Mostly Harmless

Hearing "The Itch" at the movie theater this afternoon reminded me that I hadn’t yet posted my quick-n-easy instructions for subverting the copy protection scheme on Vitamin C’s enhanced CD "More." So here it ’tis.

But first, some background info. The gist of it is that the CD has the music video for "The Itch" hidden in an invisible directory which you can only access by installing a plug-in and following a special web link. Once you’ve done that you can watch the video (full screen). The plug-in gets an encoded string from the web site which lets you play the video; merely saving the html from that page will not be sufficient to fake out the plug-in.

So, what to do? What to do?

1. Buy the CD
2. Install the plug-in, go to the web page
3. Save the page as a "Web Archive" in IE (only works in IE, grrr)
4. Create a 45-50 meg disk image named "VitaminC"
5. Copy the hidden file ("Vc01.hlk") in the invisible folder ("content") to the disk image, maintaining the same path as on the CD. The folder can be visible on the image.
6. Copy the web archive (and plug-in installer stuff if desired) to the disk image
7. Save the disk image, dump the CD
8. Open the web archive from the image and enjoy!

The web archive will make it appear that you’re connecting to the real web site, but it isn’t (tricky). I have run it without the CD and without a network connection, so it does work.