HD-DVD / Blu-ray Hack pending?

[nightflier]

Apparently someone figured out how to get around the HD-DVD / Blu-ray copy protection and I suspect it won't be long before someone writes a more elegant procedure than just tapping a key repeatedly, but here it is:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/07/07/print_screen_hd_hack/

[superpanavision70mm]

OMG...I hope that wasn't suppose to be serious! Do you know how many pages that would be? Well, let's see....24fps....that means a 2 hour film would only be ...

172,800 frames.

[teledynepost]

Wait, wouldn't that be like 1 TB of data at 1080p (24bit bitmaps)? I don't know about video formats, but is there some sort of lossless compression done on these discs? I thought they had capacities of 20-40GB or something.

[nightflier]

20-40Gb may seem like a lot, but if someone's going to burn that right back to a HD-DVD or Blu-ray disk, then that's not an issue for hard drive space. Although I do imagine that the burning will take some time...

[bfalls]

Copy protection isn't intended to guard against computer savvy hackers. There's always going to be a way around any copy protection. It's intended to stop the "one-button" ripping programs that everyone can use. Or at least make the process time and labor intensive, or expensive.

Copy protection uses dummy chapters, patterns which cause the player to freeze and sometimes specific arithmetic commands which cause the copy processing to jump to a wrong destination on the disc. It's very sophisticated. Yes maybe the "printscreen" ploy works now because the studios are more concerned about producing disc for the market than they are about copy protection, especially since the cost of BD-R discs are still pretty prohibitive. Once it takes off and studios can retask their resources the copy protection will be more sophisticated than ever by utilizing more storage space. With DVD+-R being so inexpensive a hacker can make 5 "coasters" for every one DVD and still be ahead, depending on what value he places on his time. With most hackers, it's more the challenge than the movie.