Here's an example of a normal embedded Youtube video, borrowed from Patti Schiendelman's Gakken Mechamo Inchworm post.

Back in march, it was discovered that when you view a video directly on Youtube, you could add a "&fmt=18" to the URL to enable a higher quality, higher resolution stream which is encoded with the H.264 codec.

To make this work in an embedded video, however, you need a slightly different hack. After pasting the embed code into a blog post, adjust the two video URLs (one in a param tag and one as the src parameter in the embed tag) by adding "&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" to the end.

For example, the above video embed becomes:

<object width="600" height="475"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iMQBKkDJY2c&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iMQBKkDJY2c&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="600" height="475"></embed></object>

And here's the result:

The still frame before the video is played is the exact same over-compressed image, but when a user clicks play, they will get a nice surprise. Instead of 320x240 video encoded with the Sorenson codec, the video will come in at a resolution of 480x360, encoded with the superior H.264 codec.

Embedding High Quality Youtube Videos [via Kottke]
View YouTube in high-res

During tonight's election coverage, CNN pulled out some deep tech, displaying Jessica Yellin live via hologram. I looked closely and wasn't even able to see the R2 unit behind the scenes.

<update>
My original impression of how this works is below. A comment from Eric suggests that this might actually be a real hologram that Wolf can see in person, and not a live bluescreening effect. More on this at the end of the post.
</update>

From what I can tell (and I could be wrong), this is done using a combination of technologies, most of which you could simulate at home if you could be satisfied using standard equipment, some careful camera work, and post production techniques instead of the real-time hardware and networked camera equipment CNN is rocking.

The person is recorded inside of a blue or green tent surrounded by an array of cameras that are able to catch several angles at once, presumably with each camera partnered with a real camera on the studio stage. The appropriate holo-camera feed is chosen depending on the real studio camera being used, and the holo camera is networked and synced to move exactly with its partner camera in the studio. This allows the hologram to shift perspective appropriately as the studio camera scoots around the stage. You might compare this to how the virtual first down line is tweaked in real-time to fit the various camera positions in a football game broadcast, except in this case it's not a generated asset, it's a live video feed that's carefully filmed to be at the exact perspective.

Finally, using traditional keying/blue-screen techniques, the tent background color is alphaed out of the feed and the video is overlayed on top of the studio feed, leaving the keyed-out hologram correctly perspective positioned on the final output.

There are two final added touches that make this pretty convincing. One is the red circle on the floor. My best bet is that it's real and created with a red light from above in the live studio feed. The second is the person-to-person conversation. Wolf Blitzer is a pretty good actor - there's no way he's actually seeing the hologram in front of him.

Or can he? Eric points us to the Musion Eyeliner and Cisco Telepresence technology that can display what appears to be a fairly high-fidelity hologram in a stage environment. Here's a video that shows how such a system would be set up:

I remain a bit unconvinced that this is actually what's going on, mostly because of the full 180 degree camera POV that was used in the CNN version, but doesn't seem possible with the Musion system. What are your thoughts? Please post them in the comments.

Anyone care to make their own hologram video with a moving camera? It'd be a bit of a challenge using consumer equipment, and I'm not sure what software you'd use if you didn't have something like After Effects, but it'd be pretty fun to see. For inspiration, here's a decent one done with a fixed camera position:

CNN Hologram Interview [via MAKE]
Real Life R2D2 Hologram

Cisco Telepresence Demo On Live Stage
Musion Eyeliner Hologram Projection System

Direct manipulation of video is one of the more uncanny HCI concepts I've ever seen. Instead of manipulating time with a traditional scrubber bar, the user can drag objects in the video across their path of movement. Nothing in the video actually changes, but the perception is that you can directly manipulate the objects in the video stream by pulling them around through time.

There's a Windows application called DimP which implements this interface. When you hover over a movable object in the video, a light path appears that emphasizes the object's motion curve, which you can then move the object across. From the DimP website:

So what's being manipulated, exactly? Both the video content (e.g., the things you see moving in the video) and the "tape head". When using DimP, the user directly manipulates the video content and indirectly manipulates the tape head. When using the seeker bar, the user directly manipulates the tape head and indirectly manipulates the video content.

The video above describes how DimP works in a bit more detail, showing a few different video scenarios where direct manipulation really shines. It's intuitive and bizarre at the same time. If the universe is completely deterministic, I can't help but think this is what time travel must look like.

