[NTLUG:Discuss] MI2 boycott

[Richard Cobbe]

Lo, on Wednesday, 3 May, 2000, Steve Baker did write:

> travis.farral at nokia.com wrote:
> 
> >  Now sure, DeCSS *does* allow
> > one to illegally copy DVD's and I'm sure many have used it for that.
> 
> I don't think that's true. DeCSS decrypts the DVD - and the decrypted
> movie is far to big to copy *anywhere*.  If you wanted to copy a DVD,
> the last thing you'd want is DeCSS making the file ten times larger!

Question primarily about the technical aspect of this debate:

I haven't really been following the technical issues involved in DVD in
general; the players are still a bit beyond my budget.

However, as I understand it, running a DVD through DeCSS doesn't do any
sort of decompression, right?  The reason it's not (currently) practical to
copy DVDs is that the actual media themselves can hold so much data, that
effectively you have no place big enough to store it conveniently.

Right?  Or does DeCSS also do decompression, much like gpg --decrypt (say)?

Richard