“Norway’s best known IT export, DVD Jon, has hacked encryption coding in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, opening up content broadcast for the multimedia player to alternative devices on multiple platforms,” Gavin Clarke reports for The Register. “Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the media’s source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made a decoder available.”
“The hacker hopes his move will make content streamed to Media Player more widely available to users of alternative players on non-Windows platforms,” Clarke reports. “His latest hack was done to make Media Player content available to the open source VideoLAN Client (VLC) streaming media player. VLC is available for download to 12 different operating systems and Linux distributions and has seen more than six million downloads to Mac… Johansen told The Register he’d acted following requests for NSC support in VLC. One developer is already hard at work integrating Johansen’s decoder into the VLC. Johansen said: ‘Windows Media Player is not very good and Windows and Mac users should not be forced to use it to view such [NSC] streams.'”
Full article here.
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