The curse of DVD region encoding

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sandipb
Ist häufiger hier

#1 erstellt: 14. Nov 2007, 13:00

I had this DVD that I was carrying for a demo today. Just by chance I happened to play it on my Ubuntu Gutsy laptop. Strangely, the video was badly pixellated, and mplayer spewed errors on the screen.

Looking at the back of the DVD cover showed me the problem. The DVD is of "Pirates of Caribbean - Dead man's chest" sold by Excel in India. It has a region 3 logo, as well as a new symbol saying "this dvd is copy protected". mplayer(or was it totem too?) was complaining that it cannot play encrypted DVDs. Wtf???

Now, if MPAA wants us legally confirmant to respect region encoding, why is a region 3 DVD being sold in India? Is this even legal? Are they expecting that all DVD players in India are modified/cracked to be multi-region?

I know that the mplayer problem was about encrypted DVD rather than region encoding, but my question still holds

This is the single biggest reason why I am so apprehensive about buying expensive DVD players. Common players like the Philips one I have, have secret codes available on the web to make them multi-region.

Aren't those expensive DVD players that you folks buy restricted to a specific region? Are these players easily modifiable(without affecting warranty) to be multi-region? What do you do when you get non-local region DVDs like this one in the market?

I would be very upset if I have a region 5 locked 20k Denon DVD player which cannot play the DVD I just bought for 600 bucks in the music shop.

SNV
Stammgast

#2 erstellt: 14. Nov 2007, 14:19

Dear Sandipb,

Laptops need to be hacked. They generally come with a 5 try. (You can change the region five times and then it retains the last region selected).

All dvd players sold in the country starting with your 5k to the high end models are all hacked and then sold in India.

Infact most of them are hacked and made region free at the manufacturers end before shipping, or else the respective distributor is provided with the hack code.

Relax dude.

Regards
SNV

particleman
Stammgast

#3 erstellt: 14. Nov 2007, 14:57

Tut, tut. As a Linux user you should know that the OS is by its very nature, region-free. That is, most Linux variants have the libdvdcss library installed that helps bypass whatever region-coding roadblocks your hardware puts in its way. Like many new distros, Ubuntu doesn't install the library by default in order to keep the distribution compliant with open-source standards.

Thus extra steps are needed. For starters, add the Medibuntu repository to your system's list of APT repositories. Like so:

sudo wget

http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Then you get yourself the libdvdcss2 library:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Finally, you can watch your DVD (any DVD) by using totem-xine. Just get the following libraries as well:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3 libxine1-ffmpeg totem-xine
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

There you go. Happy viewing!

P.S. Moderators: Please let me know if this content may be considered offensive and I will remove it at once. I am merely presenting information that is already in the Operating System's own documentation (please see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ )

[Beitrag von particleman am 14. Nov 2007, 15:03 bearbeitet]

nietzsche
Ist häufiger hier

#4 erstellt: 15. Nov 2007, 07:57

I got a new cyber home DVR 1600 from US. It had a region code of 1; I got it changed to '0'. My bad luck, it is not playing DVD, including region 1, 2 etc. It is not playing audio CD also. What could have gone wrong?

Can any help me to identify and rectify the problem? Thanks in Advance.

Regards

ani
Stammgast

#5 erstellt: 15. Nov 2007, 08:18

Hope this may help

http://www.dvd.revie...ll/cyberhome1600.asp

http://www.dvd.reviewer.co.uk/forums/default.asp?Forum=176

[Beitrag von ani am 15. Nov 2007, 08:20 bearbeitet]

Shahrukh
Inventar

#6 erstellt: 15. Nov 2007, 09:42

I had a Cyber Home for a year. Great value those things!!

nietzsche
Ist häufiger hier

#7 erstellt: 15. Nov 2007, 09:51

Dear Ani

Thanks for the link. Let me try the hack code given therein.

Regards

reignofchaos
Stammgast

#8 erstellt: 15. Nov 2007, 11:06

Sandipb the easiest way to bypass all sorts of region encoding is to just get RPC1 firmware for your DVD drive. Please look up the dvd model number and then either search in rpc1.org or cdfreaks forums. I'm sure you'll find region free firmware for it.

This is the first thing I do with any optical drive I acquire.