As expected, revoking WinDVD's AACS device key hasn't slowed down hackers very much. Wired has reported that people on the Doom9 forums have now found a way to expose a disc's Volume ID without AACS authentication. By applying a patched firmware to an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, discs can be ripped or played back, even if the Volume ID has been revoked.
Well, it looks like you can stop worrying about Corel locking up your next gen DVD player. The clever bods at the Doom9 and XBoxhacker forums have managed to patch the Xbox 360 HD DVD to to play any disk without authentication.
HD DVD and BlueRay require that a disk authenticate itself with a Volume ID. A player can then be patched so it will not play any revoked disks.
What this hack does is bypass the check for a Volume ID you can stick any disk in the player and you're good to go, rendering useless any future revocations. It's still possible to lock out the actual hardware, but how long will it take the hackers to get around that?
People have already taken this hack a step further and have found a way to expose Volume ID's using an unpatched drive. While the AACS LA could, in theory, revoke the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, Microsoft probably won't let that happen. If you'd like to read more, the entire article can be found here.
