"Andy Champ" wrote in message
. uk...

ISTR reading recently that blu-ray copy protection had already been
cracked.

It's an on-going battle.
Slysoft's AnyDVD-HD has cracked the AACS protection.
Blu-Ray retaliated with BD+.
Slysoft cracked BD+.
There's currently a new version of BD+ which Slysoft's developers claim
will take a couple of months to crack.

http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=21985


If you don't have an HDMI connector, your player is not allowed, under the
terms of the license (sic) they agreed to, to send out HD content. And
AFAIK HDCP hasn't been cracked.

Indeed, but that's not the place where people are targetting their efforts.
The HDMI cable carries a very high-bandwidth uncompressed stream. That's
not what we'd choose to tap into and copy anyway.

The main difference between HD-DVD and Blu-ray was BD+. The blu-ray guys
worked out that James at Sly-soft and ... err... the other guys name
escapes me, something Chinese - would be able to crack any protection
with time. HD-DVD had barely hit the market when it's single layer of
protection was cracked. BD+, on the other hand, can be updated, and is
being updated. The player manufacturers are contracted to provide updates
to fix any cracks.

Which does not bode well for the average honest consumer. They get hit as
collateral damage.

Every few months, when you buy a new disk, you get a message that you need
to update your player firmware.

So are standalone player mfrs going to support and provide BD+ firmware
updates for all their models indefinately?

I think we all know the answer to that.

"I'm sorry, sir, we no longer produce that model. That was last year's
model. If you want to play the latest releases, may I suggest you update to
our not-quite-obsolete player 2009? "

Meanwhile, the 'bad guys' who they are *trying* to target just rip it with
AnyDVD-HD and remove all the silly DRM nonsense anyway.

--
Ron