Yes, HDCP was indeed cracked, and now there’s an open-source decoding system for it. Right now the system requires a fairly beefy PC, but that may change as people poke around the code a bit.
You’ll recall that there were initial reports a few weeks ago that basically said: HDCP cracked! There was next to no information beyond that, so I was sort of like, “Is this true? No idea, we’ll have to wait and see.”
And we have now seen!
The system, created by two fine chaps in Rob Johnson and Mikhail Rubnich, takes care of the HDCP handshake, then decrypts the video on-the-fly.
It’s not the most efficient code yet, as you’ll need something like a multi-core, 64-bit CPU, with nearly 2GB of RAM entirely dedicated to the work.
What was the point of HDCP again? I never really got it, aside from Hollywood being paranoid.