[ILUG] SDMI initiative

[Niall O Broin]

Probably OT, but in the interests of letting people use content they may
have some time in the future bought on Linux . . .

The SDMI people seem to think that they have a nice tight encryption system.
You have 

SDMI files -> decoding app. -> sound driver -> card -> loudspeakers -> sound

Now of course anyone can copy such music in an analog manner via the output
from a sound card, just like tape to tape copies of old, but of course
there's a quality loss. I had an inspiration today. At the sound driver
point, SDMI must have been decoded to a sound sample, or rather a digital
representation of an analog waveform, because this is what a sound card
wants as input. Somebody tell me why a bogus sound driver could not be
written which, instead of passing digital data to D/A sound hardware, simply
buffers said digital data and then saves it to disk, for subsequent
conversion to the digital format (MP3) of choice ?


Note that I'm not of course condoning anything illegal - this is just some
techical mind wandering.




Regards,



Niall