Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   Passkey is an app that sits between your DVD &/or Blu-ray drives & everything else in Windows. What it does is decrypt discs with DRM, so you can copy the disc, or play a retail video DVD or Blu-Ray disc using any media player that can handle the format, & so on.

   Passkey does contact the mothership for information on just how to decrypt individual discs, but even so the software is updated fairly frequently to handle new protections, e.g. v. 9.01 was available 9/3, with v. 9.02 released 9/6. The main new feature of version 9 however seems to be how it's activated -- instead of the keys that were sent out for v.8, 9 requires a sign-in to an account at DVDFab's site. Version 8 will presumably no longer be updated, or at best not often before updates stop entirely

   Now the main reason for this post is that thousands, maybe 10s or hundreds of thousands of lifetime keys for Passkey 8 were given away in August, 2015. As of this afternoon those licenses are not recorded in their database the way that purchases are, so if you install 9, it will by default replace v.8, but if you attempt to activate 9 it will show a trial ending next month.

   Giving DVDFab the benefit of the doubt, they did not have accounts available at their site before this, AFAIK. So it could be an oversight -- or not -- but I would guess that there's going to be an awful lot of pressure from everyone who got a free lifetime license for DVDFab to honor the lifetime part. I imagine we'll just have to wait & see if DVDFab decides to make those v.8 licenses work in 9.

   Posted 8 years ago #
2. 

   Tiffany
   Member

   By going through the posts on the forum you can redownload PK8 back and still be activated. You just cannot activate PK9 unless you pay.

   From their website.

   To those who may be concerned,

   The original plan for the new features added in the Passkey 9 was intended for a brand new product, in which case, both paid customers and non-paid users will have to buy if they are interested. The reason for this is simply due to the fact that those new features cost us huge R&D effort, plenty of time, considerable amount of investment on buying new corporation level servers and the enhanced security measures to keep the data on those servers absolutely safe from any potential harm. But on the second thought, we decided to pack those new features into the Passkey 9, so as to honor the existing customers, especially those lifetime license owners, and to keep their budgets down, at the cost of our minimized marginal profit.

   However, to those lifetime license owners whose licenses were sent as free gifts or obtained during our previous giveaway campaigns, we can no longer offer free upgrade because we’ve handed out a huge number of free licenses in the past few years, millions of perhaps, which equals almost a third of our paid users. That’s why we finally decided to offer 30% deep discount to this proportion of our lifetime users, which has already left us at no profit at all.

   So, we sincerely hope you can understand our situation, and we still hope to offer top-level products and better service to all our customers in the years to come.

   From DVDFab Team
   Reply With Quote

   Maybe just maybe, one day they will offer the free licenses again just like they did with PK 8. Who knows.

   Posted 8 years ago #
3. 

   Terri218
   Member

   Who asked them to "improve" it and charge for it? I was very happy with the unimproved free version.

   Posted 8 years ago #
4. 

   mikiem2
   Moderator

   IMHO DVDFab has to be hurting.

   The market for anything DVD has shrunk, & Blu-ray has never been as popular as video DVDs once were. On top of the smaller potential market, Fengtao [DVDFab] decided not to have a representative present in US court, when a company behind one method of Blu-ray DRM sued -- the result was rather than a verdict, the judge issued a court order forbidding US sales. Along with lost sales, Fengtao had to deal with no longer being able to use DVDFab[.]com & finding new ways to handle payment.

   Fengtao's main competition came from SlySoft [AnyDVD & AnyDVD HD], who hired legal representation & survived a similar lawsuit with allegedly only a fine, so that may have been an unforced error on Fengtao's part. The same might be said for giving away so many lifetime licenses for PassKey, with 2 giveaway periods of a month each if I remember correctly.

   As far as I can tell the main difference between PassKey 8 & 9 are that 9 has a more advanced registration, I assume to cut down on the number of illegal copies. The move from DVDFab 8 to 9 added recording the user's MAC address, though the app itself was also changed a bit, while PassKey 9 now requires an account on the DVDFab site with a recorded purchase.

   Many Blu-ray [& some few DVD] discs now have Cinavia protection, which is buried in the audio track(s) like a subliminal message that we can't hear, & when a player [required to support Cinavia as part of the Blu-ray license] detects Cinavia, it looks for something on the original disc that cannot be copied. AnyDVD HD broke Cinavia on a few software players -- to compete Fengtao added [limited] Cinavia removal, apparently hard-coded into DVDFab 9.

   Tying that all together then, & just IMHO...
   There's less money coming in from sales of DVDFab & PassKey, while development costs have gone up, with the addition of whatever's needed on their servers for accounts, increasingly complex Blu-ray DRM, coding for the removal of Cinavia on a individual movie basis, & hosting + bandwidth costs for the non-Cinavia audio tracks that DVDFab 9 downloads. Money's tight enough [or Fengtao's become greedy enough -- you decide] that investments were made to cut down on piracy [investments that weren't made during DVDFab's golden years].

   Giving away PassKey lifetime licenses might have been a somewhat desperate move, or it might not have sold very well in the 1st place, or maybe it's a combo of both, but it likely did not bring in the desired number of paying customers, so a major update for v.9 did not happen, & they made upgrading the free v.8 licenses impossible. I expected all sorts of complaints & protests online -- enough to make Fengtao at least reconsider the move -- but I haven't seen it, so maybe there's not all that many people using it.

   Posted 8 years ago #

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