SlySoft, the creator of the AnyDVD DVD/Blu-ray ripping software, has shut down following Hollywood pressure:
The Antigua-based software company SlySoft has shut down its website and ceased sales of the popular Blu-ray ripping software AnyDVD. The action comes several days after a group of Hollywood studios and technology partners asked the U.S. Government to intervene.
Earlier this month AACS LA, the decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of movie studios and technology partners including Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft and Intel, reminded the U.S. Government about the unauthorized activities of SlySoft. SlySoft is known for selling various copyright protection circumvention tools including the popular AnyDVD software, of which it sold tens of thousands of copies over the years.
In 2014 AACS-LA won a court case against the software manufacturer in Antigua, where a local court found SlySoft owner Giancarla Bettini guilty of six charges under the 2003 Copyright Act and ordered him to pay a fine of $5,000 per offense. Failure to pay would result in six months in jail for each offense. However, despite the win for AACS not much changed. SlySoft's owner immediately filed an appeal which effectively put the convictions on hold. Meanwhile, AnyDVD remained widely available.
This changed yesterday when the site suddenly went blank as the domain's main nameservers were removed. Initially it was unclear what triggered the downtime, but a few hours ago SlySoft put up a brief statement confirming an early Myce report that legal problems are the cause.
From the above Wikipedia link:
AnyDVD is a device driver for Microsoft Windows which allows decryption of DVDs on the fly, as well as targeted removal of copy preventions and user operation prohibitions (UOPs). With an upgrade, it will also do the same for HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The AnyDVD program runs in the background, making discs unrestricted and region-free. In addition to removing digital restrictions, AnyDVD will also defeat Macrovision analog copy prevention. Analog prevention distorts the video signal to prevent high quality copying from the output. AnyDVD is also able to remove copy-prevention from audio CDs.
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The former employees of Slysoft have regrouped as a new entity named RedFox and have released a new version of AnyDVD. The new release adds support for the Redfox Online Protection Database and new Blu-ray discs. For existing AnyDVD license owners the software will work as usual. With this release AnyDVD and its development appear to be back to normal.
Here is the changelog for this new release (version 7.6.9.1):
- AnyDVD reborn! SlySoft is dead, long live RedFox!
- This is an intermediate release, so old customers can continue to use their existing AnyDVD license to watch their discs.
- This version can access the new RedFox Online Protection Database
- This version will only work, if you already own a valid AnyDVD license
- For compatibility with 3rd party programs, AnyDVD will still use "SlySoft" for directories and registry paths
- It will replace an existing SlySoft AnyDVD installation
- New (Blu-ray): Support for new discs
- Some minor fixes and improvements
The new official forum is here | The new official download page is here.
[Continues.]
The closure of SlySoft is having a chilling effect on another commercial provider of copy protection circumvention software:
The company behind the popular DVDFab software has announced it will not be supporting decryption of the enhanced Advanced Access Content System (AACS) that will be used to protect new Ultra HD (4K UHD) Blu-ray discs. The announcement comes just a day after rival copying software company SlySoft confirmed its closure.
[...] Under pressure from AACS LA, a decryption licensing outfit founded by a group of powerful Hollywood movie studios and various technology partners, SlySoft first went dark and then announced its closure this week. And now, in the space of just a couple of days, another DVD/Blu-ray copying software company also appears to be feeling the heat.
[Continues.]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:17PM
Boot into Linux. It'll rip faster.
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:34PM
Enjoy the "hope and change" of the post-TPP world. Brought to us by moronic liberals.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:44PM
I hope you're counting Republican politicians among those "liberals" because they're the ones controlling Congress right now and they're all in favor of the TPP too.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:49PM
1) They're not moronic. They knew exactly what they were doing.
2) It was only the liberals because the conservatives weren't in. It's not even a conspiracy - the TPP is pro-corporate and both American parties are so far in corporations' pockets that they cough up lint during speeches.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:57PM
They knew exactly what they were doing.
