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The program was first released on 6 October 1999 when Johansen posted an announcement of DeCSS 1. 1b, a closed source Windows-only application for DVD ripping, on the livid-dev mailing list.

The source code was leaked before the end of the month.

The first release of DeCSS was preceded by a few weeks by a program called DoD DVD Speed Ripper from a group called DrinkOrDie, which didn't include source code and which apparently did not work with all DVDs.

Drink or Die reportedly disassembled the object code of the Xing DVD player to obtain a player key.

The group that wrote DeCSS, including Johansen, came to call themselves Masters of Reverse Engineering and may have obtained information from Drink or Die.