The x264 Project Bangs Out A Blu-Ray Encoder

[jbrown96]

I suggest you refrain from commenting on this since you clearly don't have any idea about encryption or video players.

First off, ENCRYPTION is in NO WAY restricted.... anywhere. USA/DMCA does NOT restrict encryption -- it restricts UNAUTHORIZED DECRYPTION. If you are the one doing the encryption, then you are, by definition, authorized.

Secondly, one can know the ENCRYPTION keys withOUT knowing the DECRYPTION keys. It does NOT compromise the encryption for a "for public use" key to be used in the encryption of public materials.

Third, JUST WHERE did you come up with the idea that a BD player won't play an unencrypted disk? What a BD player WON'T play is an ENCRYPTED disk that was made AFTER that player had ITS DECRYPT KEYS REVOKED.

You don't understand the encryption system used by AACS. It's a multi-stage AES encryption, which uses symmetric keys. Knowing the encryption process necessarily means you understand the decryption process. Since the work to create an AACS disk would allow for decryption, it's illegal in the USA.
While the individual AES steps might not be illegal, the entire process certainly falls under a circumvention device and would be illegal.
There are no "for public use" keys available for free. AACS LA is very strict about payment. They would never allow x264 to release their keys for free (beer and/or speech).
For disks that have a BD structure (opposed to BD-R structure), AACS is required. Players are forbidden from playing them, largely because they would be illegal copies in 99.9% of cases. You could try to put a BD structure on a BD-R disk, but the players aren't allowed to play it. On a PC, you could probably get by this, but not on a standalone player.

Even if we step outside all of the decryption/encryption talk, all of these processes are heavily patent encumbered. While MPEG-LA hasn't stepped in to stop X264, I think that AACS LA would destroy them. MPEG-LA has an interest to foster the creation of H.264; they lose some money on people using free stuff like x264, but they make more money by the increased use of H.264. Large companies buying licenses are where the money is made. AACS LA on the hand depends on the integrity of AACS to sell its product. If anyone can bypass that, then they are irreparably harmed (and I mean a substantial crack, not individual titles/players). They have zero incentive to give away or allow others to create keys "for public use." It undermines the entire security of AACS. When your entire business model is built on security, you tend to take it very seriously.

[V!NCENT]

AACS was already cracked a loooooooooooong time ago. And then I do not mean just 'a' key, but the motherkey ("of DRM" as it was called). Want proof? Just look at all the sigs of /. users. Some still have them in there.

Ever since 'they' just created a new scheme with new keys and the old scheme is now in every new player, along with the new protection just so that old titles can still be played.

Ofcourse the reason you can't play new BDs in old BD players that are not linked to the internet is because they are only supporting 'the old spec' <- yeah right, and massive sarcasm!

[DeepDayze]

You don't understand the encryption system used by AACS. It's a multi-stage AES encryption, which uses symmetric keys. Knowing the encryption process necessarily means you understand the decryption process. Since the work to create an AACS disk would allow for decryption, it's illegal in the USA.
While the individual AES steps might not be illegal, the entire process certainly falls under a circumvention device and would be illegal.
There are no "for public use" keys available for free. AACS LA is very strict about payment. They would never allow x264 to release their keys for free (beer and/or speech).
For disks that have a BD structure (opposed to BD-R structure), AACS is required. Players are forbidden from playing them, largely because they would be illegal copies in 99.9% of cases. You could try to put a BD structure on a BD-R disk, but the players aren't allowed to play it. On a PC, you could probably get by this, but not on a standalone player.

Even if we step outside all of the decryption/encryption talk, all of these processes are heavily patent encumbered. While MPEG-LA hasn't stepped in to stop X264, I think that AACS LA would destroy them. MPEG-LA has an interest to foster the creation of H.264; they lose some money on people using free stuff like x264, but they make more money by the increased use of H.264. Large companies buying licenses are where the money is made. AACS LA on the hand depends on the integrity of AACS to sell its product. If anyone can bypass that, then they are irreparably harmed (and I mean a substantial crack, not individual titles/players). They have zero incentive to give away or allow others to create keys "for public use." It undermines the entire security of AACS. When your entire business model is built on security, you tend to take it very seriously.

Yes I am positive this will definitely prick up the ears of MPEG-LA and AACS-LA's legal team. If this project really gathers steam, there might be the possibility of the DMCA being invoked to stop this. As we have seen with dvdcss there's a lot of legal precedent out there that can kill this.

I'm also sure the encryption will be broken, but at the same time the smart hats at AACS-LA will retaliate with a newer encryption process that would necessitate ALL players to have firmware updates

I would not ever hook my player to the internet just for the spooks to update it without warning

[DeepDayze]

AACS was already cracked a loooooooooooong time ago. And then I do not mean just 'a' key, but the motherkey ("of DRM" as it was called). Want proof? Just look at all the sigs of /. users. Some still have them in there.

Ever since 'they' just created a new scheme with new keys and the old scheme is now in every new player, along with the new protection just so that old titles can still be played.

Ofcourse the reason you can't play new BDs in old BD players that are not linked to the internet is because they are only supporting 'the old spec' <- yeah right, and massive sarcasm!

And I'm sure that the motherkey's been changed...and everyone and their brother has to update their players. Not a pretty sight!

[Fixxer_Linux]

I'm no developper at all and I'm little at a lost with all this Bluray topic.
I still don't very understand some things.
You can find in stores BluRay players (the Bluray player for connecting to your TV, in your living room) for less than 150-200 euros (or dollars) that will play all the bluray discs you can feed him, no matter if the Bluray is to be bought in two years.
The Bluray player is also not connected to internet, so he can't grab new disc keys or revocate it's keys that are stored in its eeprom but you would have feed it with an uncrypted bluray or whatever.

