Macrovision claims to be able to make the current CSS DVD copy protection scheme more effective from rippers without compromising compatibilityI was doing some reading a while ago and there were claims that film studios were sometimes making more on DVD sales than at the box office.?Regardless of what the split is there is no doubt that DVDs are a lucrative source of income for studios which is why they have a vested interest in cracking down on movie traders and movie rippers.?News.com is running a story about Macrovision and how they may be able to tweak the cracked CSS copy protection system to make it more difficult to rip future DVDs without sacrificing compatibility
Gervin said Macrovision engineers have spent several years looking at how various DVD-copying software packages work and have devised ways to tweak the encoding of a DVD to block most of them. That means the audio and video content itself requires no new hardware and isn't scrambled anew, as is the case with most rights-management techniques. Someone using one of the ripping tools on a protected DVD might simply find their software crashing, or be presented with error messages instead of a copy.
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the company says it is confident that discs encoded with its new product will be playable on all major DVD player brands and PC drives.
The final statement sort of worries me - I think I know about as many people with non-major DVD player brands as major ones. If they manage to keep compatibility with existing DVD players though, more power to them. However, I do not know how effective the scheme they are proposing will be - most of the mangled CD protection schemes that have been released have been broken quickly and easily. This might keep the more casual DVD back up people on their toes though as having to download different programs or different updates for each particular movie will be tedious. Article Link: Macrovision will attempt to bolster DVD CSS
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