DimP - A Direct Manipulation Video Player
DRAGON - Direct Manipulation Interface Demo for OS X

Sebastian Tomczak has been playing around with controlling VGA output from an Arduino. Using Max/MSP to process audio and send data to the Arduino and a standard VGA output to send sync data to the monitor, he's been able to put together some cool video effects.

In these examples, i am simply using three pins to control the RGB lines. However, the Arduino is not generating horizontal or vertical sync - this is generated by a computer.

You can grab the Max patch and Arduino code from Sebastian's post. I dig the effect - it reminds me of the cool C4 demos kids used to make.

Hacking VGA lines with Arduino

Friedrich Kirschner's Milkscanner is a clever method for scanning 3D objects using only a webcam, some milk, and a camera rig made out of LEGO.

The basic idea is this: you place an object in a container, incrementally fill the container with milk, and take a photo after each tiny fill increment. The Milkscanner software mattes out the white part of the images, resulting in a silhouette "slice" of the object for each increment in the Z dimension. Each slice gives you information about the outer perimeter of the object at that depth (assuming the object is convex).

Milkscanner is able to output a depthmap from this information which you can use in Blender or MovieSandbox, an open source machinima filmmaking tool. Friedrich has been using the latter to produce some pretty fantastic work. Instead of small objects, however, he was able to scan a human using a bathtub which was filled with ink-tinted water.

The original version is written in C# and requires a Windows PC with the latest DirectX. If I read things correctly, there is a new version that will be released soon which is written using a cross platform drawing and image capture API. Hopefully this means that the new release will be available for Linux and OS X. Fingers crossed - this looks like fun.

Fluidscanner
Milkscanner binary and source downloads (distributed with MovieSandbox)

Earlier this year, I wrote about project Apricot, an open source game that is currently under development using Blender and the Crystal Space game engine. This isn't the only project that the Blender Institute has been funding recently. Big Buck Bunny, a completely open source animated film, was released at the end of May. It's an impressive case study for what can now be done on the Blender platform.

This Open movie project had as main targets:

• Developing tools in Blender for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass
• Improve character animation tools for cartoonish motion and deformation
• Test Blender with giant outdoor environments, with large grassy fields and many trees with leaves
• Further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite

And secondary:

• Create a great and good looking animation short, licensed freely as open content
• Provide content for other artists to learn from or to re-use, including documentation and tutorials

And of course: Have lots of fun!

I recognized a few of the film's characters from some of the demos that have been released in the Apricot game development site. The beauty of open source is that a lot of these assets can be shared between projects. There's also something to be said for a development culture that embraces documentation and information sharing. Take this "bunny rig" character animation control demonstration, for example:

The Blender community has already been really good with program documentation, tutorials and howtos. The development of open source games and films, with all the techniques and artwork that is a part of that process, takes things one step further. Now you also have a chance to learn from the techniques that were used in the making of a larger film project, straight from Blender animation gurus. It's not every day you have an opportunity to download full artwork, scene, and animation assets for an entire film.

Big Buck Bunny
Blender - open source 3D content creation suite
Elephants Dream - the first open movie project, made using Blender

Previously: Open source game development

If you want to shoot time lapse movies with your DSLR, you need an intervalometer, a simple device which sends a signal to your camera to trigger the shutter at a timed interval. You can buy one for around $100, or you can write a few lines of basic and have your trusty TI calculator take timed photos for you, resulting in nifty movies like this:

Yonderknight has an Instructable for doing exactly this with a standard TI 83. You can connect a Canon EOS Rebel to the calculator with the standard 2.5mm data link socket, and the software just sends a 1 down the line once a second. Matt Coneybeare tool this a step further with his code for the TI-89, allowing the user to specify a duration and interval period.

Both howtos walk you through the whole process, including a couple of recommendations for importing and converting the image frames into a video. It should be pretty straightforward to adapt either of these methods to your specific TI platform and video needs.

Turn a TI-83 into an intervalometer
Time-lapse code for the TI-89

Using a standard DV cam, a Mac Mini, and the Quicktime Broadcaster utility, you can roll your own Slingbox-style TV streamer on the cheap. David Glover, realizing that his DV camera had an analog input and firewire output, put together a howto for doing just this:

Yesterday from a dusty shelf I discovered my Sony DV camera. And after playing with it for a while I discovered (or possibly re-discovered, as I might have just forgotten) that it has analogue video inputs that it will digitise and then spit out of the DV port.

