"I thought you were going to tell me what a bad eugoogalizer I am"

Okay, tonight I got to learn about the latest, pointless excercises in handcuffing used by the large media producers of the world.

DVD's have been copy-protected in several pathetic ways for years. Region-coding (VERY pathetic and just plain stupid), CSS (broken almost immediately by CSS Jon) and others. This was of interest because some people still believe in the concept of fair-use. I personally believe in this very much. I think I should be able to dump my DVD's to a hard drive and watch them that way if I choose. I should also be able to make backups to disc in case my originals get destroyed by kids, cats, kitchen appliances (you don't usually see that kind of behavior though ;-) ), etc.

There are various free tools out there to accomplish exactly this. DVDShrink being my absolute favorite. In fact, it is one of my favorite software applications period. It has a fantastic UI, and just simply does the task it is intended for with ease. These are topics for another entire blog.

However, tonight I found myself in posession of a disc that no longer worked. "The Forgotten", a great movie I already paid $17 to see in the theater. DVDShrink would get to about 18% and die. Thus I began a google search to get the lowdown.

Turns out the spawns of satan (the movie distributors) have been at work on new techniques. These include RE2, an upgraded region encoding, and ARCOS - yet, another fine bastardization of technology by Sony. I couldn't find any good defintions on ARCOS, but I did find many references stating that "The Forgotten" most definately used that protection. So, I did a search for a way around it, and found a slick little program named DVD43free. It strips away the stupid protections through a small shim, allowing any programs reading the drive to see it as completely unprotected. Thus, DVDShrink was now perfectly happy to create a backup.

I will now watch the movie in a few nights when I actually have the free time, and then delete the image. Go to hell MPAA, I'm keeping my fair-use.