Let's dispel with this fiction that Anonymous Cowards know what they are doing. They have no idea what they are doing. Anonymous Cowards are undertaking a systematic effort to change this site, to make SoylentNews more like that other site. (click) Let's dispel with this fiction that Anonymous Cowards know what they are doing. (click) Let's dispel (click)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 26 2016, @06:38AM
+1 insightfunny
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:41PM
Please post FLOSS alternatives.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:02PM
user@computer:~$ sudo :(){ :|: & };:
[sudo] password for user:
root@computer~# gnuDVDrip/home/ISOS/revenant.iso
gnuDVDrip is included in most Debian and Fedora-based distros, but takes as input a weird regular expression. They did that so the low-level kids wouldn't be using GNU tools to violate laws.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:17PM
And exactly how is that going to rip Blu-Rays and remove BD+?
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:42PM
How would you do it?
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:49PM
http://www.makemkv.com/svq/ [makemkv.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fritsd on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:18PM
That's easy:
when you're in the supermarket, DON'T buy those DVDs with the blue edge. They don't work in a normal DVD player.
Sometimes, the only way to win is not to play their game.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:37PM
Which works out fine if you don't want to watch out of region movies. A lot of the movies that I want to watch aren't available in region 1, so I wind up having to have them imported. Unfortunately, because of those jackasses in the MAFIAA, I can't watch those without buying an additional DVD player per region. So, I'd have to have 3 different DVD players in order to play the DVDs that I've bought legally.
I was using AnyDVD to deal with that, but now I don't really even have that option.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Friday February 26 2016, @01:18AM
Upgrade your firmware [rpc1.org]. Do it fast, they're closing soon.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday February 26 2016, @01:53AM
Looks like the firmware for my drive has already been lost. Hopefully somebody will know where to find a copy. It sucks that people have to jump through all these hoops just because the IP rightsholders are assholes.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 26 2016, @10:59AM
You could easily watch them on your computer, but if you really want them on a physical DVD that you can play, if I understand it correctly, your problem is as follows:
(1) rip the encrypted VOBs (easy) (mount as iso9660 filesystem and cp -pr)
(2) decrypt the VOBs, you'll need to find and download libdvdcss. There exists a multimedia Debian repository which has it. It's not on the regular Debian repository because Uncle Sam.
I've never actually done (2), because with libdvdcss installed, you can play encrypted DVDs on your computer, which is the only thing I need.
But there are probably programs for this.
(3) assemble a video DVD filesystem (VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS) with the unencrypted VOBs. (DIFFICULT)
I thought that commercial DVDs were much higher density than the 4.4 Gb you can fit on a data DVD you can burn yourself.
So you may need to work with dvdauthor (shudder...) to put half of the VOBs on one 4.4 Gb image and the other half on the other.
Now you need to make a new menu, you can use videolink, which has fallen out of favour/is no longer maintained in Debian. I run it in a VM. And then I wrote a script to make videolink easier.
With respect to ease of use, it's my script > videolink >> dvdauthor. dvdauthor is quite hideous.
(4) genisoimage to make the one or two ISO images from the VIDEO_TS directories
(5) burn them to physical DVD-RW
Now you can watch it on any DVD player and without nag screens.
I have actually never had the need for this. I've made some DVDs for personal use with things I taped from TV (MPEG transport stream to VOB with ffmpeg with target pal-dvd), and they worked on my parents' DVD player but I had a sync problem in the VOBs, so navigating didn't go very smoothly. (anybody tried this and solved the navigation problems? something to do with index frames)
And I copied some children DVDs to my harddisk; VLC can play encrypted VOBs with no problem (it decrypts them on-the-fly with libdvdcss) and much less nag screens, and the actual physical medium doesn't get scratched/thrown about as a frisbee.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday February 26 2016, @04:44PM
You can't rip out of region DVDs without either using a drive that can play discs from a region. You can't even play them with approved software.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 26 2016, @05:17PM
Sorry, I don't understand. What happens if you do
mkdir /tmp/dvd; mount -t iso9660 -v /dev/sr0 /tmp/dvd
?
Does it show the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directory?
And can't you then just do a cp -pr of the /tmp/dvd to somewhere with a lot of disk space?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Friday February 26 2016, @05:58PM
As far as I can tell, the drive won't even read it. It just gets an I/O error when I do that, but when I use a disc that's from the appropriate region, that's not a problem.
