This copy protection scheme has been marketed under a variety of names, including ARccOS (by Sony), RipGuard (by Rovi), Disney X (by Disney), etc. When the disc is copied sequentially, however, these corrupted areas cause the drive to hang up and get stuck. When the disc is played, these corrupted areas of the disc are skipped.
Both of these situations can cause strange behavior and odd error messages on computer systems.Īfter the CSS protection system was cracked, the movie industry looked for a alternative copy protection scheme that would be compatible with the large number of existing DVD players in the marketplace.īorrowing a (failed) technique from the video game industry, they settled on a scheme in which portions of DVD discs are deliberately mangled in such a way as to render them unreadable. In addition, many DVD drives will refuse to complete the "authentication" process and provide a decryption key if the disc and drive are not from the same region. Many DVD drives have a tendency to completely lock out access to an encrypted disc until the drive has been "authenticated". At the end of the "authentication" process, the drive allows access to the encrypted DVD data and the player can use the key it has obtained to decrypt the DVD data and play the disc.
When the disc is inserted into a player or computer, a series of "authentication" handshake key exchanges occur between the DVD drive and the player software. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit cipher that is used to encrypt the data stored on the DVD disc. Macrovision Corporation renamed itself Rovi and now promotes other copy protection technologies.ĬSS is an encryption system that is the main copy protection scheme used on pre-recorded DVD discs. With the demise of analog video and the widespread availability of digital decryption tools, Macrovision protection has largely become irrelevant. Macrovision can be defeated by passing the composite video signal through a hardware device that restores the proper video signal levels.
By manipulating the signal level of the composite video, Macrovision fools the automatic gain control of most video recorders resulting in annoying shifts in color and brightness in the recorded video. The Analog Protection System, popularly known as Macrovision after the company that developed it, is a protection system that is applied to the composite analog video signal coming out of DVD players. The following part will illustrate these schemes in great details. Recordable DVD discs are also sometimes copy protected using Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) encryption.
These are Analog Protection System (APS) scrambling, Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption, and a system involving corrupted disc structure. There are three types of copy protection that are used on commercial pre-recorded DVD discs.
The following article will talk about different types of DVD copy protection and how to remove DVD copy protection with the best DVD Copy protection removal software.
The good news is that there are several program allow you to either circumvent or completely strip copy protection so that you can get full control over DVD that you have legally purchased. The copy protection used by media distributors not only helps to prevent piracy, but also prevents you from making backup copies of your DVDs.