Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen has cracked the lock on Google"s new in-browser video player. Johansen, also known as "DVD Jon" for his work on decrypting DVD security codes, has created a patch for the Google Video Viewer—less than 24 hours after the search giant shipped the video playback plug-in, a tool based on the open-source VideoLAN media player.
The patch, released on Johansen"s "So Sue Me" blog, effectively disables a modification Google made to the VideoLAN code to prevent users from playing videos that are not hosted on Google"s servers. Johansen said the patch, which requires the .Net run-time framework, will remove Google"s restriction and allow the playback of video files that aren"t on the video.google.com server.