Today is a sad, sad day for fair use. DVD Decrypter, the best free DVD ripping program every built, has been forcibly retired by "SOme compaNY". After a couple days of unexplained dvddecrypter.com downtime, an announcement was made on cdfreaks.com indicating the end of DVD Decrypter.
Considering the law they are enforcing is 2 years old, I'd say we (meaning the author, LIGHTNING UK!) got lucky for quite a while. Although it is not surprising the corporations are going after their biggest perceived threat. They sure pick their battles.
Lots of people think all ripping programs are the same.... They just decrypt the CSS protection and copy the files to your hard drive right? Wrong! Cryptography isn't the only copy protection mechanism on DVDs. Sony's ARccOS (not the inverse trigonometric function) doesn't use advanced encryption. In fact, it's far from advanced. It uses bad sectors in "unreferenced material" on the physical media to deter the copy process. Stand alone players do fine because they won't every enter a playback sequence called a program chain (PGC) that leads to these sectors. These protected sectors are all over these discs. There are other methods involving DVD navigation commands, which need to be modified for a modified disc to work. The old favorite, SmartRipper, hasn't kept up. Frequent updates and forum support are requisite for a successfully ripping tool.
UPDATE (09/08/14): Now the newer DvdFab HD Decrypter also got shutdown, sort of. A New York court ordered seizures of all the foreign company's domain names, cash and accounts. Fortunately, the software is still available via the .cn domain name if you don't live in the US. If you are in the US, you are out of luck -- you get a useless version of the software.
