[MPlayer-users] Dealing with Copy Protection

[Alexander Roalter]

Paul TT wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:09:29 +0200
> Alexander Roalter <roalter at cs.tum.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>>... and no, I'm not talking about CSS, but about the new thing used by 
>>Sony which is known under the name ARccOS.
>>
>>This copy protection method marks some sectors as unreadable/with wrong 
>>checksums/whatsoever and uses the IFOs to navigate around it, so a 
>>regular player will never see these sectors.
> 
> ···
> 
> i have the passion protected that way and it plays with mplayer.
> plus, if you do a mplayer -dumpstream it dumps the movie too
> 

believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Although all 4 discs of the 
4th Seinfeld season are protected, I have only problems with the 2nd 
episode on Disc 2 and the 1st Episode on Disc 4. Analyzing the cell 
structure made me aware of this, though I'll have to compare it with the 
other Seinfeld discs that work why they work, but I suspect their 
protected sectors (badly marked sectors, so to speak) are on a less 
critical position.

Since dumpstream does the same reading routines, there's no difference.

I see no other solution than implementing a correct Cell Navigation 
(which does not necessarily include DVD navigation). To do this, 1st the 
cell infos should be at least be considered and secondly the commands 
should be parsed, though documentation about it (The DVD VM command set) 
is not easy to find. For what is my understanding, mplayer plays from a 
specified sector (as given by track/chapter) on all subsequent sectors 
(as is defined in the Title Set), and to my knowledge no post-, pre- and 
cellcommands are read and/or used.

cheers,
Alex