[HN Gopher] What Is LibreDrive (2019)
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What Is LibreDrive (2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-10-09 02:58 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forum.makemkv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forum.makemkv.com)
| bitwize wrote:
| Almost certainly a DMCA violation and therefore illegal to
| distribute.
| therein wrote:
| Too bad I already flashed it long time ago into my LG.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm not sure why. If the point is to make the firmware read
| every bit of the drive, that doesn't seem like it would break
| any copyright law. The encrypted data is rather useless without
| breaking DRM, but the DRM breaking doesn't happen in hardware.
|
| If the firmware is based on existing, proprietary drive
| firmware, then distributing it may run afoul of copyright law,
| but if all that's distributed is a patch file then I don't see
| the problem there either.
|
| There are quite a few countries with exceptions in copyright
| law for compatibility reasons, like modifying programs to make
| them work on newer hardware without the original authors'
| consent. The reason VLC (and many other open source projects)
| can play DVDs is that France, where VLC is based, has laws that
| make it legal to distribute a DVD playback library. I don't
| think any Linux distros have faced legal trouble over
| distributing VLC, even if they are American in nature.
|
| I'm sure the copyright lobby will have a different opinion, but
| I don't think it's quite as black and white without knowing
| where the author resides and/it what nationality they have.
| immibis wrote:
| Because the purpose is to read disks protected by
| technological protection measures. Circumventing
| technological protection measures is illegal, period. That's
| one of the things many people don't like about the DMCA. I'd
| recommend to start archiving this website now.
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, the post is from 2019, and MakeMKV has been around
| much longer than that. I know this isn't always the case,
| but I feel like if they were going to take down MakeMKV's
| site, they probably would have done it by now.
| immibis wrote:
| They thought that about Yuzu, too.
| tombert wrote:
| MakeMKV has been around considerably longer than Yuzu
| ever was. I think I first downloaded it in 2013-2014.
|
| Not to say that the MPAA isn't ever going to go after it,
| but I am sure they're aware of it by now and have, if
| nothing else, been biding their time.
| tempfile wrote:
| The DMCA is American law, so the parent comment can only be
| referring to America. Obviously doesn't apply outside there.
|
| > I don't think any Linux distros have faced legal trouble
| over distributing VLC, even if they are American in nature.
|
| That's because they generally don't distribute libdvdcss,
| which is the illegal part.
|
| > Many Linux distributions do not contain libdvdcss (for
| example, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE) due to fears of
| running afoul of DMCA-style laws, but they often provide the
| tools to let the user install it themselves. For example, it
| used to be available in Ubuntu through Medibuntu, which is no
| longer available.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss#Distribution
| tombert wrote:
| Maybe to the letter of the law, but I think there's a reason
| why no one seems to go after MakeMKV.
|
| If you're _using_ MakeMKV, then almost by definition you have a
| legitimate copy of the media you're ripping, and as such not a
| direct target of any kind of piracy prevention. Obviously you
| could then post your rip on The Pirate Bay or something, but I
| don't think that MakeMKV is generally blamed for that.
|
| I have a ton of Blu-Ray movies purchased legitimately, and I
| use MakeMKV to rip them and play them with Jellyfin. I don't
| distribute them, I only play them in my house.
|
| Am I technically breaking the law? Probably, DRM law is weird
| and confusing in the US, but I doubt that the MPAA has a huge
| problem with what I am doing, since I _am_ paying them for
| legitimate copies of my movies.
| opengears wrote:
| Using libredrive supported devices - would we get some other
| advantages? Like being able to read from old and broken CDROM and
| DVD devices more reliably?
| bombcar wrote:
| No, it actually makes it "worse" in that most usual DVD players
| and drives will do a "best effort, but keep going" type of read
| which may result in a pop or skip or desync for a moment on
| playback - but these tools are archival and refuse to read if
| they can't read correctly.
|
| It's actually quite annoying at times, for example it's often
| better to rip audiobooks with iTunes and then grab the files
| and delete it from iTunes than to use something like XLD
| directly.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I remember several years ago when I wanted to watch a Star Wars
| DVD on a computer.
|
| This was in the UK with the DVDs purchased in the UK and with a
| DVD reader also purchased in the UK, as that's where I live.
|
| Windows Media Player told me that the region of the Disc was
| wrong and that if I wanted to watch it, it could instruct the
| firmware on the DVD player to update its allowed region, but that
| I could only do this (I think) five times and no more.
|
| Rather than dealing with this pompous bullshit I watched it with
| VLC player which just worked without doing any of that legal
| nonsense.
|
| I've remained a big advocate of VLC ever since.
| alias_neo wrote:
| I had a tangentially related situation many (~20?) years ago
| when I bought a music album released under Sony, I had a sweet
| PC based Hi-Fi setup, and the DRM ring they'd added to the disc
| meant it wouldn't play back at anything above MP3 128.
|
| I noticed a ~1.5cm ring around the outside of the disc was
| visibly a different colour/texture to the standard audio part;
| I tried blanking it out with Sharpie which some people online
| suggested might work, but eventually gave up and contacted Sony
| to tell them how pissed off I was that they were preventing PC-
| based music listeners from listening to what they'd bought.
