[NTLUG:Discuss] DVD players.

[Steve Baker]

Some information - and a Question:

I noticed that Fry's had DVD drives for $39 - which is cheap enough for me
to take a chance on. So I picked one up yesterday, swapped out my old CD-ROM
drive and installed the 'ogle' DVD movie player - and (to my complete suprise)
it all works *really* nicely. (I'm using SuSE - with a 2.2.19 kernel with an
850MHz CPU and nVidia GeForce-2 graphics).

However, if I 'mount' the DVD drive with a movie disk in it, I see a bunch
of files - some small, some **HUGE** (1Gb). I was interested in getting a
rough idea of the new drive's data rate - so I naively decided to time:

    cat /dvd/video_ts/vts_01_1.vob >/dev/null

...where that file is one of the Gigabyte monsters... I was suprised to see
a bunch of low level hardware errors showing up.

  "Media Region Code is mismatched to logical unit -- (asc=0x6f, asq=0x04)"

I'm totally puzzled because the DVD software can play it OK (although it
doesn't mount the drive to do it).

I was under the impression that the encryption/access controls on a DVD
operated at the software level - not within the drive hardware itself.

But I wonder if that's why the drives are so cheap - maybe they are not
North-America region drives.  If Windoze software takes notice of the
region coding thing but the Linux code doesn't - then we could imagine
that these drives would be completely useless to most people!

Does anyone know for sure?

It's weird.

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----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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