I'm confused by this. All I knew was possible was to backup a DVD-A with something like DVDFab, and then play it back with Foobar. Foobar has a plugin that can tell you when there is a watermark with DVD-A and doesn't stop playing it. A disc I made this way would not play in a DVD-A player. If cracking means to remake the audio file with digital signal processing I question if that counts as a crack.
And I get disturbed by the smugness of saying nobody cares. A lot of people don't care about bluray either. By the way, there is a growing market in DSD files on some hi-res audio web sites. DSD in case you don't know is the type of audio used by SACDs, PCM used by wavs etc.
I don't get what's "smug" about saying that not enough people care. It's a purely rational thing. Where there is enough need, things get done.
With DVDA people obviously didn't consider it worth the trouble.
Even when there was a working solution, it was forgotten, so obviously: people didn't care enough. That's how it is. Nothing "smug" about it.
"a lot of people don't care about bluray" is totally irrelevant - important is "a lot of people do". Very few people care about DVDA. Even on this forum, I bet the majority doesn't even know what it is.
The watermark was added by DSP, of course it needs to be removed by DSP.
But I just realized probably what is meant as cracking the watermark, is converting the audio to WAV format and playing it in something else. But I question if DVD-Audio as a format, to play a backup as a DVD-A disc, was ever entirely cracked. And those who 'don't care' used HDCP restrictions to kill off DVD-A for good. Restricting playback to 16 bit every time in those systems.
That simple tool back then really removed the watermark (this involves finding the secret keys in the audio stream and specifically remove the artificial echoes they are made of).
It did take WAV files as input and output - merely because it's a convenient format and there were (and are) tools that will convert DVD-A to WAV.
It would have been possible to re-create a DVD-A from that result. Stripped of all watermarks. Playable as DVD-A.
I tested the stuff back then, I think with PowerDVD, if my memory is not failing. It would mute the WAV files with the watermark - but no longer after processing.
That - for me - counts as a 100% defeat of the watermark / a crack if you will.
It annoys me a bit, that I can't find the thing anymore. Only the decoder sources - but that's me. Must have dumped it, because in all my smugness, I didn't care enough