As a result, the only way around that is a region-free DVD drive or a cracked driver that lies about the region encoding on the drive and reads it that way. It's really annoying as most non-English DVDs are never released in the US, which means you're stuck buying multiple drives to deal with the various regions.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday February 29 2016, @04:17AM
Umm ... a friend of mine has quite a few out of region movies, and a modern DVD drive (has to be RPC-2), and libdvdcss worked fine on it. It got stuck only once for a moment or two, then brute-forced the key and everything was fine...
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday February 29 2016, @05:31AM
From what I understand that's a "broken" drive, they're not supposed to allow you to play disks from different regions. The RPC1 drives didn't respect the region codes, unfortunately, they're also quite old at this point.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday February 29 2016, @08:30PM
From here: http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html [videolan.org]
it appears that libdvdcss doesn't require a drive matching the region code of the disc. This is further confirmed by this page here: http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss/doc/html/ [videolan.org]
which says, in relevant part:
title is the fallback when all other methods have failed. It does not rely on a key exchange with the DVD drive, but rather uses a crypto attack to guess the title key. On rare cases this may fail because there is not enough encrypted data on the disc to perform a statistical attack, but in the other hand it is the only way to decrypt a DVD stored on a hard disc, or a DVD with the wrong region on an RPC2 drive.
I'm not doubting your experience, but perhaps it's just your drive that's broken somehow? What I've always heard is that libdvdcss makes region codes irrelevant. Also, the rpc1.org site is shutting down in like 6 months because of lack of demand. If this were still at all an issue, wouldn't that site be in as much demand as ever?
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday February 26 2016, @02:41PM
And if we don't want shitty 480p versions of the film?
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday February 26 2016, @03:41PM
I don't know. Do tell us what your working solutions are. I can only give "it's good enough for me" solutions.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday February 26 2016, @05:35AM
That's odd, they made the syntax look just like an old school for... oh.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:16PM
$ axi-cache search --all DVD|grep rip
82% ogmrip-doc - Application for ripping and encoding DVD - Documentation files
82% ogmrip-plugins - Application for ripping and encoding DVD - plugins
81% libogmrip-dev - Application for ripping and encoding DVD - development files
81% libogmrip1 - Application for ripping and encoding DVD - libraries files
81% ogmrip - Application for ripping and encoding DVD
72% handbrake-cli - versatile DVD ripper and video transcoder (command line)
71% handbrake - versatile DVD ripper and video transcoder (GTK+ GUI)
56% dvdbackup - tool to rip DVD's from the command line
(Score: 1) by r1348 on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:52PM
http://negativo17.org/bluray-playback-and-ripping-on-fedora-aacs-bd-bd-j/ [negativo17.org]
This is for Fedora.
You're welcome.
(Score: 1) by Yaa101 on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:53PM
DVD: vobcopy->handbrake
BD: makemkv (beta is FAIB not OS)->handbrake
No comment...
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:08PM
Is that Linux-only? I have Handbrake on the big laptop with a DVD burner and it failed badly when I tried to rip The Martian. If it needs the Linux version I guess I'll have to put Linux on the big one, too.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Yaa101 on Friday February 26 2016, @01:20AM
You need vobcopy to rip the *.VOB parts into one big *.VOB file, then transcode the *.VOB file into *.m4v (mp4) with handbrake.
You can use ffmpeg for the transcoding too, handbrake just has a nice gui, on the other hand, vobcopy and ffmpeg allow you to automate with bash scripting.
vobcopy is a commandline tool to get the vob parts off the dvd and glue them to one file:
http://vobcopy.org/projects/c/c.shtml [vobcopy.org]
handbrake:
https://handbrake.fr/ [handbrake.fr]
ffmpeg:
https://www.ffmpeg.org/ [ffmpeg.org]
And yes, they are all cross platform.
No comment...
(Score: 1) by Yaa101 on Friday February 26 2016, @01:23AM
Hmm... On the other hand, I think vobcopy is linux only, sorry for the mistake...
