[MPlayer-users] Dealing with Copy Protection

[EC]

On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 21:09:29 +0200
Alexander Roalter <roalter at cs.tum.edu> wrote:

> Now mplayer still does this, though I'm not sure if it is for the 
> caching (read ahead) or some other thing. To my knowledge some "cells" 
> of the VOBs are usused and produce read errors with the cdrom driver, 
> which causes sometimes even a complete system arrest, but still at least 
> around 5 minutes of retry for the driver (in this time you cant put to 
> death mplayer or any other software trying to access the drive) and the 
> eject button of course is also blocked.

I'm not sure if this is the same copy protection (20th century Fox?), but I was having similar problems with one of the episodes (just 1) on disk 2 (season 1) of 24.  It was a few months ago and I don't recall the exact error, but I got kernel messages about vob cell problems and it froze up my cdrom and mplayer processes for a few minutes.  None of the episodes on this disk could be read with mencoder, but -dumpstream worked fine on all but the problem title.

I finally got it copied over by using wine+dvd decryptor (good windows dvd ripper), but it took long enough to get all that figured out.

It was from netflix, but if you are actually interested in a more in-depth look, I could rent it again.

//Eli