A forum poster by the name of Muslix64 has recently cracked the new “unbreakable” AACS protection or HD DVD movies and posted it in a thread on Doom9 forum. It also appears that Muslix64 has created a video about using the BackupHDDVD software, showing a command line interface, the files being created and a clip of Full Metal Jacket while showing that the DVD was in hand, not in the player.

“just bought a HD-DVD drive to plug on my PC, and a HD movie, cool! But when I realized the 2 software players on windows don’t allowed me to play the movie at all, because my video card is not HDCP compliant and because I have a HD monitor plugged with DVI interface, I started to get mad…” posted Muslix64 on the forum. “This is not what we can call ‘fair use’! So I decide to decrypt that movie. I start reading the AACS specification I have found on the net. I estimate it will take me about 4 weeks of full time job to decrypt that. I was wrong, it was in fact, easy…”

AACS protection is the Advanced Access Content System and is a standard developed for content distribution and digital rights management to restrict the access and copying of new optical discs and DVDs. The standard was developed and adopted by Sony, Disney, Intel, Microsoft and a few other major companies to protect HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD’s. Links to download the software and source are available on the forum post.

Whether this will have an impact on the DVD format war front is hard to say. Will studios move towards Blu-ray since the HD DVD protection has been compromised, or are there a lot of people out there that want to make copies backups of their movies and will want to go the HD DVD route?