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I want to make a DVD movie which will be playable on a standard DVD player, but I want to make it copy restricted.

I know it is practically impossible, but I just want security to protect it from normal users, not from high end software pirates. Any software freeware/shareware will help me.

Xander
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Milan V.
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    Such a scheme is already built into the DVD specification. It's called the [Content Scramble System](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System). – Xander Aug 28 '13 at 14:24
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    Breaking standard DVD copy protection requires knowledge of its existence, and a google search for "DVD rip software". It's not reserved for very experienced software pirates anymore, and takes minutes or less to break on modern computers. – Brigand Aug 28 '13 at 16:20
  • @FakeRainBrigand This is a general principle. For any standard protection method that is not so good, since there is market and it is doable, there will be a tool, it will be available on the Internet, and people with zero CS knowledge will be able to use it. – curiousguy Aug 28 '13 at 17:39
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    I must be thick - took me a couple of hours to work out how to rip DVDs - thankfully I already had the software to unencrypt the CSS - it was the other nasties that caught me out. – symcbean Aug 29 '13 at 15:23

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If your DVD can be read by a standard DVD player then it can be read by a standard DVD player. This implies that it can use only that which is supported by standard DVD players, i.e. CSS, which is hopelessly weak.

You would have better luck with AACS as used in Blu-ray disks. What AACS tries to achieve is still "impossible" in theory, but in practice copying a Blu-ray disk or extracting its contents requires some hardware which costs more than 40$ at the nearest electronics shop. If the contents of your disk are interesting in some way, there will come a time when some people will find it fit to invest some effort in extracting them, but you might hope for a few weeks or even months of respite before this event.

Thomas Pornin
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  • could you please suggest any software that use CSS for protection ? – Milan V. Aug 29 '13 at 05:46
  • The DVD player itself uses CSS for "protection" (and it does not amount to much). And, also, this issue CANNOT be dealt with in software. You will have any level of protection with that kind of system only if the decryption is done in hardware (if it was done in software, the player would have a key which would be too easy to reverse-engineer) AND the player refuses to play a disk which is both encrypted and "home-burnt" (as opposed to industrially pressed). – Thomas Pornin Aug 29 '13 at 13:22
  • For that matter, there _are_ DVD software players for Windows which include the decryption keys, and they have been reverse-engineered. It just happens that CSS itself was so poorly designed that DVD players which do not include the key (e.g. players for Linux) find it more convenient to just break the algorithm directly. But even if CSS was done well, the software decryption would kill the security. With Blu-ray, the decryption is done in hardware, with a _reader-specific_ key (each individual reader has its own key). – Thomas Pornin Aug 29 '13 at 13:24