No comment...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @01:49AM
Whats wrong with .mkv? I haven't found a device that doesn't play .mkv video yet. Even my non-smart HDTV plays them from a flashdrive.
(Score: 1) by Yaa101 on Friday February 26 2016, @02:03AM
Nothing is wrong with mkv, both mp4 and mkv are just containers for many codecs including h264 and hevc.
mp4 with h264 and ac3/aac run virtually anywhere and in most devices hardware accelerated, so for most people, especially the less educated with video and audio codecs, mp4 is synonym with modern video.
No comment...
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 26 2016, @02:44PM
Thanks, that looks like the exact info I need.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @09:30AM
A DVD ripper running on Windows? Are you insane? Windows ten will report you to the BSA and the MPAA and the RIAA and the MAFIIA faster than you can upgrade! Don't be a fool! Friends don't let friends run Windows Ten, even if that friend had Feet that are Hairy!! Seriously.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 25 2016, @09:46PM
Hopefully SlySoft will give Hollywood the ultimate middle finger and post their source code and binaries publicly so that anyone can use it for free.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Covalent on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:28PM
Fantastic idea! They may want to just open a new company and start again, but if they don't go that route they should post both the code and documentation.
This basic story pops pretty frequently (there's two on the main page now!) and the results are always the same:
1. MAFIAA tries to stop people from ripping / transcoding / sharing / whatever the movie they bought / DLed
2. Company is closed / Service is shut down
3. Between 2 and 10 alternatives fill the vacuum within a month or so.
Is the MPAA/RIAA that dumb? Do they think any of this helps them? I just don't get it. Somebody fill me in on why they don't realize that the best way to get people to PAY for their product is to make it available, without restriction, at a reasonable price. The vast majority of people would gladly pay $1 to watch a movie on their phone / iPad / computer. If you charge $19.99, people will pirate it (and they should, considering that's double the price to see it in a theater!)
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mcgrew on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:11PM
Indeed, and they should get rid of the user-hostile bullshit like unskippable trailers and ads and "it's illegal to copy this movie" shit. When I buy a DVD the first thing I do is try to remove the bullshit and burn it to a blank DVD.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:28PM
Copyright is the MAFIAA's religion. They believe in copyright beyond all reason. There is no persuading people like that. Hitting them upside the head with a clue bat makes only the dull thunk of solid wood beating on solid wood.
But they do have some animal cunning. As long as they can, they will work the propaganda angle, play on public sympathy for starving artists, and brazenly demand that law enforcement and ISPs and others do their dirty work for them. How this all ends is hard to guess, but one way I'm sure it won't end is by them having a change of heart like the Grinch did. Perhaps they'll fade in power and importance until they're irrelevant. Maybe a generational change will bring fresh blood into the ranks of the owners.
As for me, I'm a cord never. I've seen enough of the malarkey with unskippable parts of DVDs and having to install DeCSS separately on a Linux system that I've lost what little interest I had in watching movies. Too much trouble. There are plenty of other entertainments to fill leisure time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Fnord666 on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:57PM
At one point James, a staff member at Slysoft said [slysoft.com]:
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:29PM
Doesn't look like that will happen soon. The program has been deleted not just from its home page but from softonic.com as well, with the message "AnyDVD HD download is no longer available in Softonic."
http://anydvd-hd.en.softonic.com/ [softonic.com]
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday February 26 2016, @12:05AM
Yes, I'd like to see that happen. The source code is protected speech, so once it's in the real world there's nothing that can be done to stop its spread. Of course, that means that new keys may or may not be crackable, but it does mean that anybody using the software for circumventing those asinine region restrictions on DVDs would be able to do so permanently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:01PM
Somebody sure went nuts with their modpoints.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:07PM
proposal to rename 'modpoints' to 'millibutthurts'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:51PM
Moderation
Overrated=1
q.e.d.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:01PM
What do you want to bet this is a funds transfer problem imposed by the government to prevent credit cards or PayPal payments from being transferred. Maybe the government even leaned on Antigua to lean on these guys.
Remember that Antigua won a WTO ruling [thomsonreuters.com] that on-line gambling prohibition in the US justified ignoring US Copyrights.
