Video Player's DVD-Copying Feature May Run Afoul of MPAA

17.07.2009
The latest release of the VLC media player is a huge hit, racking up nearly 8.6 million downloads since the 1.0 release last week, according to the makers of the . But some observers - including movie studio lawyers - may feel the new software is just a little too good. In researching a , I was surprised to learn that it easily allowed me to copy encrypted DVDs directly onto my hard drive. That's something that has landed firms such as RealNetworks in court.

Copying a DVD with VLC is simple. Just pop a DVD into your PC's drive, start playing it through VLC and click the red record button in the VLC interface. The movie, even, in some cases, copy-protected movies, will record in real-time to a file created on your hard drive.

This isn't quite the same process as DVD ripping, in which a software program cracks the DVD's CSS encryption and saves the DVD image as an ISO formatted file. Ripping happens much more quickly than real-time recording.

You can save videos recorded with the VLC software in numerous file formats, including MPEG-4, AVI, and QuickTime. The file can then be saved for playback later, copied onto another DVD, or made available for distribution (if you so choose).

In my tests I was able to copy the CSS encrypted DVDs The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Spider-Man 2. The Narnia DVD even sported the "copy protected" magnet logo on the back of the case. Another recent DVD, The Da Vinci Code, played in VLC but refused to copy.

I contacted VideoLAN, the makers of VLC, and asked the developers to explain the new video capturing feature in its 1.0 release. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, VLC developer, wrote in an e-mail that in order for VLC to copy a DVD the player needs to bypass the DVD's copy protection. "VLC needs to break CSS protection to play DVDs," Kempf wrote adding "I am sorry, but I don't think this is news at all." He may be right.