HDMI actually doesn't support the colorspace that all digital video is distributed in, so unless you know exactly how your blu-ray player is doing the colorspac

HDMI actually doesn't support the colorspace that all digital video is distributed in, so unless you know exactly how your blu-ray player is doing the colorspace conversion it's going to be slightly lossy just from that. In addition, you're going to want to encode the video using a lossy codec, or the storage requirements will be stupidly large (think ~36 MB/s at a minimum.) So that's another lossy step from HDMI. So, if you crack HDCP to copy blu-ray, you get (with each arrow representing a lossy conversion) Blu-ray -> CSC from y420 for HDMI -> CSC to y420 for encoding -> encode Wheras if you crack AACS you get the video stream on the blu-ray directly, and the only hassle is the cat-and-mouse game with key revocations (AACS is better designed in that it seems a master key cannot be derived from the keys we have easy access to.) Also, the way HDCP works, you can't just dump an encrypted stream between two any HDCP devices and decrypt it later; you have to control one of the devices to the point that you know its key.