So, knowing that, why is it so hard to find the keys for working for all the Bluray existing and to come and writing down a BluRay reader for linux, just it's exists on DVD ?

This post is by no way to mean that it's should be done and is supposed to be easy, it's just to understand why it's so hard.

Can't some hacker group buy a cheap Bluray player, pull down the Eeprom contents on PC and apply this to a linux player ?
TOTALY ILLEGAL, I know, but it has been done quite fast on DVD, why so much difficulty with bluray, knowing that a stupid bluray player can do it for less than 100 bucks ? (i also know that complexity has no relation with price in this case).

And if it's to find the key with brutal force, some grid computing using GPU calculation couldn't do the job in a sizeable time ?!?

[jbrown96]

AACS was already cracked a loooooooooooong time ago. And then I do not mean just 'a' key, but the motherkey ("of DRM" as it was called). Want proof? Just look at all the sigs of /. users. Some still have them in there.

Ever since 'they' just created a new scheme with new keys and the old scheme is now in every new player, along with the new protection just so that old titles can still be played.

Ofcourse the reason you can't play new BDs in old BD players that are not linked to the internet is because they are only supporting 'the old spec' <- yeah right, and massive sarcasm!

A few keys were broken, but it's completely different than the CSS crack for DVDs. CSS was very weak encryption that allowed for brute-force attacks, but even more significantly, the algorithm was reverse-engineered. There is no way to make a CSS key that cannot be cracked easily. Hence, it's trivial to copy DVDs and play them on unlicensed players such as VLC. A CSS-type crack for AACS would be necessary to create BD structure disks. however, the keys that have been found are for specific players and disks. These keys are not a "master key" because no such key exists, and do not lead to a reverse-engineered form of the algorithm to allow for key generation.

Furthermore, Volume IDs are a part of AACS that are required in Blu-ray players. Consumer BD writers cannot write the BD-ROM Mark where the Volume ID is stored, so it would be impossible to burn a BD-R that could meet the BD structure requirements. This is in addition to the inability, legally and technically, to create AACS-compliant disks.

[jbrown96]

I'm no developper at all and I'm little at a lost with all this Bluray topic.
I still don't very understand some things.
You can find in stores BluRay players (the Bluray player for connecting to your TV, in your living room) for less than 150-200 euros (or dollars) that will play all the bluray discs you can feed him, no matter if the Bluray is to be bought in two years.
The Bluray player is also not connected to internet, so he can't grab new disc keys or revocate it's keys that are stored in its eeprom but you would have feed it with an uncrypted bluray or whatever.

So, knowing that, why is it so hard to find the keys for working for all the Bluray existing and to come and writing down a BluRay reader for linux, just it's exists on DVD ?

This post is by no way to mean that it's should be done and is supposed to be easy, it's just to understand why it's so hard.

Can't some hacker group buy a cheap Bluray player, pull down the Eeprom contents on PC and apply this to a linux player ?
TOTALY ILLEGAL, I know, but it has been done quite fast on DVD, why so much difficulty with bluray, knowing that a stupid bluray player can do it for less than 100 bucks ? (i also know that complexity has no relation with price in this case).

And if it's to find the key with brutal force, some grid computing using GPU calculation couldn't do the job in a sizeable time ?!?

The problem with breaking in to any individual player (i.e. a specific model) is that the keys can be revoked. AACS is very well designed to be able to revoke keys without causing wide-spread problems. Typically, crackers look to break PC Blu-ray players, and AACS has invalidated those keys and replaced them. AACS is very different from CSS. Keys are very individual and can be revoked fairly easily.
The brute-force suggestion is laughable. AACS uses AES encryption, which is sufficient for top secret documents. Furthermore, even if individual keys could be brute-forced, learning one doesn't help you cracking the others. All this cracking would have to be re-done for each title.
Blu-ray rips exist because the security of keys in software players is not perfect, and the keys can be recovered. However, there is a decent amount of work that needs to be done to find them. And again, the keys can be revoked. What crackers typically do with this is to not make the keys publically available, but AACS takes that into account. From the decrypted content, the keys that were broken can be recovered, so AACS LA knows which keys to revoke.

[Daniel Fraga]

Well "support" for mplayer is overrated. It is very unlikely that you can buy a new bd and play it directly using libbluray. What matters is m2ts support - and there subtitles are still missing for

I'm trying to convince some MPlayer developer to support PGS subtitles...

http://bugzilla.mplayerhq.hu/show_bug.cgi?id=1512

There're 2 developers which could code it:

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2009-July/061909.html

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2010-April/064374.html

PGS and menu/playlist support are the 2 features I want most.

[3rdalbum]

I'm pretty sure the AACS LA would not revoke the keys of a hardware player, because almost nobody actually connects their hardware Bluray players to the internet. If we discovered the key for a popular early player or a popular player that does not have specific online features, then I'm pretty sure the key would never be revoked due to the widespread problems for legitimate users.

Then again, they might... but it's a more promising direction than just continuing to crack software players.

What we really need is an open standard for high definition discs, that will not have DRM. Work on this needs to start straight away, to support 4k resolution in 3D. By the time display technology catches up, there will already be a standard (ours) for putting this content onto discs, and it would have a chance of gaining traction simply for being the first standard and hopefully the first fully-implemented standard.

[Kano]

Without firmware updates for your HARDWARE players you just can not play current titles when the encryption changes, that's clear or not?