ARccOS Protection
Encyclopedia
ARccOS is a copy-protection system made by Sony
that is used on some DVD
s. Designed as an additional layer to be used in conjunction with Content Scramble System
(CSS), the system deliberately creates corrupted sectors
on the DVD, which cause copying software to produce errors (see bad sector
).
Despite being promoted as "fully compatible with available DVD players and drives," some DVDs with ARccOS cannot be played on some DVD players: Sony DVPCX995, Toshiba SD4700, Harman Kardon DVD101, Microsoft Xbox and others. Sony has announced a future firmware update for their players to fix this incompatibility issue. One revision of the ARccOS scheme used by Sony was incompatible with a higher number of players than average. Sony has offered to replace those discs for owners having problems; the replacement discs will have a newer version of ARccOS coding on them, which Sony claims is more compatible. Some DVD rental companies have warned users that the Sony DVDs in question may not play on their machines. Many DVD Ripper
s have been designed to overcome ARccOS protection, it is also naturally overcome by using ddrescue, a linux utility designed to copy images with errors.
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
that is used on some DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
s. Designed as an additional layer to be used in conjunction with Content Scramble System
Content Scramble System
Content Scramble System is a Digital Rights Management and encryption system employed on almost all commercially produced DVD-Video discs. CSS utilizes a proprietary 40-bit stream cipher algorithm...
(CSS), the system deliberately creates corrupted sectors
Cylinder-head-sector
Cylinder-head-sector, also known as CHS, was an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive. In the case of floppy drives, for which the same exact diskette medium can be truly low-level formatted to different capacities, this is still true.Though CHS...
on the DVD, which cause copying software to produce errors (see bad sector
Bad Sector
Bad Sector is an ambient/noise project formed in 1992 in Tuscany, Italy by Massimo Magrini. While working at the Computer Art Lab of ISTI in Pisa , he developed original gesture interfaces that he uses in live performances: 'Aerial Painting Hand' , 'UV-Stick' Bad Sector is an ambient/noise...
).
Despite being promoted as "fully compatible with available DVD players and drives," some DVDs with ARccOS cannot be played on some DVD players: Sony DVPCX995, Toshiba SD4700, Harman Kardon DVD101, Microsoft Xbox and others. Sony has announced a future firmware update for their players to fix this incompatibility issue. One revision of the ARccOS scheme used by Sony was incompatible with a higher number of players than average. Sony has offered to replace those discs for owners having problems; the replacement discs will have a newer version of ARccOS coding on them, which Sony claims is more compatible. Some DVD rental companies have warned users that the Sony DVDs in question may not play on their machines. Many DVD Ripper
DVD ripper
A DVD ripper is a software program that facilitates copying the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. They are mainly used to transfer video on DVDs to different formats, to edit or back up DVD content, and to convert DVD video for playback on media players and mobile devices...
s have been designed to overcome ARccOS protection, it is also naturally overcome by using ddrescue, a linux utility designed to copy images with errors.