By Nick Farrell: Thursday 28 December 2006, 08:13
A HACKER who was miffed that he couldn’t view his HD movies on his computer set-up, gave himself a target of four weeks to crack the AACS specification. However, apparently it turned out so easy that he only took eight days.
The bloke, who goes by the handle Muslix64, bought a HD-DVD drive to plug on his PC, and a HD movie.
Then he released that the two software players on windows don't allowed him to play the flick at all, because his video card was not HDCP compliant and because he had a HD monitor plugged with DVI interface.
Muslix64 told the doom9 forum that the AACS specification made him mad because it was not 'fair use' to own an HD monitor and not be allowed to watch an HD movie, which he paid for.
After six days work he found the title key of the movie in his memory and this meant he managed to decrypt the movie in an afternoon. There was a day where he fixed problems such as frame skipping, but all up it only took him eight days to crack the code.
He has put together a small program called "BackupHDDVD", a Java based command line utility to decrypt movies.
Just before Christmas he made a small video called "AACS is Unbreakable" where you can see the output of the program while decrypting. You can also see a playback of a decrypted movie and upload that video on YouTube.
