Dear Warner Brothers,

As a poor hosed college student, I have spent many a month where I have not bought any movies. Finally, I got some money for my birthday and decided to buy the film March of the Penguins. However, I did not read the very fine print, and when I got home I found that it crashes mplayer, and totem will only play the previews; it is completely unable to play the feature title. I don't want to copy this goddamn DVD, I only wanted to be able to play it on my computer since the TV room downstairs was full of LARPers at the time. However, due to your ridiculously anti-consumer copy protection, I had to borrow my roommate's Powerbook in order to accomplish this. I don't like Macs. I already paid you for the movie; why does my software need to pay you to play the movie? Maybe next time I will download your movie instead of paying you for it.

No love, Christine

comment 1

What did the fine print say?

And have you reported this as a bug on the media players in question?

Comment by Anonymous Sun 02 Dec 2007 06:24:46 PM UTC
comment 2
Given that the players crash, there's obviously a bug (or more) in the players. Why are you blaming the media?
Comment by Olaf van der Spek Mon 03 Dec 2007 04:25:42 AM UTC
comment 3

The bug in the players is that they assume the content conforms to the DVD spec. The ARccOS 'protection system' plays the usual games with zero length tracks and other bogus header data. (Yes, the players should be sanity checking the input rather than crashing.)

For ARccOS protected DVDs (ie. Sony/Columbia) this should work to rip the file. Drop the '--sout' argument to simply view the movie.

% vlc dvd:/dev/dvd@1 --sout "#standard{access=file,mux=ps,dst=./foo.ps}"

Comment by Brad Mon 03 Dec 2007 10:30:38 AM UTC
comment 4
Also you should check that libdvdcss2 is version 1.2.9 or higher.
Comment by TK Mon 03 Dec 2007 01:45:46 PM UTC
comment 5
I might call them "Damn Warner Bros".
Comment by blix Mon 03 Dec 2007 04:30:05 PM UTC
comment 6

Yeah, I checked and I have libdvdcss2 1.2.9. I guess I'll see about trying that vlc trick -- I didn't try it in vlc because the machine I was trying to play it on runs lenny and vlc isn't currently in lenny.

Anyhow, thanks for the tips.

Comment by Christine Tue 04 Dec 2007 12:17:32 AM UTC