noobatlife

I’m a big believer in free culture, so it only stands to reason that I don’t like DRM and copy protection. Sure - if you take the time to record, or write something and release it into our world you have the right to profit from it - but don’t lock down your contribution to society such that I’m unable to build on your work and make something better or new. Without such progression our world comes to a standstill. Without it we may as well still be cavemen!

So I’m going to show you how to bypass or break the DRM on a few of the most popular formats in use at the moment. Use this info to mashup, mix and rehash the worlds content and make something new!

Read on for the how-to…

How Remove iTunes DRM / Copy protection

Apple have gotten smarter over the years so older methods of copying songs from itunes have stopped working - but it’s still possible.

One way round-about way of getting your song to be DRM free is to add the song as the sound track on an iMovie project and then export the audio after your video has been created. More info on that here.

If you’re a mac user you’ll want to grab a copy of FairGame which will do the above for you - much easier if you ask me.

If you’re still on windows the best way I’ve found is to burn the tracks you want to copy to a CD using itunes and then rip them again afterwards using something like CDex.

Remove DRM from Windows Media Files (wmv & wma)

Windows users can use the wonderful freeware and opensource app FreeMe2 to strip the DRM right out of wmv and wma files. Full instructions are here if you need them, but its pretty straight forward.

Ripping Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies

There a few tools out there (some free / some not) that claim to rip the latest gen of movie disc’s but the best I’ve found so far is DumpHD. It just works.

Ripping DVD’s

This is pretty common place these days but if you’re still stuck on this one I can recommend DVD Decrypter. It’s easy to use and I’m sure even your Mom could use it. You’ll probably also want to grab a copy of DVDShrink if you want to re-burn your dvd’s as retail dvd’s are often too big to fit on a DVD-R.

If you’re on a mac give MacTheRipper a try - from what I’ve heard its great.

If you can think of any other popular formats I’ve missed can you let me know in the comments and I’ll try to add info about them too!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under downloading, internet.