So this gave me an idea - this is essentially what the Slingbox does, except the Slingbox outputs a network stream rather than DV video. But I have a Mac Mini sitting underneath my TV downstairs, and that has a DV port on it...

This is really handy if you want to catch a show on your computer while you are working from another room. Assuming you also have a DV camera and a spare Mac you can connect to your TV, it's also essentially free.

DIY Slingbox
QuickTime Broadcaster - Apple's free video transcoder and streaming utility

YouTube user kwakhed23 pushed out this video showing before and after imagery of the Moon. In the "before" part of the video, you can see the effects of the atmosphere warping the Moon's image as it passes over the frame. In the "after" video, a temporal noise reduction filter is applied using the open source video tool VirtualDub. It's difficult to tell for sure in the YouTube compressed video, but it appears to have cleaned up the image nicely.

i thought this might be useful to other amateur astronomers who use the "mount the camera on a tripod and point it at the eyepiece" technique. you should be able to get much more detail this way.

I've used VirtualDub for deinterlacing and other random video cleanup projects before, and it's a very handy tool. I'm not certain exactly which filter is being used by kwakhed23, but in addition to the built-ins, you can check out Donald Graft's site for numerous other contributed filters which might be worth playing around with.

Better Astronomical Images Via Filtering
VirtualDub
Donald Graft's Collection of VirtualDub Filters

YouTube has been testing higher bitrate encodings of it videos, which you can see if you add a &fmt=8 or &fmt=16 to the video url. Historically, all videos have been delivered to the lowest common denominator: sorenson encoded 320x240. By adding &fmt=6 to the URL, the video is served up in 448x336 resolution and I'm guessing it's using the VP6 codec (can anyone confirm?). &fmt=18 gives you the iPhone-style MP4 stream.

What videos will actually look better in the higher res format is completely dependent on the material that was uploaded to YouTube, obeying the rules of garbage in garbage out. I've looked at a number of videos where you can't really tell the difference between the low and high-res versions, presumably because the uploaded video was already heavily compressed or pre-scaled to 320x240. There are a few, however, that are strikingly better, such as the skateboarding dog above.

A greasemonkey script is available which will cause Firefox to automatically load the fmt=18 version, if available. A quick install and you can be wasting time at twice the bitrate.

Watch High-Resolution YouTube Videos - [via] Link
YouTube HD Greasmonkey Script - Link

Quentin Lengelé put together a cool demo for a Flash application that uses the Papervision 3D library to pan around a 360 degree video while it's playing:

The idea was to apply the BitmapData of that movie on a GeoSphere.

The GeoSphere is made in 3DSMAX with flipped faces and exported in ASE Format.
The ASE Format is readable by Papervision3D.

Then you just need to draw your bitmapData into a texture you apply to the ASE in ActionScript.

I'd be really interested in seeing a DIY version of the 360 degree camera hardware. Has anyone taken something like this on?

360 Degree Video with PaperVision 3D - [via] Link

A while ago we wrote about removing the DRM from Netflix "Watch Now" movies. At the time, it involved wading through a bit of HTML source to find the target video URL. Since then, a couple of important things have happened: a Greasemonkey script was written that makes it a bit easier to download and process the DRMed WVM file, and more importantly, Netflix is now allowing unlimited downloads.

What can you do with this? Well, you can download a number of videos ahead of time and then watch them at your leisure, especially if you travel a lot and are offline for extended periods of time. It also means you can convert the files to mp4 format for playing on your mac, iPod or Apple TV device. Or maybe you were hoping to finish that documentary you were making about the strange facial expressions of Sylvester Stallone and needed a few more clips to splice into your film...

How To Rip Netflix "Watch Now" Movies - Link
Netflix Downloader Greasemonkey Script - Link

The Monster and Friends Design Studio released a beta version of an iPhone camcorder app today. The hack's author, drunknbass, was able to squeeze about 10fps out of the camera when capturing data at a 2 megapixel HD framesize.

The current beta will do this for 5 seconds, but the author alludes to a future version being able to record indefinitely long clips at a higher frame rate. This may only be achievable at the sacrifice of the huge frame size, though. I'd assume that there are some non-trivial data throughput and compression horsepower limitations that would make long recordings at high framerate and high resolution pretty difficult.

