"Has the HD DVD next-generation optical disc format's anti-rip technology been cracked? That's certainly what's being claimed by a programmer going by the name muslix64 who has posted a Java-based app he maintains will free the video on a disc from its encryption shackles. Enter BackupHDDVD, his Java-coded utility that gets a movie's key from memory, possibly via the player software, and then uses it to copy the movie over to the hard drive in an unencrypted form. There's a caveat: muslix64 admitted the code - for which he's provided the source - is highly unstable. It's also open to question how generic all this is as it only seems to work with one title. The programmer added that he's also found the disc's overarching volume key, and is preparing a BackupHDDVD update for 2 January that will allow users to extract other files from an HD DVD."Well, that sure didn't take long. And here I am without an HD-DVD drive. :? Oh well. It seems to me that ripping HD-DVD titles to your hard drive would take enormous amounts of space. Some of my regular DVD-ripped files exceed 3GB. Can you imagine archiving a 30GB version of the same movie? Yikes. 8O Good thing hard drives are cheap!