How to Hack

Sometimes, what we learn for a class follows the law of unintended consequences. Learning one technique can open pathways for both new-found applications of the technique as well as providing a beachhead from which to branch out and learn new things. Just such a thing occurred when I was preparing my movie project for Lit. and Civ. II.

Once I read the requirements for this project, I had two questions. The first was, “What movie do I choose?” Well, I at least have that portion all sorted out. The second question was, “How do I get the video clips that the project asks for?” I could come up with three answers to that question. The first was to choose my scenes and then to scour the Internet's prominent video-hosting websites. I quickly realized that due to copyright restrictions, there was a fair chance that I would have a rather difficult time finding all of the scenes I would like, so that option was out. Option number two, which I rejected out of hand, was using a pirated source. The third and final option I could think of was to acquire the movie on DVD and to decrypt it so as to have an editable copy on my external storage drive. This seemed the most flexible way to get the scenes I need without actually pirating a movie.“Is this even legal?” I wondered. It turns out, to make short work of it, that you can decrypt, copy and store videos as long as you do not distribute them to the public. This tangent track into copyright law and the history of DVD decryption helped to soothe my niggling conscience, and was a bit of interesting reading to boot.

“Now what? I have no idea what I'm doing.” Well, I went to the place where nobody knows your name: the Internet. Whenever you have a problem, no matter what it is, somebody will have likely gone through it and either asked for and received help from forums or left a self-help blog posts. Even with these helpful anecdotes at my disposal, sometimes things just don't work the first time out of the gate. Considering my test platform, Dr. Strangelove, came out with a French voiceover, the first time was not exactly the charm. Back to the drawing board I went, but couldn't quite figure out how to circumvent these apparent problems. I conceded the contest for the night and took a well-deserved rest.

Eventually, I figured out that there were actually two different pieces of software, along with supporting auxiliaries, that I needed to accomplish my goal. The first was DVD Decrypter. Out of the three pieces of software that I tested for this portion, this provided me with files that were both complete and easy to plug into the second-stage programs. The second program I decided to use goes by the moniker of Handbrake. Although the files come out of the decrypter with rather enigmatic names like VIDEO_TS.BUP, Handbrake can easily discern their purposes, almost always automatically selecting the correct settings for importing the main movie. After choosing the correct folder, the files are easily transformed into a new complete video with an extension more easily understood, such as the AVI and MP4. Handbrake also provides a plethora of options, allowing you to choose what to retain and what to discard so as to increase compression rates. When I worked with my process, in went a double-layered DVD (~7.6 gigabytes) and out came an MP4 file at about 6x compression, ready to be played on any computer.

For an assignment that boiled down to “show some video clips from your choice of greatest comedy movie and explain why you like it,” I learned far more than what I think makes a comedy movie great. Instead, I gained a passing familiarity with a few aspects of copyright law, researched the differences and conversions between digital storage files, and learned the aspects and differences between certain software packages and how to distinguish what I'll want. Most of these lessons were not included in the guidelines nor would they be taught in any of the courses at TCU, yet I feel that I gained information that is just as valuable to my career as what I learned from the assignment.

If you are looking to do this, I highly suggest looking through the website http://www.dvdshrink.info/guides.php, which has rather useful interactive step-by-step tutorials. I didn't find it until this point in the story.