Several years ago Slysoft emerged as the premiere provider for software that is capable of decrypting CSS on Standard DVD’s. Slysoft is located in St. John's Antigua (West Indies) and is therefore out of the reach of the MPAA. We all understand the need to protected IP (intellectual Property) but our “FAIR-USE” rights should not be trampled in the process. We deserve the right to backup our media and to use the same media on “other machines” that we own in the same household. Slysoft delivered the ability to do this with AnyDVD (CSS decryptor) and CloneDVD (the application interface). AnyDVD runs in the background while decrypting CSS protected media. CloneDVD is used to select the contents of the disk to backup by burning the contents to disk or by allowing you to create an ISO for burning at a later date.

AnyDVD HD comes on the heels of progress made by the hacker community. AnyDVD HD decrypts AACS on HD-DVD disks (and Blu-Ray soon). Muxlix64 managed to find a way to exact the “title key” for an HD-DVD movie while PowerDVD or WinDVD was running. He did not provide the keys but provided the application to copy HD-DVD disks once a key was located. The rest of the community followed his lead and tracked down keys for over 100 HD-DVD titles (via Windows Memory Dumps) in addition to creating GUI applications. Then another hacker managed to find the “processing key” which essentially makes locating “title keys” in memory obsolete as the “processing key” works for all HD-DVD titles shipped to date. Since the “processing key” can be changed, expect this to happen in the near future.

Slysoft has only released AnyDVD HD (AnyDVD version for HD-DVD movies) and NOT a CloneDVD HD version (will come in the future). The good news is that AnyDVD HD not only decrypts HD-DVD movies but also includes a ripper application for DVD and HD-DVD disks. Use of the rippers is very straight forward. Simply load the ripper by right clicking on the AnyDVD HD icon on the Windows Taskbar (or use the Windows Start Menu). Select the “source drive”, select the destination directory and then select “Copy DVD”. The ripper provides a progress meter with time remaining in the copy process and also provides the transfer rate from the disk to the hard drive.




The ripper will create a directory using the name of the DVD or HD-DVD and place all copied files (in their appropriate directories, such HVDVD_TS) in the directory (you can also “Drag and Drop” the files to any directory). Once the copy process is complete, you can load the movies using PowerDVD or WinDVD. Simply open PowerDVD (for example), select “open movie file on hard disk drive” and enjoy! Once the movie is loaded you can access ALL menus and also access features such as “TrueHD Audio” and “U-Control” (PIP Interactive Movie Experience).


NOTE: The HD-DVD ripper tool works in Vista but to playback ANY (encrypted or decrypted) Digital Content using PowerDVD (or WinDVD) in Vista you must have a HDCP compliant Video Card. Playback in XP does not require a HDCP compliant Video Card (unless playing back directly from the original disk).

Since there are NO HD-DVD Burners shipping yet and media will probably cost a small fortune, creating HD-DVD disks is not a reality at this time which should be comforting to the AACS and HD-DVD groups (Blu-Ray too). Sharing content is NOT really feasible either as the EVO files for the movies range from 19GB to 25GB in size (King Kong is near 28GB). Using Torrents to download these files is madness (unless you have no life “what-so-ever”) which makes me happy as I really want HD-DVD to survive and piracy does not help the cause at ALL. Again, one should only use AnyDVD HD to excise ones FAIR-USE rights and NOT for sharing movies with ones buddies, co-workers and strangers.

AnyDVD HD is an excellent application that has been released in record time following the release of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray last summer. AnyDVD HD is available from Slysoft at SlySoft Products | Copy Movie DVDs with AnyDVD and CloneDVD and costs 30.00 for existing AnyDVD users (with a registered key) and 79.00 for new users.

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Editor - www.hidef.com

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