2011 – Page 7 – Roo's View

Ubuntu Bluray Woes

Recently I picked up a bluray drive for my PC. As I use Ubuntu as my desktop it would be nice to be able to play back (or rip & convert) movies I own. There is documentation on this, but it is somewhat non-trivial and didn’t work for me.

The model drive I have is the LG CH12LS28 Black 12x Blu-ray Read 16x DVD+/-R/RW Write Combo Drive LightScribe SATA, an amazing amount of technology for the price. Plug it in and away I go. Bluray discs show up just fine (but I lack the software on Ubuntu to play them back), and the other attributes of the drive all appear to check out just fine.

I started out looking into DumpHD. There are multiple bits of software to install to get things to the point where they should work, but I kept hitting the error:

The given Host Certficate / Private Key has been revoked by your drive.
After banging my head on this particular problem for a bit, I then decided to try out makemkv. Installing it takes a bit of doing, but no more than 5 minutes later I was ready to try it out. The end of the error log looked very similar:

Can't read AACS VID from disc - most likely current AACS host certificate is revoked by your drive The volume key is unknown for this disc - video can't be decrypted Failed to open disc

However, what I didn’t notice right away was what made it actually fail – this was dumped near the top of the error log:

Drive 'HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW CH12LS28 1.00' requires AACS bus encryption, disc decryption may fail. Error 'Scsi error - ILLEGAL REQUEST:COPY PROTECTION KEY EXCHANGE FAILURE - AUTHENTICATION FAILURE' occurred while issuing SCSI command

You’d think I’d remember this cardinal rule of debugging – always look at the very first error! So it turns out that the main issue I’m having is AACS bus encryption.

I found a good description of the problem which I’ll rephrase here. AACS bus encryption is a new twist in the story. Bluray has DRM to protect the contents of the media, to access the contents you need to unlock the DRM. Previous to AACS bus encryption the player software would have the key, pass it to the drive, and the content would stream decoded over the sata bus to the player. This let all sorts of traffic ‘sniffing’ attacks happen to the data on the bus. Newer drives (mine include) support additional encryption of the data over the sata bus to block these sniffing attacks. Both makemkv and DumpHD (currently) depend on these sniffing attacks. There is a thread on makemkv on this topic.

As with any DRM scheme, it can be broken for the simple reason that decoding the disc on a computer is a legitimate thing to do using licensed software. Thus all of the magic to decode the disc can be stored on your computer, it is just a matter of knowing the secret to the trick. Sadly, today there is no licensed software for Linux.

Off to windows I went (the same PC I run Linux on, also has a licensed Windows XP install). I dutifully installed the software that came with my new bluray drive – a free copy of PowerDVD 9. I was very sad to see this as the result:

I’m running a fairly economical setup on a core i3 using onboard graphics. What’s burning me here is the lack of suitable graphics drivers from Intel to support HDCP (yes, more DRM). I can either buy a graphics card that supports the right kind of drivers, or upgrade to Windows Vista (or beyond). While I could use this as the excuse to buy a graphics card, I’m certain there is a way to do this in software.

The solution ended up being a combination of three elements:

AnyDVD HD solves both the AACS bus encryption and DRM issue. It is a driver that accesses the bluray drive directly (avoiding the bus encryption) and can unlock the DRM. There is a free trial.

Since Windows XP can’t read a UDF 2.5 filesystem, which is how the data on a bluray is stored, we need a utility that allows this to be done.

The DAUM POTPlayer can manage to play back bluray content, assuming it has been decrypted (thanks to AnyDVD HD) and is visible as files on disk (UDF 2.5 filesytem). The result you can see evidence of in the screen capture at the top of this post. The experience isn’t very user friendly, but it works well enough.

OTA HDTV in Ottawa

I’m always a little amazed at how much people pay monthly for TV service. We ran for years with no TV at all, and all the money we “saved” I easily spent on DVDs (and more I’m sure). Several year ago we decided that some amount of TV wasn’t a bad thing, it also gave me a great excuse to build a PVR based on MythTV. After shopping around StarChoice (now ShawDirect) seemed like the right fit. The basic package was cost effective and gave us enough TV. I liked the fact that we got HDTV in the base package, and that meant high definition hockey games and special events like the Olympics.

ShawDirect has a great policy (pdf) that lets you schedule seasonal breaks in service. I’ve been using one of those to try out using over the air (OTA) TV as our only source. We haven’t really noticed the lack of TV, even through the Stanley Cup finals (but our team wasn’t in it).

