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El Reg reports
Blu-ray players [...] use an antiquated digital rights management scheme to control the distribution of movies, meaning some films could only be played in the geographic regions in which they were purchased.
Matthew Garrett (mjg59) [...] told the Kiwicon hacker conference in Wellington, New Zealand, [December 11] how firmware designed by Taiwanese firm MediaTech could be popped to enable the region encoding to be changed.
[...]The hole [flaw], since crudely-patched on units made in 2014, closed off the ability to gain authenticated access where the DMCA controls could be changed. The pop is possible because the firmware checked for and permitted arbitrary code to run on USB devices ahead of running from internal flash storage.
Garrett's (alcohol-fueled) research could likely be advanced by more sober punters to mitigate the latest fixes, he said.
OK. You folks who delayed buying one of these things because of the DRM can now start your search for a pre-2014 unit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @07:45PM
isn't videolan all over this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @08:03PM
Somewhat, however progress is slow due to low interest in the project by people able to do anything.
http://www.videolan.org/developers/libbluray.html [videolan.org]
http://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html [videolan.org]
http://www.videolan.org/developers/libbdplus.html [videolan.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 12 2014, @11:50PM
There's this: http://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/ [whoknowsmy.name]
But the key file is from 2012 and can't play BDs released since then :(