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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6948 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 17 of 20 27 March 2007 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am afraid we have a possible disconnect between theory and practice here. I personally hate watching movies on a computer screen and use a stand-alone DVD player hooked up to a TV for that, but I did do some testing, and I haven't seen the behavior you describe. (The computer in question is new, is a mainstream brand, and I haven't touched the drive's firmware.)
P.S. I may have to test all our desktops and laptops systematically - I am wondering if many computer DVD drives don't enforce anything these days. Edited by frenkeld on 28 March 2007 at 8:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7016 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 18 of 20 28 March 2007 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
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This will be my final post in this thread. A number of DVD players (not computer drives, but standalone players) are multi-region by default. These are generally lower-end players by random companies whom the DVDCCA are unlikely to beat up on. If Sony released a region-free DVD player, they would be smashed to a pulp.
However, as stated earlier, region-free DVD players do exist -- I've seen conflicting reports on the Internet that the standalone drive I have is in fact one but I only have region 1 DVDs. However, this does not change the fact that they are almost certainly breaking the licensing agreement they signed with the DVDCCA when they licensed CSS, if they actually licensed CSS at all. Since the algorithm and decryption process are publically known, it's entirely possible to implement the algorithm without a license from the DVDCCA. However, as an 'unlicensed' player it is technically illegal. This is in fact one of the problems with the open-source DVD players (xine/vlc/mplayer) -- the CSS implementation they contain is 'unlicensed'. With mplayer, it's obvious to make the distinction between encrypted disks and unencrypted disks. If the disk is protected, the command 'mplayer VTS_01_1.VOB' will fail as the VOB file is encrypted with CSS and I haven't told mplayer to decrypt it. OTOH, 'mplayer dvd://1' will work because mplayer knows to perform the required CSS authentication. In summary, not all disks are protected, either by CSS or region coding. That is a choice of the disk manufacturer and not strictly required by the DVDCCA. Region coding, however, _must_ be enforced by the physical drive in a properly licensed dvd player. In order to play encrypted disks, the dvd drive must contain an implementation of CSS in order to perform the challenge-response. One of the conditions of the license is that they respect region coding on the disks. I think the disconnect here is not so much between theory and practice, but between theory, licensed practice, and unlicensed practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6948 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 19 of 20 28 March 2007 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||
By theory versus practice I didn't mean that drives designed to prevent access when the regions are mismatched can't perform to specs. What I meant was that perhaps not all drives on the market today enforce the standard fully. I tested two desktops and 4 laptops we have at home, with the following results. Two region 2 DVD's were used for testing. When I tried playing either one with commercial DVD player software, I was told that they were region 2 and asked if I wanted to change the drive's region setting. Upon refusal, the disk would eject. One of the disks was "tougher" than the other, however - when inserted into a stand-alone DVD player set to "region 0", it wouldn't play when the other would. It would only play after I'd set the stand-alone player specifically to region 2. So, this one clearly has some encryption enhancements, but both are region 2, and not multiregion. I then tried the "tough" disk on 2006 entry level HP desktop with Windows XP, 2006 midrange Dell system with Linux, 2006 low end Compaq brand laptop with Windows XP, 2006 low end Toshiba laptop with Windows XP, 2004 high end Dell laptop with Linux, and 2004 Apple Powerbook with OS X. All but the Apple would play the "tough" disk with VLC (under Windows XP) or mplayer (Linux). The Apple wouldn't play it under VLC, and I checked that it also wouldn't allow me to copy some files from the DVD to the hard drive. Clearly, the drive used in the the Powerbook was more restrictive than the others. To see how restrictive, I put in the "non-tough" region 2 disk in it, and it started playing it with VLC. All in all, out of these 6 machines, only Powerbook wouldn't play a region 2 DVD, and even then only the one with some type of region coding enhancements. Other systems, while being mainstream brands as far as the whole system is concerned, probably use off-brand DVD drives whose manufacturers seem to slap the DVD logo on them without too much concern for the standards. Not much of a statistics, but it does suggest that it's not a default for all of today's drives to enforce the DVD standard fully in the firmware. I would certainly just go ahead and test any system one is interested in using for playback of foreign DVD's. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, there are US$50 stand-alone DVD players out there that will do the job. (In which case one can probably also buy a cheap second DVD-ROM drive and set it to a different region). Edited by frenkeld on 29 March 2007 at 3:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6948 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 20 of 20 28 March 2007 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||
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[mistaken post] Edited by frenkeld on 28 March 2007 at 11:44am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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