DVD Decrypter

» see dvddecrypter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

DVD Decrypter was on every Windows machine i knew that had a burner in it, somewhere around 2004. Turkey in those years ran on optical media. a DVD writer was an upgrade you saved up for and blank discs came in spindles of fifty. the only thing standing between a disc and a hard drive was the copy protection. this program removed it.

it was freeware for Windows, written by a developer who has never gone by anything other than Lightning UK! and has never published a legal name. dvddecrypter.com went up in 2001. within a couple of years the program was doing the thing no commercial product would go near, which was reading a retail DVD-Video disc and writing out a copy with the Content Scramble System and the region code taken off.

the workflow it belonged to had two halves. DVD Decrypter pulled the disc onto the hard drive and DVD Shrink squeezed a dual layer film down until it fit on a single layer blank. everybody doing this in 2004 did it in that order, and nobody paid for either piece.

in 2005 i was twenty one and at university, on a line nowhere near fast enough to make downloading a film a reasonable way to spend an evening. the disc was the network. that is the part of this that has aged hardest, because the entire category assumed moving video meant moving plastic from one house to another.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

the program had modes and people argued about them. File mode gave you the VOB files loose in a folder. IFO mode followed the disc structure and let you take one title out of a disc that had eleven. ISO Read wrote the whole thing to a single image, ISO Write burned that image back to a blank. most people learned exactly one of these and never touched the others.

the feature nobody talks about is the one that made it feel less like piracy and more like repair. DVD Decrypter stripped user operation prohibitions, which is the mechanism studios used to stop your remote from working during the anti-piracy warning at the head of the disc. a paying customer could not skip a lecture about stealing. a copy made with this program started at the menu. that gap did more to justify the software in people's heads than any of the other flags.

~ the letter ~

on 6 June 2005 Lightning UK! posted on CD Freaks that he had received a cease and desist letter from Macrovision, and that he had decided complying with it was in his best interest. Macrovision's claim was about licensing around the descrambling methods. there was no lawsuit and no ruling. one letter reached one person who had no legal budget, and that was the end of it.

what happened next was stranger than the shutdown. Macrovision did not just demand the program come down, it acquired the intellectual property rights to every version of DVD Decrypter from its author, and the domain was transferred over. the last widely mirrored copy, sitting on AfterDawn's servers, was pulled by 27 November 2005. a company that made copy protection now owned the most effective tool for removing it, and did nothing with it, which was the point.

~ the inheritance ~

the final build was 3.5.4.0, dated 21 March 2005, which means the program was already finished when the letter came. it kept working for years afterward on whatever machine still had it, because software that has been abandoned does not stop running, it just stops matching the discs that come out later.

Lightning UK! came back on 4 October 2005 with ImgBurn, built on the same burning engine and carrying none of the decryption. that project went on for well over a decade and is still what a lot of people reach for when they need to write an image to a disc. the half of DVD Decrypter that was legal survived. the half that made it famous did not, and by the time anyone missed it the argument had moved to streaming, where there is no disc to rip and no spindle of fifty under the desk.

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