What Is LibreDrive (2019)

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856

by Tomte • 2 years ago

153 41 2 years ago

forum.makemkv.com

bitwize• 2 years ago

Almost certainly a DMCA violation and therefore illegal to distribute.

therein2• 2 years ago

Too bad I already flashed it long time ago into my LG.

jeroenhd• 2 years ago

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.

immibis2• 2 years ago

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.

tempfile• 2 years ago

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

tombert3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

bombcar2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Sony really did crazy stuff for "copy protection" on their CDs ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

p0w3n3d• 2 years ago

This is called freedom

l72• 2 years ago

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.

musicale• 2 years ago

Steve Jobs famously called Blu-ray's licensing (presumably mandating annoying DRM requirements at the OS, driver, and device level) a "bag of hurt" - but it probably didn't hurt that Apple already had a competing "iTunes" movie download store, whose annoying DRM requirements Apple happily implemented at the OS, driver, and device level.

In any case, rip/mix/burn never really made it to iDVD or iMovie (or QuickTime Player), and Apple never shipped Blu-ray movie player software for Macs.

swijck• 2 years ago

I love how we have gone full circle on retro technology.

snvzz3• 2 years ago

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.

pseudosavant2• 2 years ago

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.

doublepg234• 2 years ago

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.

janandonly• 2 years ago

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.

AtlasBarfed2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

See this forum post[1] for some insight on the situation

[1] https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24312#post_c...

bombcar2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

therein2• 2 years ago

I love MediaTek for these things. Same for "old" Android phones.

What Is LibreDrive (2019)

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