OK - this is a long shot but I have to ask. About 5 years ago I bought a DIVX video player from Circuit City that could play special DIVX DVDs. The user would pay about $3 for a DVD that had a limited viewing time (I think 48 hours). After the viewing time had expired you could either pay another $3 or purchase the DVD. However, even if purchased the DVD could only be viewed on a DIVX enable DVD player.

Circuit City ceased marketing the product about 1 year later and now no one can view the DVDs at all.

I'm wondering if anyone here has been able to rip these DVDs to their network. I tried using DVD Decrypter but all I get is the 10 minute long screen saying that I'm trying to play a DIVX DVD on a non-DIVX DVD player.

I'm thinking that someone, somewhere has found a way to extract the true video off these discs so that they can be viewed again.

Please note - I'm not asking how to do something that is illegal (or at least I don't think it is). I have paid for these DVDs in full, but got screwed when Circuit City decided to stop the business.

Actually it would be illegal, courtesy of the DMCA, which doesn't care a jot for your rights as a consumer. There is, under the DMCA, never any justification for the use of an "illegal circumvention device", and such would be required as you would have to crack the copy protection).

I'm afraid to say that I don't believe that such an "illegal circumvention device" exists for the divx encryption, I suspect the format wasn't popular enough to be worth cracking. Indeed one of the pages at "The Divx owners association" http://members.shaw.ca/the-doa/Pages/DoaDivxResources.html states categorically that the encryption was Triple-Des, and remains uncracked. You've probably already discovered googling for such a tool is doomed to failure thanks to the identically named and very popular video codec, googling for "Circuit City divx" was more focused but didn't turn up anything useful that I could see.

I hope that you have learned a valuable lesson about DRM, and why smart consumers don't buy DRM media (unless it has already been cracked, and even then only if there is no alternative).

Dan "Rubbing salt in wounds is my speciality" Smart

You're rignt about the Google searches. I basically tried both type searches that you did and basically kept either reading very old articles about the demise of DIVX (as opposed to DivX) or I read about the background of DivX and how the nomenclature was basically a crack at Circuit City's folly.

Anyway - I appreciate the input (even if it was a bit cynical). Guess I'll promptly deliver my 50 some odd discs in the trash tonight.

You should save them. They will probably be worth big money someday. I'm serious.

PRMan wrote:

You should save them. They will probably be worth big money someday. I'm serious.

You mean like an antique?

PRMan wrote:

You should save them. They will probably be worth big money someday. I'm serious.

I'll sell them to you then and let you watch them grow in value.

The salesdrone at Circus S***y at first got puzzled and then PO'ed when he gave me the "Hey dude, wanna BUY a DVD you can only watch a couple times?" sales pitch and I started laughing hysterically. It felt like he should be standing in a dark alley in a trenchcoat trying to sell me a "Bolex" watch or something.

I'm sure glad I saw thrugh the sham that the were trying to sell at the time.

[quote="waynedunham"]The salesdrone at Circus S***y at first got puzzled and then PO'ed when he gave me the "Hey dude, wanna BUY a DVD you can only watch a couple times?" sales pitch and I started laughing hysterically. It felt like he should be standing in a dark alley in a trenchcoat trying to sell me a "Bolex" watch or something.

I'm sure glad I saw thrugh the sham that the were trying to sell at the time.[/quote]


Yea, Netflix with the post office!

PRMan wrote:

You should save them. They will probably be worth big money someday. I'm serious.

I bought (and still have in the UNOPENED PACKAGE!) a copy of Deep Impact for I think $1.99 when Circuit City dumped everything once DIVX bit the dust. I figured it was a great momento... It took me quite a while to select which film to buy to get historical accuracty. Most of the DIVX releases were older catalog titles, having a (good) film from the 80's didn't make sense. So I concentrated on recent films, and hopefully one that would be remembered... I saw Armageddon and thought, 'hey, a disaster film! That matches DIVX pretty well!" But then I found Deep Impact, which is much more appropriate, since in that one, a big rock smashes into the ground... Very, very much like DIVX!!!