What if the DRM on your DVD player didn't work?
By Richard Lawler 
posted Feb 22nd 2006 3:47PM
posted Feb 22nd 2006 3:47PM
Yeah that might make you happy, but it could be a real problem for the manufacturer. Enter Samsung's DVD-HD841, an upconverting DVD player sold in 2004; it didn't sell well until a key "feature" was uncovered, you could hack it to turn off region coding and HDCP protections. The player has long been off the market, but now several movie studios have brought lawsuits against Samsung for their failure to protect content.But we all know that there have been ways around the CSS encryption practically since DVDs launched, so why sue now? Ars Technica supposes that this is more about setting an example for the next generation of DVD players, and I tend to agree. If/when someone finds a way around AACS and HDCP expect the lawsuits to come hard and heavy.
The funny thing is that I never would have even thought of hacking my DVD-HD841 player until I saw a press release yesterday that said it was easy to do. Last night I went home and tried it out and had the thing all fixed up in about 5 minutes. It even plays DiVx movies now, which is great considering I almost bought another player a few weeks ago just for that purpose.
If they'd just kept their mouths shut, normally law-abiding citizens like me wouldn't have even thought about it. Now that it's out in the open I consider it fair game!
Am I missing something about DRM?
For example, It's pretty computationally expensive to demand that the chips that handle video-processing (for things like dynamic shutters in projectors, white-balance, etc) operate on encrypted image data. It'd be a huge calculation overhead for every corrected pixel, especially for antialiasing techniques, since that would be multiple decryptions per antialiased pixel.
Much cheaper to decrypt and use a "clear" signal for processing, since a clear signal can be put through current video-processing hardware.
But as soon as you have a clear signal, someone can intercept it and bypass all the downstream copyright/DRM measures. (HDMI, MACROVISION, etc)
There will always be someone willing to break out the soldering iron and syphon clear signals off the PC board.