Re: watching DVD movies on Linux
On Sunday 08 February 2004 06:40 am, TTH wrote:
> Sorry, I already have xine installed; I am watching VCDs with no problems.
> So I am inquiring about additional packages that I need to install for
> DVDs.
>
> So, with xine and libdvdcss, I don't have to worry about RPC-1/2 DVD
> players. This is correct?
>
If you have an RPC-1 player (one manufactured before 2000 IIRC), you should be
hunky dory, as an RPC-1 player doesn't do a region check before sending data
to the system. Then libdvdcss should be able to crack the encryption so you
can use xine or mplayer to watch your movies.
An RPC-2 player, OTOH, does check the DVD's region before allowing data to go
to the system. Usually, the way they work is they check the region, and if
the DVD's from the wrong region, it refuses to send CSS keys to the system,
though it'll still let you read the encrypted movie file. The good news is
libdvdcss usually can still crack the encryption using a brute-force attack,
so you can still watch movies from other regions, though the first time you
play it, it may take a few minutes for libdvdcss to run the crypto attack.
Some RPC-2 players may refuse to send any data from the disk to the system if
the region check fails, in which case you're SOL. But I don't think there
are many of those.
There are hacks out there that can do things like turning an RPC-2 drive into
an RPC-1 drive, switch regions, reset region switch counters (so you switch
more than five times), etc. They're drive specific, and many of them only
run in Windows. They could also permanently hose your drive if something
screws up.
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