I'm hoping the next version is released with source. Hopefully, with a few heads taking a crack at optimizing things, iPhone users will get a slick guerilla video platform out of this.

iPhone Video Recording - [via] Link

Smartcam is an open source utility that will turn a bluetooth-enabled Symbian Series 60 camera phone into a webcam that you can use on your Windows PC. Half of the application runs on the phone, reads from the camera and sends video frames to the PC via bluetooth. The other half of the application runs in Windows, receives the video frames and creates a virtual web camera that can be used in programs like Skype or Yahoo messenger.

There's not much documentation, and the project is still alpha, but if you can grep the source, you technically have everything you need to make other applications which pull live video from the phone.

SmartCam project page on SourceForge - [via] Link

If you've ever needed to place a VGA monitor further than the standard 6 foot cable allows, you may be familiar with some of these problems:

• VGA cables are expensive
• Several cables chained together affects signal quality
• Running a VGA cable through conduit is pretty difficult

You can avoid a lot of these problems by making a couple VGA to Cat-5 adapters. This will let you run standard, cheap, easy-to-pull ethernet cable between your computer and video display. The twisted pair helps reduce signal loss, though it doesn't work quite as well as the long-run shielded VGA cables. Unless you need to extend your display to over 50 feet, this might be a much easier and more cost-effective way to do things.

VGA over Cat-5 ethernet cable - Link

Last week I mentioned that you can use TCPMP on Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PCs to view H.264 encoded MP4s. I glossed over a few details, so here's a quick guide for getting everything running.

What You Need:

• TCPMP: download the latest version for Pocket PC or Smartphone (currently 0.72RC1)- Link
• H.264 ffmpeg plugin: under "additional plugins" - Link
• AAC plugin: grab the Windows Mobile download under the "BetaPlayer AAC plugin" heading - Link

You'll also need your Smartphone or Pocket PC, a PC with ActiveSync, and enough space on the device (or SDCard) for storing the video you want to watch.

Install the Files:
The TCPMP download is a CAB file. You can either drop this on an SDCard in the device or copy it to the device with ActiveSync. Once it's there, use the file explorer on the device to find the CAB and execute it to begin the install.

After you've installed TCPMP, you'll need to also install the H.264 and AAC codecs so that you can view and hear videos encoded for the iPod. Both of these plugins are downloaded as a ZIP file. Inside you'll find EXE and CAB installers for the Smartphone and Pocket PC Windows Mobile platforms. You can install the CAB files just like you did with TCPMP, or you can execute the EXE installer on your synced PC and ActiveSync will take care of moving it to the device for you.

Transfer and Play Videos on the Device
The fastest way to get large video files to your device is just to drop them on a large SD or MiniSD card and insert it into your device. I did this with a few MP4s I had lying around from MAKE podcasts and Google Video downloads.

You'll find the TCPMP/Core icon in your Start Menu. After executing, you can choose "File->Open" to browse and select an MP4 file to play. There are some settings under options to adjust the video buffer and playback settings. You'll have to experiment to see what works best for your device.

On my test Smartphone, the MP4 video playback is pretty poor, but it does work. The audio doesn't skip, but there are a bunch of dropped video frames during playback. From what I can tell, the device just doesn't have the CPU muscle to decode the video fast enough without hardware acceleration. I have a feeling the Pocket PC hardware might be more up to the task. Please leave a comment if you can confirm this.

Out of the box, Windows Mobile devices can only play WMV files. Formats like Flash video or Quicktime are not supported. Using the open source media player TCPMP and some Pocket IE tweaks, however, you can view the FLV video content available on several popular video sites like YouTube and Google Video, right on your WM5 or WM6 Pocket PC or Smartphone.

For all you Tube-aholics, this is it! You now have direct, unfettered access to Youtube, Google Video & Veoh, in all their glory. Install the CABs listed below, go directly to these websites, and click on a video to play. That's it :)

Even better, you can also use TCPMP to watch H.264 MP4 / iPod encoded videos. With a large enough SD card, you should be able to use the same MP4 encoded videos on your Treo that you play from iTunes or on your iPod or iPhone.

Correction:
dankirkpatrick comments that the device referenced in the MP4-to-Treo article at jaydryden.net is actually a PalmOS device, and not the lookalike Windows Mobile Treo 700w. TCPMP is available for Windows Mobile, though, so I'll try and put together some instructions for this and verify that it works (it should). The encoding info on the Palm article should still apply, you just need to install TCPMP for WM, not for PalmOS.

