Encrypted DVD's
| This page was written by Pluto and imported with their permission when LinuxMCE branched off in February, 2007. In general any information should apply to LinuxMCE. However, this page should be edited to reflect changes to LinuxMCE and remove old references to Pluto. |
Most DVD's sold commercially employ a copy-protection called CSS to prevent you from making a copy of the DVD. From a technical standpoint, it's a trivial matter to bypass this. However, there is an ongoing debate about the legality of doing so.
Kaleidescape, Inc. was one of the first companies to offer a media server that allowed the user to store all his DVD's on the server and play them back without requiring the physical disk. Although the company claims to have obtained all the proper permission from and paid licensing fees to the DVD consortium, the DVD consortium has filed a lawsuit against the company nonetheless and is trying to halt the sale of media servers that permit storage of DVD's.
The courts will need to work out whether storing a DVD on a media server is permitted according to the "Fair Use" laws, or is illegal because of the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act".
Until this matter is resolved, LinuxMCE has decided to stay away. It is not in the company's interest, nor that of our customers, if we offer a product that stores DVD's on the server, as does the Kaleidescape, and then the courts order that the company can no longer support it, and customers must stop using it.
The LinuxMCE that ships out of the box has a DVD player and DVD storage built-in, however it only works with DVD's that are not copy-protected with the CSS system. Admittedly this means most commercial DVD's will not work. You can insert a non-CSS encrypted DVD, play it, watch it, hit the 'copy' button to copy it to the server, and then watch it from the server without the physical disk.
If you determine that is legal in your area to do the same thing with encrypted DVD's, there are widely available software add-ons that bypass the CSS copy protection so that encrypted DVD's work just the same as non-encrypted DVD's. You can search the internet for "LinuxMCE libdvdcss" and find links to them, including instructions for Add Software
