Chicago (IL) - On the heels of the first full year of the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle, a new wrinkle has appeared, as a hacker has claimed to have dug into the high-definition format's encoding and decrypt the security measures that prevent the video from being copied.
The hacker, going by the name muslix64 in an online forum, calls the PC utility BackupHDDVD. He writes, "BackupHDDVD is a tool to decrypt a AACS protected movie that you own, so you can play it back later using an HDDVD player software. This is the first version, and it's not very stable yet."
Muslix64 has made several comments about the ease of decrypting the AACS format. In his BackupHDDVD FAQ, he writes, "The program itself has nothing special. It simply implement the AACS decyption protocol. I have followed the freely available documents about AACS. The trick, is to find what they call the 'Title keys'. So I [figured] out how to extract them."
According to his forum posts, he decided to find a way to decrypt HD DVD after he realized he couldn't play his HD DVD titles on his computer because he did not have an HDCP compliant video card. After a week, he says, he was able to decrypt one movie, and a few days after that fixed several of the preliminary bugs, like frame skipping.
TG Daily has not been able to independently substantiate nor refute muslix64's claims.