Full Youtube and Google Video access - Link
Watching MP4 video on Windows Mobile PalmOS using TCPMP - Link
Wikipedia entry on TCPMP - Link

Steve Anderson wrote in about an underused feature of our favorite open source video player, VLC.

I discovered yesterday that the wonderful VLC media player has the ability not only to mount a DVD directory that's been ripped to the hard drive, but also to play a .iso image of a DVD. Seeing as I've been using it for ages without knowing this was possible, I figured a lot of other people would be ignorant to this feature!

Maybe you want to test an ISO that you've created before burning it to a disk. Perhaps you'd like to store your DVDs to your harddisk without transcoding them, retaining all the menus and special features. Using VLC, you should be able to do either by entering a "dvd:" url in the Open dialog box.

Example URLs to Open and play a DVD ISO:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/dvdimage.iso

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdimages/dvdimage.iso

Example URLs to Open and play a ripped DVD folder:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/DVDFOLDER

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdcopies/DVDFOLDER

Resources:
VLC DVD Trick - Link
Get VLC - Link

You'll probably never have the desire or need to download and watch a YouTube video on a text-only console, but doesn't it make you feel better knowing that it can be done?

The trick is to use the AAlib ascii image library as an output device for mplayer, using the -vo parameter:

mplayer -vo aa video.flv

Mplayer will decode the flv frames, process them with AAlib and print luscious video to your console window. At 80x25, it's almost 2 whole kilopixels of resolution! [via]

Watch Videos in ASCII Art - Link
Linux Multimedia Hacks - Link
AAlib ASCII Graphics Library- Link

Most of these are shot from helmet cam, but there's something cool about the perspective from a fixed bike mount as well. The latter is really easy to do on the cheap, and there are a couple Instructables that'll show you how to build a secure mount for your video camera with just a buck or two or hardware.

Video Camera Mount for Bicycle - Link
Bicycle Camera Mount for under $1 - Link

A Series of Tubes wiki - Link.

If you want to do the same for MPEG files, you can still use this tool by converting the MPEGs to AVIs losslessly using ffmpeg. After using Cbreak, just convert them back to MPEG.

It's Windows only, but the source is included (GPL) so maybe this could be ported to Mac/Linux as well. Personally, I'd also like to see this modified to automatically remove the sporting event from the super bowl commercials.

Cbreak: Free commercial remover for AVI files -Link.

Click To Play

Over at O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter, Erica Sadun points out a little-known (at least to me) feature in the current version of iChat:

By control-clicking (right-clicking) a buddy's name, a contextual menu pops up offering the option to invite that person to a one-way video chat. This means that they can watch your video but will not send video back to you in return.

For example, crafts like knitting are notoriously hard to teach without visual cues, and even the most detailed books often suffer from their lack of moving pictures. When I learned to knit, I used books as a crutch, but actually learning required sitting next to my mother-in-law to see how it was done. Even now, when I hit a roadblock with a new technique, I need to wait till the next time we're together. But if we had a feature like this, we likely wouldn't have to wait. I could just "look over her shoulder" as she described what she was doing.

The most obvious benefit of one-way video is that it doesn't require the recipient to have a video camera on their end, but as Erica notes, for instructional content as with streaming movies, one-way video has another notable advantage over two-way video conferencing:

you don't have to watch the other person watching your video. You don't have to see them adjusting their hair, performing nasal maintenance, or any of the other unconscious things people do when they get involved in watching TV as opposed to engaging actively in a social situation.

Josh Paul, author of Digital Video Hacks, has created a pretty amazing product placement experiment:

While viewing, pay attention to the table; there will be a box of cereal on it (or not). The box of cereal can be changed by using the links below. After changing a placement, simply restart the video from the beginning.

Related:

• Digital Video Hacks

Here's an online service that will transcode FLVs for you into several common formats, such as AVI/DivX, MOV/MPEG4, 3GP, etc. I've only had a chance to try it on a couple videos, but it seems to work well. You can submit a YouTube URL or a direct link to an FLV and it will kick out a recompressed version that you can easily play on your desktop, iPod or PSP. -Link.

