DVD-Audio is cracked!

[Erukian]

A little bit into the technical background of DVD-Audio.

DVD-Audio uses the proprietary MLP lossless compression to keep the high quality digital audio resolution and sampling rates compressed to fit on a DVD while retaining 24bit depth and 96khz in 6 channels (or 24/192 into 2 channels). Typically, it's very expensive to get a DVD-A player to do digital out (read $800+ for the parts to modify a dvd-a player). So since DVD-A's have been out, it's been highly unpractical to make backups of your dvd-a's, make your own mixes, or do whatever you want with them like play them off a PC.

MLP is a closed format, it uses encryption called CPPM and the discs (sometimes) use watermarks to protect the content from being ripped. But a few rogue russian programmers have done it.

What they did was take a protected DVD-A. Managed to break through the CPPM encryption. then after breaking through the encryption, they can take the MLP files and output them digitally to a wave container, which can be either stored losslessly in a FLAC file for storage on a PC (or compressed into a 5.1 mp3) or even re-burned and remixed for your own pleasure.

What this means is that for those of us who use PC's as transports to a DAC for our home stereo's/5.1 setups, we can use our PC's and browse through your dvd-a files just like browsing through MP3's. Or better yet, backup your DVD-A's if you get a dvd burner. This also opens up DVD-A to piracy and file trading, but in the end, it's a win for me because all I want to do is backup my dvd-a and play it on my computer without having to deal with swapping disc's and using dvd-video software.

No doubt that news of this will be filtering to bigger sites within the week

Here's the main mirror http://www.rarewares.org/

Also, they should be all over torrents soon and then you can grab them if the RIAA sends legal threats to rarewares and they have to take the files offline.

The DVD-Audio Forum (people who made the DVD-A standard) use encrytion for a reason, to stop piracy, so their obviously not going to like these tools. I'm not promoting piracy in any way, i'm just letting you guys know that the tools exist to finally backup your DVD-A onto your computer (like ripping a CD to your computer) or burn copy's for safe-keeping.

-Joe

[meuge]

I just downloaded the tools. Thanks for the tip. I haven't bought any DVD-A disks because I would have to purchase a player I have no use for. Now I don't need to.

[CAS]

Thanks for the info. All of us with non-malicious intents are glad to hear.

[wmilas]

Being a coder I'm joyous at this news. There is no reason we should not be able to take our own discs and rip em to our central server at home se we can listen to them in the order we want, when we want.

This is good news.

[toddvj]

This is sweet, but "They require WinDVD 5, 6 or 7 installed, as they don't do the decryption themselves, and instead patch WinDVD to output the decrypted stream to disk instead of the sound card." I've never been able to get WinDVD to play the DVD-A portion of my discs, only the Dolby or DTS. I've only been able to get Creative Mediasource DVD-Audio Player to work, so I don't know if I'll be able to get this to work yet. This is definitely good news though.

[Erukian]

I'll through together a quick guide for you guys

First uninstall the windvd dvd-audio plguin -- if it's already installed.

Insert your dvd-a, if a dvd-player starts, close it.

Open up my computer, right click on the dvd-drive, click explore. go into AUDIO_TS. if the file DVDAUDIO.MKB exists, skip down, if it's missing, keep going.

*

If DVDAUDIO.MKB is missing, that means your disc isnt encrypted, which saves you quite a bit of pain.

Extract PPCMripper (PPCM = protected PCM which = MLP) into any folder.

Create a folder on a drive with at least 7-8 gigs of free space. I used C:\classical for one of my classical discs.

Then start>run>cmd.exe browse to where PPCMRipper.exe is (this takes some DOS skills). Whether or not your dvd-a is 24/96 or 24/192, you'll have to decide here how you want it ripped. Most likely it's 24/96 or 24/48. So in our example it's 24/96. then type (PPCMRipper.exe 96000 "C:\classical")

This will launch windvd, when it's loaded just select a track, start playing it and it will dump the audio into a .wav file, all 6 channels in 24/96 in real time. So you have to play back through the entire dvd for all the songs to be ripped. You should see in the cmd.exe window the wav file being dumped. If you do, then your golden

*If DVDAUDIO.MKB exists (which it doesnt btw on any of my dvd-a's) you have to use the DVDAripper. Just follow the directions in the readme, it's not that much different of a process than using the PPCMripper. Don't use the dvd-a explorer, for ripping dvd-a to wav.. their useless.

Feel free to ask any questions if you get stuck.

Couple threads here hydrogenaudio.org it starts at post 40..

and here doom9 forums

-Joe

[KungFuNat]

ah the miracles of fair use... the industry can do whatever it wants to stop piracy, but someone will always figure out a way around it..

[toddvj]

So, all this does is records 6 wav files? Couldn't you already do that before? Once you have the wav files, how do you play them back?

If this really is something new, I'm sure someone soon will automate the process. It would be nice if you could just rip the AUDIO_TS folder to your Hard Drive, and click on the AUDIO_TS.AOB file, and it would start playing. Or you could rip to an Image file (which I have done) mount in a virtual drive and play (I could only get Dolby/DTS when I did it, but all the files seemed to be there.)

Nonetheless this looks very exiting, and when I have a few hours to play with it, I'm going to figure it all out.

[Erukian]

----------------

On 7/6/2005 11:08:49 PM toddvj wrote:

So, all this does is records 6 wav files? Couldn't you already do that before? Once you have the wav files, how do you play them back?

If this really is something new, I'm sure someone soon will automate the process. It would be nice if you could just rip the AUDIO_TS folder to your Hard Drive, and click on the AUDIO_TS.AOB file, and it would start playing. Or you could rip to an Image file (which I have done) mount in a virtual drive and play (I could only get Dolby/DTS when I did it, but all the files seemed to be there.)

Nonetheless this looks very exiting, and when I have a few hours to play with it, I'm going to figure it all out.

----------------

Sure you could before, but you'd have to capture the analog stream, after it's been converted. So you'd be losing sound quality. What this does is re-direct the digital stream from going to the soundcard to going to a wav file on your hard drive.

You play them back with in 5.1 by having 5.1 speakers on your PC or using a spdif out to a receiver. If you want 2 channel, use foobar2000 and in the DSP activate the 5.1 downmix to stereo.

This is the first time on a sofware level that the digital PCM can be captured in it's fullest fidelity. 24/96 6 channel or 24/192 in 2 channel.

The topic is a little misleading (sorry about that), it's wasnt cracked, but circumvented at the lowest level. You have to use windvd 5/6/7 to redirect the pcm output, so it's more of a hack-around solution until someone actually cracks CPPM and MLP(PPCM).

-Joe