Preliminary reports over at the new RedFox support forum indicate that RedFox is hard at work developing RedFox HD, a new software product that is designed to help decrypt HD DVD movies (HD DVD-ROMs) on the fly. This is a logical evolution for the company behind the famous RedFox app, which is an excellent piece of software that allows users to decrypt DVD discs on-the-fly. This is great news for HD DVD owners who wish to back up their HD DVD movies. The RedFox support team is top of the line, as they openly ask their users to send in information on any new discs that RedFox has trouble with. With the help of their users, RedFox continually updates RedFox to handle any new DVD protections such as ARccOS and RipGuard.
The move to RedFox HD should come at no surprise as RedFox is a company that is famous for their decryption, burning and disc backup utilities (RedFox, Clone CD, Clone DVD). RedFox will not make any official statements on the product for 3-5 weeks, as they have not yet issued any press releases.
And although they have not yet issued any official statements on the new software, we have learned some information about the upcoming product from RedFox developer comments on their forum. The early Alpha version of RedFox HD has successfully decrypted all of the HD DVD movies that they have tested with. They are also working to implement a “Remove annoying trailers” function, that will allow users to automatically remove non-skip sections of an HD DVD such as the FBI warning, the Universal “HD DVD is great” screen and others. Very nice! There will also be an upgrade path for users who have purchased RedFox in the past, although there are currently no concrete details on exactly what type of discount will be offered.
Why RedFox HD instead of RedFox Blu-ray? The RedFox developers claim that HD DVD was a logical first target for them because the format has no region coding and less DRM capabilities (eg; no BD+). So will RedFox ever release a Blu-ray decryption utility? Possibly, but their current focus is solely on HD DVD back up capabilities. Once RedFox HD has been launched, they will take a look at the Blu-ray format.

So just how does RedFox HD work? Has RedFox managed to really Keks AACS? For now, no one is sure just how RedFox HD will work exactly. Chances are that we will not know how it works in the future either, as it is a closed-source commercial product that RedFox has an interest in protecting. A RedFox developer has indicated that “nobody’s gonna have to painfully search for title keys in the memory of some badly written player.“. It will definitely be interesting to see just how well the program functions once it is released. Hopefully, I will be able to get in on the Beta-testing program once RedFox is ready to test the product.