IMDb’s Studio Briefing reports that c’t reports that a hole was found in next-gen copy protection, presumably AACS: Copy Protection Fault Found in HDTV DVD Players. Something about pausing the video and pressing the “print screen” button on the keyboard, along with the hypothesis that the process could be automated to obtain a perfect copy of every video frame, storage implications notwithstanding:

1920 pixels across * 1080 pixels down * 1.5 bytes/pixel * 30 frames/second * 60 seconds/minute * 90 minutes/movie = in the neighborhood of 500 GB

I’m not sure what hardware they’re using for this little science project and I’m too lazy to track down more research. What’s to get excited about? This is just the ever-present analog hole (roughly stated: If you can perceive it, you can copy it). We know that the copy protection will really be broken when we have an open source program that can figure out the content encryption key and decrypt the material for real time decompression and presentation.

This article reminded me to follow up on the Toshiba Qosmio laptop that was supposed to have an HD-DVD ROM drive. It turns out to be the Qosmio G35-AV650 model that is equipped with said drive.