Decrypting
Decrypting Video - What's going on?
I got a list (like the one on the left) and had to figure my way through it. You do have to study further, or it will cost money. It did cost me money too. Things like the Asus BW-16D1HT-Pro cost £160 to buy. If you open it up, you will find a Pioneer drive incapable of doing the job as it is obsolete and sells for £40 on eBay. The Picture to the left is the con I discovered. I also bought the Asus BC-12D2HT, which is not on this list but another. At first, I purchased the Archgon, but it wouldn't even play 4k, even though it said it was capable. Luckily Amazon agreed to an immediate refund. I did place an order with Amazon.com for an LG that was selling for $120 (But Americans were saying this was a $50 drive). So I thought I'd take (another) gamble on Asus.
Asus had released a statement that they wouldn't be changing the firmware to prevent people from backing up their 4K, but they seemed to have changed their minds, and people like me had to reverse their FW, back to before they had changed their mind. Mine had FW3.04 (on purchasing) & 3.0 was the last to work. A few experts had said that it appeared that there were slight changes in the code's numerical binary sequence, and it looked deliberate as there seemed to be no advantage to the drive's performance from such a minute change.
Sites like the MakeMKV support forum have a lot of useful advice, as do others like Reddit. I downloaded perhaps around five or six free programs, linked from their sites or similar, and none worked. All had disclaimers saying it might brick the device, but I was getting so desperate to find a cure, I didn't care. In the end, I went to DVDFab and paid the man. Ironically when you go to pay the bill, they say that they can't guarantee it will work. It might even break/brick the device. I tried, and it worked. I tried on the Pioneer drive Asus had sent me, and it said "unsupported drive" - Thank's Asus!
So I spent in total £320, for what in the end was a £60 drive I got from Amazon. And now I can back up my stuff - hooray? It is a shame Alan Turing died as we do need people like him. Would he have imagined that in the future we would be using Enigma busting machines to encrypt the Teletubbies!
I have had this sort of problem for years. My first smartphone was the iPhone 2, which I bought from a guy in Washington DC, who sold them unlocked and at a non-rip-off price. They were new, and he had used the (in)famous software from the Dev team to jailbreak the phone. Apple constantly was updating its App to confound this. Had I not jailbroken it, even back then, it would have cost $99/month with A&T to use it. So I jailbroke it (I don't think I even earned $99/month). The trouble was that one had to be careful to look at the app to see if the software had changed - if it did, don't plug in your iPhone, or you would have a brick. You can't use it for anything - it is dead. The Dev team was quite good and within a couple of weeks had written a hack, which you had to then download to your phone and then you could plug it into your computer (Mac users always got the hack first, but Windows was more difficult I think). I cannot count the number of times I needed to do this. Some people believe computer freedom is here to liberate us. Some corporate types seem to have financial motives. It is the thing I like in that there are so many people on the internet trying to make life better for us. I am inclined to think more at times than in our communities. I do like the quote on the Dev Teams Blog: To find yourself, think for yourself © Socrates 469 BC
If I buy music, I can download it and do what I wish. If I purchase a movie, it's encrypted. I have to decrypt it. DVD's are no real problem, Blurays are though worse, 4k, don't get me started - But why? If you buy something, it should be yours. You should be free to store it how you like. In a drawer, in the garage, wherever. If they think I'm going to start a business like Netflix and do it illegally and get away with it, how stupid do they think I am? I know as soon as I begin broadcasting, MIB is going to be breaking down the door. Why encrypt it with 256bit security when all that is on it is Bambi doing the splits on ice? I tried recently to re-encode my music collection to a higher bit rate. Some of the discs wouldn't copy, so they went in the bin. I had an old tape player of my Grand Father's whose recordings dated back fifty years - they played perfectly. Compact Discs are cheap plastic, and it is good advice to back up the data (if you can) immediately after getting it as they are just too fragile to store valuable or precious data. M-discs may claim to last 10,000 years, but a few discs I have from around twenty years ago have degraded physically. Manufacturers are generally looking to make more and more money through the ignorance of their customers. Some things are better now than they were perhaps twenty or so years ago, like cars or vacuum cleaners. Media is not one of them. Now when you buy something, it should have a notice saying Pay Annually, because this won't last longer than a year.
Copyright is a funny issue in that if you bought the right to an artist's work, no-one can listen to that work without your permission. If you buy the right to access that material, your rights are limited. So Amazon Music, for example, will give you that right, and the average person could make it last a lifetime. If I buy a DVD, which if was blind, would be a soundtrack, I can only own it for as long as the cheap format it was supplied on, managed to exist. Is this fair? In the past, we had revolutions to get by this sort of thing. Nowadays, we spend so much time trying to circumnavigate problems we forget that it is our job to cure them. So that future generations can evolve further.