damien stolarz blog

Even though we can all “rip” our own personally purchased CDs legally and put them on our digital media players for personal use, this has not not necessarily been the case for DVDs.
A high end “DVD Jukebox” product, Kaleidescape, has existed in the market since 2002, and has been in contest with the DVD Copy Control Association since 2004. Kaleidescape allows consumers to copy their own (but potentially, rented) DVDs to the server and allow random access to those DVDs.

As evidenced by the DVD Copy Control Association’s recent post on Managed Recording, the DVD CCA is not necessarily opposed to any copying of DVDs, but they want to have the digital rights management technology (the new preferred term is ‘content management’) in place to prevent unrestricted widespread copying like that which happened to CDs.

The basic technology of DVD extraction is quite straightforward: Each DVD disk simply has a folder called VIDEO_TS on it. If this folder is copied to the hard drive, then any DVD player software can play it (most have a menu option for opening a folder, instead of a DVD disk).

The difficulty of course is the copy protection on every commercial DVD, CSS (content scramble system). The user’s legal rights to copy their own purchased content notwithstanding, certain laws make it unclear whether it is lawful to use the common tools available to bypass this security. Nonetheless, just like YouTube or any other “how do they get away with that?” online technology, tools for ‘ripping’ dvds are easy to find and download. On the Mac, the hopefully named FairMount program uses the presumably lawful DVD CSS implementation inside the VLC Media Player. On the PC, dozens, if not hundreds of programs such as the free DVDFab allow the VIDEO_TS to be extracted.

Once the legal limbo of ‘dvd ripping’ has been exited, there are a variety of programs that will create a digital jukebox out of the extracted DVDs. Apple’s FrontRow, which comes with every modern Mac, can play back VIDEO_TS folders automatically with a program called DVD assist. The program My Movies achieves a similar effect with Windows Media Center PCs.

The new news is that Kaleidescape recently prevailed in the current round of debate, having it’s system declared fully compliant with the licensing agreement they signed and paid for with CCA.

This, of course, is only one step in the process. The decision will likely be appealed, and put the product in legal limbo again. And this decision clears no path for the aforementioned programs, none of which sought or obtained a CCA license. Their saving grace is that the ripping is separate from the “jukebox” engine, so the Jukebox applications themselves don’t appear to be doing anything unlawful.

EE Times just published a useful article with some of the history behind the Kaleidescope/CCA conflict. Read the article

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