News

On July 4, a Brazilian website apparently posted some tools that allowed users of InterVideo's WinDVD to pull copy-protected data off DVD-Audio discs and store it on the user's hard drive rather than simply routing it to a sound card. According to Afterdawn, the tools didn't "do the decryption themselves, [but] instead patched WinDVD to output the decrypted stream to disk instead of the sound card."

But don't go off looking to download those tools now—they've been yanked. As "rjamorim" (presumedly the same individual as "MaximA," who is credited with originally distributing the tool set) explained on Doom9's forum: "I got a phone call from a big local lawyer office (no fake, I checked the caller ID and the phone number really belongs to a lawyer office). They have been hired to make me stop distributing the DVD-A tools. It was a reasonably big talk, but I can summarize it [as], 'We are giving you two choices, either you remove all references to those tools from your site now, or we'll have to take you to court.'"

His response? "I'm already removing."

Website High Fidelity Review pointed out the "applications have some legitimate value for enthusiasts (the ability to tell whether a disc has Verance watermarking and being able to analyze the audio content digitally to spot upsampled discs, for example)."

These strike us as pretty handy tools, in fact—as does the ability to access high-resolution digital data so that consumers (like us) can enjoy significantly better sound quality than that which the nearly quarter-century–old Red Book standard has bequeathed us. Of course, we don't condone intellectual theft, even if it is motivated by lofty ideals, but the failure of the high-rez formats of DVD-A and SACD seems to us to stem more from their inability to truly deliver on their promise to their real constituency, those of us concerned with sound quality, than from the "format war" issue.

Of course, now that the genie has been let out of the bottle, it's a safe bet that we'll be hearing a lot more on this particular issue in the near future.