[MPlayer-users] MPlayer hangs playing 'Sony Pictures' DVDs.

[Alexander Roalter]

mplayerhq.hu at jamesplace.net wrote:
> I've had a few DVD's that I have not been able to play via mplayer lately. I 
> believe they've all been distributed by Sony Pictures. I start with: mplayer 
> dvd://1 and the movie will begin to play. After about 10 second it hangs. I 
> can not stop mplayer with <ctrl><c> or 'kill' 
> 
> Entries like the following start appearing in my logs.
> ---
> Feb 24 19:45:47 main kernel: scsi6: ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0, CDB: Read 
> (10) 00 00 09 f4 20 00 00 40 00
> Feb 24 19:45:47 main kernel: Current sr0: sense key Medium Error
> Feb 24 19:45:47 main kernel: ASC=10 ASCQ=90
> Feb 24 19:45:47 main kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 2609280
> Feb 24 19:45:47 main kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 
> 326160
> Feb 24 19:46:15 main kernel: scsi6: ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0, CDB: Read 
> (10) 00 00 09 f4 22 00 00 3e 00
> Feb 24 19:46:15 main kernel: Current sr0: sense key Medium Error
> Feb 24 19:46:15 main kernel: ASC=10 ASCQ=90
> Feb 24 19:46:15 main kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 2609288
> Feb 24 19:46:15 main kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 
> 326161
> Feb 24 19:46:43 main kernel: scsi6: ERROR on channel 0, id 0, lun 0, CDB: Read 
> (10) 00 00 09 f4 24 00 00 3c 00           
> ---
> 
> I have to reboot stop mplayer. 
> 
> The DVD's play find with Kaffeine on the smae machine. What the deal??
The Problem seems to be the copy protection from sony called Arccos. I 
encountered it on my Seinfeld DVDs, where I got the same errors. 
Rebooting is not really necessary. Kill the window mplayer runs in (as 
Ctrl+C won't work always) and wait a bit (around 5-10 minutes), then the 
DVD drive should be accessible again.

The problem is that the selected title has some deliberately placed 
defective sectors, and via cell commands the playing application can 
play around them. A dump player like mplayer does not care for these 
cell commands and jumps directly into the defective sectors and the 
cdrom driver reads and reads and reads.

Kaffeine seems to implement these cell commands, so this should be 
integrated into the playback routines. Simply patching the cdrom driver 
to not care about the defective sectors is another way, but since there 
can be arbitrary jumps, a/v-sync may be corrupted and even linear 
playback, so the first seems the logical way to go.

On the other hand there seems no one interested on this list to 
implement this feature, I simply got a "don't buy these DVDs" as a 
response.

If this problem would be fixed, all my DVD problems would be. Lastly the 
subtitle problem on Star Wars and Indiana Jones was fixed, so I'm only 
waiting for this one.

hth,
Alex