Last year I purchased a Black-Magic Intensity Pro HDMI capture card. It also captures component, S-Video, and composite. Of course, by itself none of my HDMI devices will send it a high-def signal.

Sooooo... I've recently added a HDCP stipper to my tool kit. You'll have a hard time finding these in the US for a while, but keep an eye out. (mine was sent from overseas). It basically answers the HDCP auth request and passes on the data to my HDMI capture card. I record 1080i from my Dish Network HD 722 receiver, and 1080p from Bluray player. The quality is outstanding.

Just to be clear, I don't share my archived content with anyone. I just believe it is my right to copy anything I've paid for (subscription content included) to my PC to archive it.

Now that Blu-ray has been cracked I don't have to go through the extra step of capturing it with my HDMI capture card, but I'm still using it on my Dish. (converting it to h.264 is the biggest pain)

The point I'm trying to make here - any determined individual can easily by-pass any of these annoying copy protection schemes. All the industry is doing is adding cost and annoyance to the process. Want to stop people from pirating a movie? How about they stop charging $15 for a movie that I already spent $20 going to the theater for? Sell a million copies @ $6 instead of 100k copies @ $20.

$2.99, or $1.99, or even $.99 isn't the magic number for an online show/movie/tune. Especially for an annoyingly DRM protected file.

Good job!! Seriously, restricting consumers from creating backups of media they purchases is downright annoying. It was only a matter of time before this happened and couldn't of happened to a better more deserving company like Sony who goes out of it's way to annoy the piss out of consumers.

You can't rely on algorithms for security if you're going to then just send out copies of the "protected" material for people to hack all they want at. Sooner or later someone will crack it, and hyper complex algorithms will be so slow that noone will want them for this kind of data volume.

The article is unclear if it strips all the encryption off so the new disc has no AACS or BD encryption. So it can then be copied with regular software like Nero.

Good stuff!

agreed - couldnt have said it better myself

Yes, this strips off both AACS and BD ! :)

Any more details on this HDCP stripper? Brand, model #, where to buy? Any info would be great!

bad is that slysoft is getting too much attention and will probably get sue and close down.
good is that now we can copy BD disc or downgrade it to fit into a DVD? (haven't try that yet)

I can't wait for BD drive and disc to go down in price so the I can burn disc.

Slysoft is purposly located in another country where they are very lax on copyright issues. It'll be hard for them to get sued.

Now other companies will have software and freeware. For everyone that goes out a hundred new ones will pop up.

So, where's the reaction from the Blu-Ray DRM scaremonger crowd? Honestly... I'm curious for their take.

"We over-estimated Sony's ability to make a secure DRM? We still do not like sony but this DRM being hacked is a good thing?"

Use your imagination.

Now if they use it or not is another matter. All Commercial diskes are suppose to have a watermark in the disk that only the player can read and that is not transmitted anywhere outside the drive. The problem is that Sony has advertised the S500 model as being able to play BDR disks, whereas the S300 can not.

Now the BDA could require that all new players only play disks with the watermark and accept the fact a couple of million players will be able to be used to play pirated/DRM broken disks. That way you could break the DRM all you want but you will not be able to make a disk to play back on your player. Of course you could still use your computer to play back the movie although the storage requirement will quickly consume disk space.

It will be fun to watch how the studios react to this. Unfortunately the studios will still have to use the special disk making process and pay Sony to do so because without the watermark some players (Sony S300) will not work. So if the Studios were smart(NOT) they will drop all the DRM and reduce the price of the movies to around $15 like has been talked about a week or two ago in the writers strike article.