If you have ever slid a brand new 4K UHD Blu-ray into your PC’s optical drive, only to have your standard media player throw a cryptic error about "AACS authentication failure," you have just met the front line of digital rights management (DRM). To the average user, a Blu-ray is just a disc. To a computer, it is a heavily encrypted fortress.
To make matters worse, many discs also use BD+. This is a virtual machine that runs on your player. The movie file is encrypted, but the decryption code is contained on the disc. The player downloads a "BD+ VM" that literally rewrites the decryption logic on the fly to prevent dumping. makemkv aacs
The implementation was sloppy. While the bus encryption was tighter, the underlying Volume Unique Keys were often still stored in memory unprotected. Once a few "leaked" keys for major studio releases hit the internet, MakeMKV could use LibreDrive to grab the MKB and cross-reference it with known keys. If you have ever slid a brand new
4K UHD Blu-rays introduced AACS 2.0. The industry promised this was "unbreakable." It introduced a concept called . In theory, even if you had the keys, your player had to phone home to verify the disc wasn’t a rip. To make matters worse, many discs also use BD+
MakeMKV is excellent, but it isn't magic. For brand new discs released in the last 48 hours, there is a period where even LibreDrive struggles.
Prior to LibreDrive, your Blu-ray drive’s firmware was an enemy. The firmware was programmed to refuse reading certain areas of the disc if the AACS handshake failed.