They've also released the trasncoder source under the LGPL, which you can grab over at sourceforge and use in your own transcoding project. Nice! -Link.

Related:

• Howto: Download Youtube and Google Videos

In Hack #59 of their book Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb use a classic illusion known as the McGurk Effect to show how our senses combine to completely change our ultimate experience of perception. Knowing what's going to happen doesn't even keep you from experiencing the illusion. It just weakens the effect a bit.

Let's try it out. Watch my lips as I make a few sounds:

[[McGurk Effect clip]]

Now, listen to just the audio portion from that clip:

[[audio clip]]

Besides perhaps being a little bit creepy, when you watched the video, I should have appeared to be saying "da da," but when you listen to the audio without the video, it's clear I'm saying "ba ba."

This illusion can't happen in real life. Like McGurk, I made it by splicing the audio of me saying "ba ba" over a video of me making a different sound: "ga ga." When you're not watching the video, you hear what I'm actually saying. But when you see my lips moving, the two bits of information clash. The position of a person's mouth is key in telling what sound someone is making, especially for distinguishing between speech sounds, called phonemes, like "ba," "ga," "pa," and "da," which are all made by popping air out.

Beyond a neat mind trick, the McGurk Effect has some practical uses as well. In Hack #57 of his book Digital Video Hacks, Josh Paul shows how to create the effect yourself, as I've done in this video, and use it in your own movies to fool your audience.

Here's an example of an applying the effect. Watch my lips as I mouth a couple words, while dubbing over a completely different phrase:

[[olive juice effect]]

What did I say? Could you tell that I was saying "olive juice" in the video, before editing it with a different audio track? Does it even matter?

This type of editing occurs frequently when feature films are shown shown on TV. Some words obviously are frowned upon by the FCC, and when movie houses edit them out, they generally try to fool you into believing the audio is original to the movie, or at least keep you from noticing the difference too much.

A common example is when someone shouts "Forget you!" onscreen. Though you know a different phrase was used in the original, the illusion is convincing enough to keep you from being distracted by the dubbing. But when the illusion is used with words that don't quite fit the context of the movie, the effect tends to break down. For example, when I hear John Goodman shout, "This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps," I know the attempt has failed miserably. - Link to video download.

Resources:
Mind Hacks, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb

Hearing with Your Eyes collection of McGurk Effect movies

]]> [<a href="http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hear_with_your_eyes_the_mcgurk.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558" />Read More</a>] [<a href="http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hear_with_your_eyes_the_mcgurk.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558#comments" />Comments</a>] http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hear_with_your_eyes_the_mcgurk.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558 http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hear_with_your_eyes_the_mcgurk.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558 Hackszine Podcast Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:43:11 -0800 Arnezami from the Doom9 forums slurped out the processing key that can unlock every HD DVD and Blu-Ray disc, regardless of how any of us feel about these wonky multiple formats and DRM, reading the forum messages on how...
Arnezami from the Doom9 forums slurped out the processing key that can unlock every HD DVD and Blu-Ray disc, regardless of how any of us feel about these wonky multiple formats and DRM, reading the forum messages on how this was accomplished is a lot of fun...

...then I realized why I first didn't find the Media Key: it was removed from memory after the Volume ID was retrieved and the VUK calculated. I also saw that in my "corrupt" memdump the VUK, Vol ID, Media Key and the Title Key MAC were all closely clustered in memory: in the first 50kb (of the entire multi megabyte file!) but there were large empty parts around it. Almost as if it was cleaned up.

This gave me an idea: what I wanted to do is "record" all changes in this part of memory during startup of the movie. Hopefully I would catch something insteresting. In the end I did something a little more effiecient: I used the hd dvd vuk extractor (thanks ape!) and adapted it to slow down the software player (while scanning its memory continously) and at the very moment the Media Key (which I now knew: my bottom-up approach really paid off here) was detected it halted the player. I then made a memdump with WinHex. I now had the feeling I had something.

And I did.

Processing Key, Media Key and Volume ID found!!! - Page 6 - Doom9's Forum - [via] Link.

]]> [<a href="http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hd_dvd_processing_key_found.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558" />Read More</a>] [<a href="http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hd_dvd_processing_key_found.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558#comments" />Comments</a>] http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hd_dvd_processing_key_found.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558 http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/02/hd_dvd_processing_key_found.html?CMP=OTC-7G2N43923558 Home Theater Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:53:04 -0800