed but retaining the HD res, fit on even a DL DVD.

Let's not forget that almost all HD-DVDs and most of the newer Blu-Ray discs are not encoded in MPEG-2 - they are using VC-1, which, though generally held in lower regard than H.264, is considerably more efficient than MPEG-2. As such, to retain most of the fidelity, you're not going to save a lot of space by re-encoding to H.264.

Even allowing for the fact that decent quality HD rips are still going to be on the >10GB scale, I predict mass torrenting of HD content within a couple of years. Definitely within 5 years it will be as trivial to download an HD movie as it is to download an SD movie now.

Aankhen 22nd February 2007, 04:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by mclean007
Okay, I'm sure H.264 rips will look better with HD source than with DVD, but my point stands. My point was that you won't get ANY lossless compression out of an even half-way decently encoded video file of any format (kenco_uk was suggesting that you could losslessly compress an HD movie to half its size).

Hrm. I'm not sure how feasible that would be. The only frame of reference I have is that you can losslessly compress CD-quality audio to 50% its size, but to the best of my (limited) knowledge that's the result of a. a lot of work over a long period of time, and b. the inherent nature of audio. So yeah, I guess expecting 50% lossless compression is a bit much at this point.

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Let's not forget that almost all HD-DVDs and most of the newer Blu-Ray discs are not encoded in MPEG-2 - they are using VC-1, which, though generally held in lower regard than H.264, is considerably more efficient than MPEG-2. As such, to retain most of the fidelity, you're not going to save a lot of space by re-encoding to H.264.

Mmm. Let's put it this way: re-encoding it to a 700 MB or even 10 GB H.264 would be better than re-encoding it to a 700 MB or 10 GB XviD. ;) Am I far enough away from the original point of the thread yet? :p

mclean007 22nd February 2007, 10:42

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Originally Posted by Aankhen
Hrm. I'm not sure how feasible that would be. The only frame of reference I have is that you can losslessly compress CD-quality audio to 50% its size, but to the best of my (limited) knowledge that's the result of a. a lot of work over a long period of time, and b. the inherent nature of audio. So yeah, I guess expecting 50% lossless compression is a bit much at this point.

You are right - good lossless audio codecs can make ~50% file size reduction. However, that is a result of the fact that CD / WAV audio files are not at all compressed, so can easily be losslessly compressed. Think about it, if you were writing a lossy video codec, and you found your output could be losslessly compressed, you'd realise your codec wasn't producing the smallest file sizes and you'd either improve the algorithm (most likely) or add a final step that losslessly compressed the lossily encoded output.

It may be that there are codecs that produce more efficient lossy encoding than what is used on HD discs, but the very nature of lossy encoding means that you will ALWAYS lose some quality if you decode the original HD content and re-encode it with your superior encoder. So unless you can get hold of the original, uncompressed, HD source (on the order of 1TB for a 1080p24 2 hour movie) you won't get a video file of equal quality to the HD disc with a smaller file size.

kenco_uk 22nd February 2007, 11:37

What I was on about was the fact that, even on DVD's, you can leave out 5.1 DTS soundtracks for languages you're never going to want. I would imagine, with HD-DVD having that much more available room, you're going to get even more DTS foreign language sound stuffed on it. And with DTS 5.1 taking up a fair chunk of space on a standard DVD, I'd imagine they'd take even more room up on a HD-DVD. Thus you could drop them and save a lot of storage space.

Imo, 'lossless' was probably the wrong word. I used it in the same context as people call .ogg 'lossless' compared to mp3. As mcclean007 mentioned, a h264 rip would keep enough integrity of the picture and sound.

mclean007 22nd February 2007, 13:22

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Originally Posted by kenco_uk
What I was on about was the fact that, even on DVD's, you can leave out 5.1 DTS soundtracks for languages you're never going to want. I would imagine, with HD-DVD having that much more available room, you're going to get even more DTS foreign language sound stuffed on it. And with DTS 5.1 taking up a fair chunk of space on a standard DVD, I'd imagine they'd take even more room up on a HD-DVD. Thus you could drop them and save a lot of storage space.

Maybe, but as a percentage of the storage space of the disc, the audio tracks will probably be a lot less than on a DVD. I wouldn't expect the savings, percentage-wise, to be as good as with DVD, especially if you want your rip to include the highest quality audio on the disc (PCM multi-channel or Dolby TrueHD). I guess if you binned that and took the standard DTS/DD 5.1 track, you'd probably save a lot more space, but that sort of defeats the point a bit.

