Ultra HD Blu-ray discs can be ripped by new utility, bypassing copy protection

[Len]

Cat and mouse between DRM developers and crackers continues

The battle between DRM developers and cracking teams continues on as AACS 2.0 copy protection has been broken by Russian company Arusoft. Dubbed 'DeUHD', Arusoft's newly released utility allows Ultra HD Blu-ray discs to be decrypted and stored in DRM free formats.

DeUHD can currently only rip around 30 movies and has only eight supported Blu-ray players, but further development is expected in the near future to add support for more optical drives and movies. Arusoft is allowing users to request support for specific movies and claims to be working on adding new movies weekly.

For now, the tool is available as a trial version that only allows eight to ten minutes of a single disc to be decrypted or as a standalone license that has all available features. The standalone version costs €199 ($233) and takes approximately four to six hours to decrypt a standard length movie. It should be noted that standard Blu-ray discs are not supported, only Ultra HD Blu-rays.



There is no fancy user interface to look at, but considering the purpose of the software, Arusoft is not likely to receive any complaints about aesthetics.



Whether this will have any effect on piracy of movies remains to be seen. Users are typically allowed to make one backup copy of their owned media strictly for personal use, so there is a somewhat questionable legal use of the software. For skeptics of the validity of the software given that very little is known about Arusoft, five free licenses will be given away to people that can prove they own the required hardware.