How to remove DRM from Zune Marketplace music

[soccerdad]

Figured I should post this, just in case it helps someone... Anyone...

There's a file in the folder referenced below named "v3ks.bla". I copied that to the expected file named "drmv2.lic". Then I re-ran the freeme2 command line. It prompted me for the SID for that file. I wasn't sure if that's expected or not, but I entered the SID in the drm2.key file that drmdbg created. Freeme2 then started doing its thing - 98617 packets of length 16000. Didn't take long. At the end it gave an error - "Unknown packet id...", so I thought it failed and quit thinking about it for a while.

But when I brought up my Zune software, it found the created "Freed-..." file and was able to play it. It ignored the original file altogether, and if I manually tried to play it, it said it didn't support the file (or some such). I'm sync'ing to the Zune now - looks like it might be converting the format, as it's going pretty slow; but I'm pretty excited to see if this works.

I picked that v3ks.bla file by using Process Monitor (www.sysinternals.com) to see what files were accessed when I loaded and started the movie in WMP. When I saw it hit that file, I opened it. It was in an xml format, which is what it seemed like freeme2 was expecting based on the source code. Maybe I was just lucky, but so far so good...

In case anyone cares, the file is a .wmv of the Live Free or Die Hard movie. It comes on a second dvd in the special edition version, and it's already on that dvd (from "Fox Digital Media"). There's a ####-####-####-#### serial number in the packaging, and when you load that dvd, it starts some software that lets you copy the file off the dvd. It's targeted at plays4sure, but I wanted to see it on my new zune 80gb.

Cool stuff!

Donnie

Originally Posted by soccerdad

You may have fixed this and are getting ready to release a version with the fix. I saw in one of the doom9 threads where on Jan 3 2008 you said you were prepping a new binary release. But just in case...

The issue mentioned here where there is no "drmv2.lic" file in the registry-specified location ("C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM" on Vista) is, I believe, causing the issue mentioned over on doom9, "Couldn't allocate space for license file!".

Because the file doesn't exist, the fseek / ftell calls that figure out how much space to allocate are probably returning -1, which when viewed as an unsigned int is 2^32 (4GB). That memory allocation will obviously fail. Should probably check if the file exists before opening and seeking.

What I don't know nearly enough to answer is why an expected "drmv2.lic" file isn't in that directory. There *is* a drmv1.lic file. Don't know what that means. [EDIT] There is a "drmv1.key" file in that folder. There are *no* .lic files in there at all.

FWIW...

Donnie