Quote:

Imo, 'lossless' was probably the wrong word. I used it in the same context as people call .ogg 'lossless' compared to mp3. As mcclean007 mentioned, a h264 rip would keep enough integrity of the picture and sound.

Fair enough. I guess the thing is, DVD used a pretty inefficient codec by modern standards (MPEG-2), so it was quite easy to rip and encode DVDs to much smaller file sizes while retaining the majority of the detail of the original, simply by using a better codec. Both the HD formats are capable of using MPEG-4 derived better codecs themselves, and (with the exception of some early blu-ray titles, which inexplicably used MPEG-2) seem to have settled on VC-1, which, while perhaps not quite up there with H.264, is not nearly so inferior as MPEG-2 is to, say, XVID.

Obviously, H.264 doesn't touch the sound, so the integrity of the sound is down to whether you keep the original lossless TrueHD/PCM, the original lossy 5.1, the original stereo (eugh, that's if they even still put 2-channel on the new discs) or a recode of one of the above.

I've never heard of Vorbis (I presume this is what you mean by .ogg) being called 'lossless' compared to mp3. As I see it, something either is lossless or it isn't, so the concept of 'comparatively lossless' is meaningless. You could say that Vorbis achieves transparency (where you can't tell the difference between the encoded version and the original) at a lower bit-rate than mp3 for most people and on most equipment. I guess also that some people can still tell well encoded 320kb/sec MP3 (think lame --alt-preset insane) from the original with certain source audio - my ears aren't that good - whereas they might accept q9/q10 Vorbis as transparent. I don't know. On my stereo, with my ears, q6 is perfectly transparent, as is MP3 at --alt-preset standard.

kenco_uk 22nd February 2007, 14:03

Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying (and I sit down, corrected, for the most part) you're missing the point of what I'm trying to say. Uncompressed or HD audio takes up a fair amount of space (even if it is the only audio stream on the disc, there'll be more than one language) and as you say, audio 'transparency' means you could get away with at least some compression. Tie that together with the fact that it won't just be in English, but Italian, Spanish, German, etc.. all you'd need would be the language you want to hear, so you could drop the other languages and save a fair amount of space.

Granted, I may have exaggerated saying you could save about half the space, but do you want me quoting exact figures? I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I'm just trying to get my point across.

mclean007 22nd February 2007, 14:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenco_uk
Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying (and I sit down, corrected, for the most part) you're missing the point of what I'm trying to say. Uncompressed or HD audio takes up a fair amount of space (even if it is the only audio stream on the disc, there'll be more than one language) and as you say, audio 'transparency' means you could get away with at least some compression. Tie that together with the fact that it won't just be in English, but Italian, Spanish, German, etc.. all you'd need would be the language you want to hear, so you could drop the other languages and save a fair amount of space.

Granted, I may have exaggerated saying you could save about half the space, but do you want me quoting exact figures? I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I'm just trying to get my point across.

Totally, you could definitely save some space with no loss of quality by stripping out the superfluous features, languages, subs etc., and by trimming the credits if you like that kind of thing. My point was that, based on the assumption that audio bitrates won't increase as much from DVD to HD as video bitrates as a rule, the percentage saving of stripping out the unwanted sound tracks will not be as great. Now, if you're just directly ripping from (say) a 30GB movie, saving 1-2 GB of sound is no big deal. If, however, you plan to accept some loss of quality by re-encoding at lower bitrate, that 1-2GB starts to look like a much bigger saving in the face of, say, a 10GB file. Take it to the logical conclusion, i.e. rips to dual layer DVD or two single layer DVDs, and saving a bit on sound will, I agree, make sense as it allows you to keep the video bitrate (and hence quality) as high as possible.

I think we're preaching from the same bible!

Anyway, personally I'm not bothered about the availability of pirate copies for download / purchase from my local friendly Chinese mafia. The reason I'd want to be able to rip HD discs is to archive them on my (future) media server, in their full, untained HD glory (i.e. no re-encoding). I will obviously tear out the unwanted languages, subs, features (I've never watched the extras on 99% of my discs, and I'll still have all the originals, so I'll be happy to put the disc in if I ever fancy a bit of behind the scenes action) and lesser quality audio streams (retaining the PCM/TrueHD/DD+ whichever is the best available on the disc). Terabytes of storage are getting pretty reasonable these days, so a RAID-5 server with ~3TB (mmm - 100+ HD films) will be quite affordable in a couple of years, when I plan to make this a reality - hopefully the ripper technology will be flawless and easy to use by then!

kenco_uk 22nd February 2007, 14:43

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Originally Posted by mcclean007

Anyway, personally I'm not bothered about the availability of pirate copies for download / purchase from my local friendly Chinese mafia.

lol :D

I've just had a wiki on hd-dvd and there's a few more audio streams that are apparantly mandatory, i.e. Linear PCM, True-HD(2-ch)+, DD+, DD, DTS and MPEG Audio.