| They sent back an apology and a new copy of the disk without
| the DRM/MP3 crap.
|
| I bet LibreDrive might have worked by letting me just read the
| disc raw and grab the bits I need.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Sony really did crazy stuff for "copy protection" on their
| CDs ...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo.
| ..
| n1b0m wrote:
| "Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful.
| It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs
| that merely made the program's files invisible while also
| installing additional software that could not be easily
| removed, collected an email address from the user and
| introduced further security vulnerabilities."
|
| That's diabolical
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It was likely very illegal as well, but you know big
| company and a legal system that is/was decades behind the
| state of the art
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| This is called freedom
| l72 wrote:
| I had a similar issue, of moving from the US to Germany in 2000
| and my spouse bringing her favorite DVDs with us. However, once
| we got there, she was unable to watch any of them, as all the
| DVD players were for the EU region, while her DVDs were for the
| US.
|
| She is not a technical person, but she is now very acutely
| aware of B.S. restrictions like this (and later DRM on mp3s)
| and how to get around them.
| swijck wrote:
| I love how we have gone full circle on retro technology.
| snvzz wrote:
| makemkv itself is also tremendously useful.
|
| Got some inconvenient to work with BD or DVD? Just dump it into a
| mkv file with makemkv, and now it is convenient to work with.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| It is worth pointing out that MakeMKV has a CLI you can use it
| without the GUI. I have a batch file that rips the main movie
| from my BD drive and names the MKV based on the BD disc label.
| My script is old enough I wrote it myself, but ChatGPT/Claude
| could easily do a better job.
|
| When combining MakeMKV's CLI and Handbrake's CLI there is an
| easy and very repeatable path of going from disc to an
| optimized MP4. Some might think it is sacrilegious to use MP4
| instead of MKV. I've found MP4s with H264 video and AC3 audio
| can play almost everywhere (for me: Xbox, Roku, iPhone/Safari,
| Edge, Android, most smart TVs) now, and support surround sound.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is against using different containers
| for compatibility, you can remux from mkv to mp4 very easily
| with ffmpeg directly. However it's a little odd to go through
| the intermediate step of using MakeMKV if you're just
| compressing the resulting remux using Handbrake. Usually the
| point of MakeMKV is to get the highest quality copies of
| retail media.
| downut wrote:
| "... you can remux from mkv to mp4 very easily with ffmpeg
| directly."
|
| According to the HandBrake docs (ISTR) mp4 can't handle
| multiple languages and subtitle sets, so the conversion
| mkv->mp4 is (potentially) lossy. I'm no expert, just trying
| to keep the language/subtitle sets I want, maybe I've
| missed something here. What I do so far is HB encode to
| Matroska, not MPEG-4. Then I don't lose any of the ones I
| want. Also I have noticed sometimes MakeMKV is not entirely
| inclusive in its defaults and I have to add extra
| languages/subtitles.
| janandonly wrote:
| Very interesting set of posts. I feel that when this website goes
| dark and the last grey-beards stops blogging, this kind of arcane
| information will be lost forever.
|
| This makes me sad.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| But but but but AI will remember!
|
| That does make me think about the fact that AI LLMs could be
| useful at archiving specific fields that are "obsolete".
|
| An archive of documents, presentations, research papers tech
| specs, relevant code, etc could be prepped and expended over
| the years for the field/technology/etc. it would be nice having
| an LLM specifically known to target that body of knowledge so
| the prompt subclauses to filter out the rest of the general
| internet bullcrap.
| pdpi wrote:
| > LibreDrive functionality is implemented as part of open-source
| LibDriveIO library (at the time of this writing the library
| source code is not yet released)
|
| This was posted in 2019. As of today, there is still no published
| source code.
| rfl890 wrote:
| See this forum post[1] for some insight on the situation
|
| [1]:
| https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24312#post_c...
| bombcar wrote:
| Based on this and my experience with the world, I suspect
| that he's protecting a revenue stream but intends to open-
| source the code when he retires or no longer depends on the
| stream.
| junaru wrote:
| Correct me if i'm wrong but its not even exploiting some firmware
| bug or anything.
|
| Think there is a 'plugin interface' in those firmware that
| exposes whatever is needed to read the raw data so all it does is
| uses that interface to dump data instead of using the official
| calls. IIRC its why the read speeds are slower.
|
| Source: some post on the same forum couple of years ago.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Depends on the drive. Early drive firmwares were unencrypted
| and left debug features available. Modern drives use encrypted
| firmware and have the debug modes disabled. If you've got one
| of those early firmwares, you're good to go. If not, you'll
| need to patch your drive.
|
| However, "encrypted" is fairly weak compared to, say, a game
| console when the key is the same for all drives and there's no
| hardware-level anti-rollback...
|
| As a result, it was fairly easily defeated on modern drives.
| Find key, decrypt firmware, make changes, re-encrypt, update.
| Thanks MediaTek for keeping the same flawed legally-approved
| chip architecture for almost a decade.
| therein wrote:
| I love MediaTek for these things. Same for "old" Android
| phones.
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