[mythtv-users] CD Copy protection?

[Ryan Steffes]

The trick of the whole situation is that the only protections that even 
kinda work are the ones that use bad data. However, it can't be TOO bad or 
you wouldn't be able to play it at all, and the amount of peopel who watch 
movies/listen to music on their computers is too large a segment to ignore.

I recently got a copy of Hitch to take with me on vacation. My plan was to 
rip to my external drive, with some other movies, and stick it in a bag. We 
can watch it on a laptop when we get there, or pipe it through the laptop to 
composite-in on the TV. However, the copy I got was a used movie rental and 
has that Sony protection with the bad sectors. Mythtv, dvd::rip, and 
mencoder all freaked trying to rip it. Maybe there's a way around it with 
those, but I don't know.

What I do know is that mplayer didn't care as much about making the file a 
perfect rip and played it just fine. Once I realized that, it didn't take me 
long to do the math and just play it to a file through mplayer and create my 
own nice little vob. Even the best CD copy protection isn't going to stop 
people from connecting line-out to line-in -- old school tape recorder 
style.

Ditto for DVDs, it's not that hard to play your DVD out to PVR in. Standard 
formats just can't be protected too much or they become useless, and you 
aren't going to sell a new standard to people who are very happy with the 
old standard. No one is going to be able to force everyone to change their 
TV, stereo equipment, computer hardware, car stereo, radios, boomboxes, dvd 
players, VHS players, and put special DRM chips in everything, including ALL 
speakers and microphones and video cameras. That's what you'd have to do to 
keep any copies from being made ever.

No law can protect a bad business model forever.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20050805/b06eec99/attachment.htm