Making (illegal) backup copies of movies you purchase on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs may have just gotten a little easier. Just a month after the first HD-DVD rips began showing up online, it looks like members of the Doom9 forums have found the holy grail of DRM stripping: a universal processing key used by every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc. Up until now, the only way to get past the AACS copy protection was to find a specific key for each individual movie you were trying to extract.

In other words, ripping a high definition disc just became almost as easy as ripping a DVD. In the short term, you can probably expect to see an explosion in high definition films torrents available online. In the long run, we can only hope someone will wrap this hack into a nice little GUI and create an easy high-definition disc backup utility that anyone can use.