Watching Encrypted DVDs

[beforewisdom]

Hi;

I'm in America "land of the free" so naturally the DVDs I own are encrypted :).

I have been able to watch some encrypted DVDs in my collection, but not others. The encryption process will stall and xine will lock.

I have been working with someone on the xine list. He seems to think the problem might have something do with my dvdrom being scsi or using scsi emulation.

I have Knoppix 3.2 4/05/03 installed to my hard drive.

I have a Samsung DVD-ROM SD 616
dmesg reports it as:
------------
hdc: SAMSUNG DVD-ROM SD-616Q, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
-----------

Knoppix set up my system so that

/dev/dvd is a link to /dev/cdrom
/dev/cdrom is a link to sr0

however I got dma working for the drive by seeting dma on /dev/hdc

Do I have a scsi dvdrom or merely scsi emulation?

Will running Knoppix from the cdrom, using a special cheat code, and then installing to the hard drive again install Knoppix in a different way that will make xine decrypt better?

If I can DVDs working on my knoppix box I can be completey independant of windows.

I would love to write back to this forum celebrating the erasuse of my win 98 partition on my old box.

Thanks

Steve

[pau1knopp]

Steve,

You may be having a scsi-emulation issue, however, if you can mount the drive and otherwise use it, I dont *think* this is the issue....

For one thing, you will need a version of decss for debian to be able to read encrypted DVD's. I would also suggest you look into installing mplayer as well. Does a better job (IMHO) of dealing with DVD's and has a more intuitive interface.

However, my favorite and easiest solution is that you use another "live cd" linux distribution called LinuxConsole. It lets you view, rip, and otherwise enjoy your legally purchased / rented DVD's and has a plethora of other goodies on it.

You can check this french beautie out at

http://linuxconsole.free.fr/

Good luck

[adyga]

hehe, and there we go, after I checked this linuxconsole and surfed along with forum, see what I got, check this out:
http://linuxconsole.tuxfamily.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7
at the 8th post , by PrezKennedy, said to the author of linuxconsole:

You may want to consider building off of Knoppix if you continue having dependency problems and such. I'm not positive but I think the latest version runs using XFree 4.3...

I guess knoppix is still the best choise, however it needs a lot of adding/removing to make it easier and better to upgrade/install new software
:D :D

[rickenbacherus]

Do I have a scsi dvdrom or merely scsi emulation?

You already have scsi emulation enabled. Look at your /etc/lilo.conf file and you should see a line like this:

append="hda=ide-scsi hdb=ide-scsi" and so on.....
So are you using scsi emulation? Find out like so:

cdrecord -scanbus

If your IDE drive shows up on the SCSI BUS then you are using SCSI emulation.


I installed libdvdcss as suggested in the docs and Video LAN Client worked right away and with minimal configuration.

[beforewisdom]

Hi;

I solved my DVD issues.

I thought I would post how I did it here for others who might find themselves in the same boat.

I have knoppix 3.2 (4/15/03 build ) on my machine. I downloaded, compiled and installed the latest greatest xine, libdvdcss.

Some encypted DVDS were taking 50min to decrypt and play.

At first I thought xine was jammed and could not play them until I absent mindedly left xine running while I made dinner and "heard noises" from my computer.

I learned that I had to "set the region" of my dvd player.

A region is a spot on the dvd where the dvd player has to go to find decryption and information to play the dvd.

Different countries/dvds have their playback information on different regions.

This is done to prevent some people from watching dvds from some places.
( I am not an expert ).

Anyway, if you dvd does not have its region set, it attacks playback by brute force.......with mondo decryption sessions.

To fix it, you need to get a region setting tool for gnu/linux.

This problem is mentioned in the xine faq:
http://xinehq.de/index.php/faq#DVDLONGWAIT

The concept of regions are explained briefly in the xine howto:
http://dvd.sourceforge.net/xine-howto/en_GB/html/howto-5.html#ss5.1

There is a xine irc channel at:
irc://irc.freenode.net/xine

There is an email list for xine users, the people there are very patient and newbie friendly. If you don't know or haven't thought something they will help you instead of giving you an ROTFM or a GOOGLE.:
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=9655

Good Luck

Steve