[MPlayer-users] [BUGREPORT] I/O errors on DVD playback (totem plays it fine)

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 12:46:25PM +0200, Alexander Roalter wrote:
> Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> >Actually I have a much better solution: Look up the DVDs you want to buy
> >and don't buy them if they have such a protection.
> >And in case they have the DVD-Video logo and do not work, you can still
> >return them anyway, since it was wrongly advertised (broken DVDs simply
> >aren't DVDs, I would expect that using the logo might even be illegal).
> 
> I wouldn't be too sure about the last one, since there are no dirty 
> tricks used as with the copy protected CDs, only a more elaborate scheme 
> is pulled which requires some more skills by the DVD player. To my 
> knowledge the DVD standard allows this kind of 
> jump-over-the-bad-sectors-behaviour, which is basically what is done. 

But does it allow bad sectors? IMO not.

> Returning them is quite a fuzz, since every DVD conforming DVD player 
> plays them without problem, only a blank play the stream from sector xx 
> to sector yy (as is done with mplayer) won't work on these discs.

Returning them should be easy as long as you buy them from a real
person and not online store.

> Oh, and I really plan on avoiding these discs, but still once and again 
> you run into them (which made me doing some research on this area in the 
> first place), and contrary to audio CDs, where one could switch to 
> unprotected discs from the U.S. (instead of protected german ones), this 
> is not that easy with DVDs, especially if they're protected worldwide.

Download the DVD rips. This is always the proper solution when the
official media is purposefully crippled by the vendor in such a way
that it's not usable.

Rich