DVD Access Library with no Mod-chip Required

255w ago - Marcan writes: While Nintendo did reply to bushing's open letter, he has not succeeded in establishing a conversation with an engineer about the issue. Furthermore, we have learned that they received and read at least two of the original three e-mails that were sent prior to the open letter, and decided not to reply (in fact, one of their replies was to one of the original e-mails, but only after the open letter was posted). Therefore, we can only conclude that they are not very interested in the issue.

As many of you may already know or have deduced, the bug in our open letter referred to a way of reading DVD-Rs (and Video DVDs) without the use of a modchip. Several people have investigated the bug independently, and they've gotten pretty close. However, we did discover an easier way of enabling this mode from homebrew, which, among other things, does not require any changes to IOS at all. This method is also relatively difficult to transform into some sort of backup loader.

Erant has been developing a library that uses this trick to enable DVD access for homebrew. We hope to release it this coming week, after a few details have been polished. svpe and dhewg have been working on a native mplayer port that uses this library to play back DVDs, which we hope to release as a proof-of-concept together with the library. We also have DVD-loading versions of snes9x and Genplus.

Non-modchip users will not need a custom IOS. Ironically, this method doesn't work for users of some modchips. Therefore, these users will require a patched IOS using the well-known UnencryptedRead patch (the library will automatically use it if needed). We'll try to release a somewhat more user-friendly version of patchmii dedicated to this task together with the library.