According to a new thread in the official SlySoft forums as well as threads in the Doom9 forums, the new AnyDVD HD will break new BD+ copy protection, the same protection that Sony said would be uncrackable for at least 10 years. There is also a tool coming from Doom9 members that should remove the BD+ from new movies.
Slysoft’s AnyDVD changelog says:
6.4.7.8 2008 10 22
- “New (Blu-ray): Added option to disable BD-Live”
- New (Blu-ray): Added removal of region locks from menus
- New (Blu-ray): Added support for new version of the BD+ copy protection
- Some minor fixes and improvements
- Updated languages
Oopho2ei’s post at Doom9 here says “I am glad to announce the first successful restoration of the BD+ protected movie “The Day After Tomorrow” in linux. It was done using a blue ray drive with patched firmware (to get the volume id), DumpHD to decrypt the contents according to the AACS specification and the BDVM debugger from this thread to generate the conversion table. The conversion table is the key information to successfully repair all the broken parts in m2ts files to restore the original video content. This small tool was finally used to repair the main movie file “00001.m2ts” according to the conversion table.
To verify the correctness i compared my 00001.m2ts with the one AnyDVD-HD creates and they both match. The MD5 hash of this 30GB large file is in both cases “0fa2bc65c25d7087a198a61c693a0a72″.”
Result for: linux
Wal-Mart has aggressively lowered the price today of their MP3 music downloads available from the Wal-Mart Music Downloads Store.
The service will now offer tracks for as low as 74 cents, a steep discount against market leaders iTunes and Amazon which offer most tracks for 99 cents.
From what I can see from glancing at the store (Wal-Mart MP3), the top 30 most downloaded tracks are priced at 74 cents while all other tracks cost 94 cents, a 5 cent discount from iTunes.
The new version of the store will also be available to more platforms (it was previously Windows and Internet Explorer only) and will now work on Linux, Macs, and browsers such as Opera, Firefox and Safari.
The move should help Wal-Mart compete with iTunes and Amazon although the retail giant’s catalog is lacking. iTunes currently has 8 million tracks available (with DRM however) and Amazon MP3 has 4.5 million while Wal-Mart only has 3 million.
Result for: linux
Dell has announced that it has signed an agreement with Universal Music Group to offer either 50 or 100 DRM-free songs bundled with new PCs sold by the vendor.
The price is a nice discount as well with 50 songs costing $25 USD and 100 songs costing only $45 USD in addition to the price of the laptop or desktop PC.
A couple catches however are that the bundles aren’t available on Dell XPS One desktops, Inspiron Mini 9 laptops, or on systems selling with Linux distributions or 64-bit Windows XP or Vista.
All the music will be in MP3 form and DRM-free and can be played back on any portable player. The current library is somewhat small but Dell says it is looking to expand.