To move to OTA I needed two things: 1) a PC capture device for HDTV and 2) a set top box to convert the signal for use with my projector. The PC side of things came along as a deal from Dell – the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-950Q was on sale one day ($54.99). This came along with a tiny little antenna which surprisingly pulled several stations. The projector has no HDTV tuner (unlike most HDTV flat panel sets) and so it was off to eBay to get a set top box. This was the first time I had used the “Make an Offer” option on eBay and I was quite pleased with the price we negotiated. The tv tuner is known by several different brands: Centronics ZAT 502 HD / RTC DTA1100HD / Digiwave DTV5000HD.

On the 2nd floor of the house I could easily pull in CBC to watch hockey using the dinky little antenna that came with the 950Q. To route the signal to the projector I needed to get a little creative and pull some RG6 from the attic to the basement, the MythTV box is also downstairs. In many situations almost anything will work as an antenna, and the simple bow-tie version I built with mostly stuff I had around already is pretty close to that.

My build was inspired by a write up I found using simple materials, the antenna I built is a Gray-Hoverman. I used a scrap of 1×3, some 14 gauge (2 conductor #14) electrical wire, some screws and fender washers. The only part I needed was a matching transformer. You can see the end result in the picture at the top of this post.

I have this antenna attic mounted, with 100ft of cable between it and the tv tuner. It works well, pulling in 5 HDTV stations all with little to no drop outs. I’d like to try to get PBS HD, but that may require a bigger antenna or an amplifier (a project for later).

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HP Color Laser Printer (CP1518NI) Refill

We print at home fairly infrequently, this meant that our inkjet printer ink cartridges were often gummed up or not working right when we did want to print. Moving to a laser printer was a good move, and the Samsung ML-2010 served us well, and was relatively easy to refill. The ability to refill the toner was one of my pre-requisites for a color laser printer – enter the HP CP1518ni, a reasonable cost but refill friendly printer.

It took about a year to drain the toner down to the level where it needed a refill. So it was off to eBay to look for a deal. In 2009, refill kits were available and were about $100 for all four colors. By 2011 the price had dropped to $50 for all four colors, including reset chips and the cutting tool. I bought mine from easycartridgerefill and had a good buying experience. At the top of this post is a picture of everything that was shipped in the box: toner, cutting tool, instructions, funnel tips, sealing tape, gloves, microfiber cloth, and reset chips.

Step 1 – RTFM. The instructions are 2 pages of fairly detailed instructions. Having refilled toner before I just skimmed them, that was a mistake. The photo above you can see I’ve used the hole cutting tool on the wrong part of the cartridge.

Step 2 – We need to use the hole cutting tool to make a hole in the correct part of the cartridge (see below). For your first refill you only need one hole, the instructions cover a 2nd area to make a hole if you need to empty the ‘wastebin’ – as this was the 1st time I was doing a refill I skipped that part having already made enough extra holes.

Step 3 – Empty the toner cartridge prior to refilling. The instructions warn that mixing old toner with new is likely to result in less optimal results.

Step 4 – Fill using the new toner. If you look at the picture of the yellow toner bottle, you can see quite clearly that it is no where near close to full. This picture was taken before I used any toner, the bottles are quite over-sized. You may need to gently swirl the bottle around to loosen the toner prior to trying to pour it. Use the entire bottle, this may take some effort and patience.

Step 5 – Seal the hole with the provided tape. The tape provided was simply metallic duct work tape that you can get at HomeDepot. Toner is a very, very fine dust – it will leak out any tiny hole or gap.

Step 6 – Now we need to swap the tiny chip that provides status on the cartridge to the printer. Sadly, this chip also prevents the printer from continuing to use a toner cartridge after you’ve passed the estimated number of pages. The original chip is pictured on the left, and the refill (reset) chip on the right. The chip swap is very easy.

That’s it, we’re done – install your newly filled cartridge and start printing.

A quick visit to the web-ui shows a full yellow cartridge with 1400 page capacity.

There are some folk who apparently run the toner down to nothing by buying new reset chips only and swapping those until they are low on toner. This could save you a little money in the long run – but at $50 for a full refill kit it is hard to argue that you need to be that frugal. Sadly, the reset chips are not reusable.

I had a few mishaps on the way to complete success..

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