Wednesday, October 9, 2002

Followup to yesterday's post on DVDs and CSS I thought I would followup yesterday's rather rambling article on the DVD format, CSS, and what is and is not encrypted (and how that influences piracy) with a post that contains links and brief facts about the DVD format. This quick summary of the DVD format discusses the format from the perspective of the content producer. Namely, what features the DVD format supports, including the copy protection and region limitations supported by the format. Not very much depth, but an extremely useful overview. Of course, the FAQ found at MIT's archive contains the most information including a lot of information on the various forms of copy protection used on DVDs, of which CSS is but one of four. Because of the plethora of playback devices used with DVDs, the DVD copy protection is generally limited to just the Video data. However, that data is stored on the disc in a standard filesystem as a set of standard files. If that filesystem is recreated elsewhere -- duplicated to the hard drive, for example -- the copy protection will not prevent playback. 1:02:08 PM