Some thoughts about CSS

The creators of the DVD standard have decided, that it shouldn't be possible to read the digital video data directly with a DVD-Drive. So they invented the content scrambling system (CSS), which should make the direct reading of DVDs impossible. So if the person wants to watch a DVD he payed for on a DVD-Drive, he also payed for, he has to pay for additional software which can show the contents of the DVD on the computer monitor. Companies, who want to produce hardware or software DVD-Players have to pay for a decryption key, they get from the DVD-Consortium.

CSS is like selling books written in a secret language and selling another book, which explains the language, seperately. No customer would accept such a marketing strategy. But for electronic media, the situation is quite different. Due to the complexity of today's technology, most customers simply don't realize, that if they buy a DVD-player, they also pay for the CSS-key which the player manufacturer had to buy (for about 1 Mio US$). And the big companies have the power to force the customers to buy DVD-players by simply removing the good old VHS-tapes from the market.

A positive side effect of CSS (for the owners of the DVD standard) is, that small companies, who could become competitors, simply don't have a chance to get into the DVD market because they can't afford the license fees for a CSS key.

And millions of people have decided not to pay for software anyway. They use free software, which is mainly written by programmer communities in the internet. Almost any computer thing, a human can think about, can be realized today by only using free software. But because of CSS, it was not possible, to write a free program which play DVDs.

The CSS-System however is a very weak encryption system, because the US government has decided that the use and export of good encryption technology should be restricted. So, some hackers found the solution of this problem by writing DeCSS, a small piece of free software which does the job of decoding DVDs. Using DeCSS and some software, which decodes MPEG2 streams, it's absolutely no problem to write a DVD-Player. The DVD-people of course didn't like this and they try to sue all web providers who offer the free DeCSS program on their homepages. By the way, since they began to make such a trouble because of a few lines of computer code, there are so many mirror sites in the whole world offering DeCSS, that today it's simply  impossible to remove this program from the internet.

In my opinion, CSS is just a way to earn as much money as possible with lowest possible effort. And nothing is more simple than selling CSS-keys (which are just a few bytes long) for 1 Mio US$ each. For professional pirates, there exist devices, which make a 1:1 copies of DVDs, so they aren't affected by CSS anyway.

I want gmerlin to support all media formats and devices including DVD. But because of the brainless trouble concerning DeCSS, I decided, not to include any line of code into gmerlin, which does CSS-decryption. If you have enough criminal energy to watch encrypted DVDs you payed for on a DVD-drive you payed for with gmerlin, you must include the criminal CSS decryption code into gmerlin's source tree yourself and recompile.

Click on the link below for more information about the CSS thing

OpenDVD