When my roommate gets utterly bored, he goes to Blockbuster and rents a movie. He rented Capote sometime ago and never got around to watching it. Most movies, he gets 15 minutes in and falls asleep. Eventually, the DVD had to be returned and he never watched it. I told him I’d copy it to my computer so he or I could watch it later. I tried my coping software, but it wouldn’t copy over. Oh well, c’est la vie, n’est pas.

Well, recently I rented Howl’s Moving castle. I tried to make a back-up of it too and it didn’t work. Therefore, something must be up. I did a quick search and found out that some movie companies are employing a new copy protection, ARccOS, to prevent people from making back-ups.

ARccOS is a copy-protection system developed by Sony used on some DVDs. Designed as an additional form of copy protection, it is used in conjunction with Content-scrambling system (CSS). The system deliberately creates a number of sectors on the DVD with corrupted data that causes DVD copying software to produce errors. Normal DVD players do not ever read these sectors since they follow a set of instructions encoded on the disc telling them to skip it. Less sophisticated DVD ripping programs do not follow these instructions but try to read every sector on the disk sequentially, including the bad ones.

Many major titles are using this protection, so I had to update my DVD ripper to DVDFab Decrypter. Normally, DVDShrink does all the work of ripping and compressing the dvds, but it hasn’t been updated since 2004. I’ll have to mess around with DVDFab a little more, but it handled the ARccOS protection and I can back-up DVDs once more.