Am I reading this right?
The Maximum Data Transfer rate is 36.55 Mb/s on a HD-DVD, of which a maximum of 29.4 Mb/s is used for Video. This leaves 7.15 Mb/s used for audio which sounds fair enough.

Compare this to 10.08 Mb/s maximum bandwidth on a DVD and 9.8 Mb/s for video, this leaves 0.28 Mb/s used for audio on DVD!

This is what's confusing me into thinking that, you could have a lossless VC-1 video track with just your preferred audio stream and save shed loads of storage space, as the audio bandwidth on HD-DVD jumps way above that of DVD, which translates to me that audio takes up a crap-load more room in comparison (I.e. the 7.15 Mb/s for an hour and a half takes up a lot more room percentage-wise on a hd-dvd disc than a 0.28 Mb/s for an hour and a half movie on a dvd disc).

Please put me right :)

Aankhen 24th February 2007, 02:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by mclean007
You are right - good lossless audio codecs can make ~50% file size reduction. However, that is a result of the fact that CD / WAV audio files are not at all compressed, so can easily be losslessly compressed. Think about it, if you were writing a lossy video codec, and you found your output could be losslessly compressed, you'd realise your codec wasn't producing the smallest file sizes and you'd either improve the algorithm (most likely) or add a final step that losslessly compressed the lossily encoded output.

Yes, you're quite right. I'm afraid I don't really have anything else to say after that large quote. :p

mclean007 25th February 2007, 02:10

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Originally Posted by kenco_uk
I've just had a wiki on hd-dvd and there's a few more audio streams that are apparantly mandatory, i.e. Linear PCM, True-HD(2-ch)+, DD+, DD, DTS and MPEG Audio.

Am I reading this right?

kind of - 'mandatory' is a reference to the fact that all players have to support these streams, not that they must be on every disc.

Quote:

The Maximum Data Transfer rate is 36.55 Mb/s on a HD-DVD, of which a maximum of 29.4 Mb/s is used for Video. This leaves 7.15 Mb/s used for audio which sounds fair enough.

Well, that's assuming the full 29.4 Mb/s is used for video. I guess in principle you could use almost the entire bandwidth for audio and have a crappy 300kb/s video stream, though that kind of defeats the point! :D

If you look in the wikipedia entry for Dolby Digital, you'll see that HD-DVD specifies 18 Mb/s maximum data rate for a single TrueHD stream.

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Compare this to 10.08 Mb/s maximum bandwidth on a DVD and 9.8 Mb/s for video, this leaves 0.28 Mb/s used for audio on DVD!

Again, that's assuming the full 9.8 Mb/s is used for video, leaving only 280 kb/s for audio. In practice, I think DVD soundtracks generally use more bandwidth - the Dolby Digital article on wikipedia suggests that DVD supports AC-3 Dolby Digital tracks with bitrates up to 448 kb/s per track - if you have a few of these plus a couple of lesser quality soundtracks for director's commentary, secondary languages etc., it soon adds up.

Quote:

This is what's confusing me into thinking that, you could have a lossless VC-1 video track with just your preferred audio stream and save shed loads of storage space, as the audio bandwidth on HD-DVD jumps way above that of DVD, which translates to me that audio takes up a crap-load more room in comparison (I.e. the 7.15 Mb/s for an hour and a half takes up a lot more room percentage-wise on a hd-dvd disc than a 0.28 Mb/s for an hour and a half movie on a dvd disc).

I'd be surprised if any discs are using 7.15 Mb/s average for their audio streams. But yes, if you had a disc that featured multiple high bitrate lossless streams for multiple languates / director's commentary etc., then you could in principle save a fair amount while keeping a perfect copy of the video stream and your chosen audio stream. In practice, however, I expect most discs to ship with a high bitrate lossless English soundtrack, up to one or two other lower rate English tracks, and a number of lower quality soundtracks for other languages. So if you want to keep the best quality English track, you will be keeping the highest bitrate soundtrack, and while you might save a decent amount of space by getting rid of the others, it won't be THAT much.

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