Blu-ray BD+ completedly defeated

The mood over at Slysoft is that of exuberance, as it announced version 6.4.0.0 of its AnyDVD HD product last week. With this version, it is now possible to make full copies of all Blu-ray discs with impunity.

Already in November 2007, a beta of AnyDVD HD was available that was able to bypass BD+ on some Blu-ray titles. Now, it appears that the entire Blue-ray protection scheme was thrown completely open as early as late last year.

Wrote Peer van Heuen, head of High-Definition technologies at SlySoft in the press release:

“Admittedly, we are not really so fast with this because actually we had intended to publish this release already in December as promised. However, it was decided for strategic reasons to wait a bit for the outcome of the “format war” between HD DVD and Blu-ray. On top of that, we first wanted to see our assumptions confirmed about the in the meantime released BD+ titles regarding the BD+ Virtual Machine.”

The press release basically had Slysoft thumbing its nose at Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group, who wrote in July 2007 that: “BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years.”

Couldn’t the BD+ protection scheme be tightened up with new encryption keys? That might be so, but van Heuen is not worried. He told Ars that “cracking updates will take significantly less time than the basic work we did the last 3 months (which was figuring out how BD+ works, since it is not documented in public).”

If you were holding back on buying Blue-ray titles due to worries that you wouldn’t be able to make your own backups, I suppose your concerns are no longer valid.

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Will you buy into Blue-ray now that it has been cracked?