The AACS (Advanced Access Content Systems) once said its DRM (Digital Rights Management) was unbreakable. The content protection DRM is designed to prevent movies on HD DVD (and Blu-ray) from being backed up. Well, it only took a hacker named muslix64 on the Doom9 boards about eight days.
The current program from muslix64 is called BackupHDDVD.99 can be downloaded on the Doom9 Forums. It’ll allow you to backup the contents of your HD DVD movie disk, provided you have an encryption key. Keys for only a few movies released to HD DVD are available on the forums but there are no instructions as to how to obtain one from other movies.
Muslix64 is currently working on BackupHDDVD V1.00 which should be able to do a full backup of any HD DVD film and will provide encryption keys.
After all that fanfare about a unbreakable code developed by the AACS and it gets cracked in eight days. Good work muslix64. He says he did it because he was using the Xbox360’s HD DVD add on and felt the inability for the system to playback HD DVD movies on his PC constituted unfair use. So, taking matters into his own hands he cracked it by himself. A hero if ever there was one.
Now I’m interested to see someone crack those extra layers of encryption on Blu-ray above and beyond the AACS’s mandated DRM.