Several states are now allowing on-line gambling - usually poker), but so far only for their own residents. And tribal casinos are now teaming up to allow some federated gambling games with the implied intent to link casinos across state borders.
It could be there is some deal in the wind whereby Antigua gets back into online gambling in the US in exchange for shutting down the copyright mills.
http://vegasclick.com/online/legal-timeline.html [vegasclick.com]
http://www.legal-gambling-usa.com/poker-usa.php [legal-gambling-usa.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:21PM
I thought the WTO had granted Antigua the right to rip off as much US IP as possible [patentlyo.com] to make up for the millions owed to it by the US? I'm surprised an Antigua based company folded so quickly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:26PM
Didn't actually read the summary? The summary clearly points out that Slysoft lost a case within the Antiguan legal system.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:49PM
So why isn't there some Antiguan (possibly governmental) server with every new release?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Fnord666 on Thursday February 25 2016, @10:47PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Justin Case on Thursday February 25 2016, @11:21PM
I bought a Blu-Ray. Paid good cash for it from the legitimate seller.
It won't play on my computer, unless I install some "illegal" copyright circumvention stuff.
So, who do I sue to gain access to what I already am entitled to have? I'd settle for one penny from each of the morons who legislated and DMCA-complaint-ed us into this mess.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Friday February 26 2016, @01:25AM
"You're not entitled to anything. You own the disc, not the content." (or something along those lines) - Signed, the MPAA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @01:27AM
So, who do I sue to gain access to what I already am entitled to have?
No one. You were only sold a license to watch the movie with approved software/hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @01:58AM
I bought a new CD/DVD drive for my Windows PC, it came with an updated version of the software that was installed with my old broken CD/DVD drive, so I went ahead and installed that too. Guess what? No audio from DVDs. A message popped up telling me I had to buy a license for dolby or some shit. Fuck that crap, wiped the drive and installed Linux and the restricted extras, and the VLC script to enable DVD playback. Fuck the **AA and every other DRM rights.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @02:24AM
ironic dontcha think.
I got a new movie today.
Wanted to watch it right away so I skip my usual rip step plus KODI setup.
Fire up ye ol bluray software that came with the laptop. First thing it wants is an update. OK sure why not. Does not work.
Ripping the sucker right now so I can watch the movie I paid for...
I am thinking this does not make people sympathetic to the copyright guys.
Figure now it is just a mater of time before bluray is properly cracked. I am thinking AnyDVD and DVDFab were keeping the real crackers at bay. Now they may just do it for the sport of it...
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Friday February 26 2016, @02:29AM
This times a million. I sadly watched on as a lady railed against a store employee because the movie she'd just bought did not work in her dvd player. I didn't feel like jumping into what was already an emotional argument, but the lady was rightly distressed and the employee couldn't do anything about it as it wasn't the store's fault. What a bunch of BS that only hurts the legit buyers. Along with not skipping stupid menus... hate re-watching stupid animations for 30s to get the actual menu.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Friday February 26 2016, @04:32AM
One of the best things about pirating is getting to skip all the menus and ads and previews and intros and animations and, er, wait, wasn't there something about a movie...?
You'd think one of these days someone will figure out how to just put a movie on a disc and ship it.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday February 26 2016, @06:01PM
The store could have given her her money back. The lack of a refund is the store's fault.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Sunday February 28 2016, @03:10AM
The store is a big chain, they might have a no-refund policy on movies due to scratches/dmg etc. I don't know, but I assume that's what happened since any normal person would have accepted the return.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2, Touché) by anubi on Friday February 26 2016, @08:08AM
If I paid for a disc that I cannot watch with a check that cannot be cashed, I betcha *they* would complain!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @02:17AM
SlySoft doesn't only make AnyDVD.
I am an avid user of VirtualCloneDrive (also from them) because Alcohol and Daemon Tools have blown my foot off for every time I've tried using them on my system. VCD also features a retardproof UI, a very small footprint (around 2MB), and does what I need out of the box.
It's frustrating how the entire site has to be pulled instead of the infringing product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 26 2016, @04:19AM
Daemon Tools just works for me.
I assume all of these products are available for free on torrents and moreso now that the company is disappearing.