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Linux Software

DVD for Linux: an Interview With the Developers 89

Posted by Roblimo from the coming-soon-to-a-computer-near-you dept.
blount writes "An interview with LSDVD developers Paul Volcko and Gad Berger is on moviebone. Paul and Gad discuss DVD crypto, patent and trade secret issues, and their plans for an application supporting hardware and software DVD playback."
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DVD for Linux: an Interview With the Developers More

DVD for Linux: an Interview With the Developers

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  • A friend of mine had the offending chip in his DVD player replaced with one that would work with all regions.
    So even if hardware region protection is implemented it ain't hard to get around it.
  • Civil, not criminal prosecution. Toshiba, Sony, et al can make you pay them money. They can't make you go to jail.

    You seem to be very anti-copyright (in the traditional sense), since copyrights put limits on what people can do in almost the exact same way. You may not like them, but no one's ever struck them down as unconstitutional. In fact, they're specifically mentioned in the constitution.
  • If the DVD MPEG stream is encrypted with a key available only by paying money and signing an NDA, wouldn't it be a very cool task for distributed.net to crack this key?

    //Johan

    Disclaimer: I really have no clue about DVD, so I'm well aware of that this idea may be a very silly one indeed.

  • It would seem that way, but I remember my dad (a corporate lawyer) telling me the story about the guy who owned a taxi service and set up a corporation for every taxi cab so that if one made lots of damage, the most that could be sued for was the value of that one company, which was the value of the cab itself. Needless to say, he didn't get away with it. Dummy corporations set up for such purposes are illegal.
  • Right now a DVD-RAM can be bought for 400-500$, however these only write 2.6GB a side whereas a DVD can be about 8.5GB a side. Not too bad though 5.2GB is still a lot of space, but the bad part is that it costs $10 for a blank 1-sided disk and $20 for a 2-sided disk, so there is NO point in copying a DVD, for now anyway.
    I don't know if they have writers that can do 17GB yet, maybe those are the $18,000 ones.
  • The only reason they exist, IIRC, is because movies may have different copyrights in different areas of the world.

    Not true. Actually region coding exists due to the fact that movie studios want to independently control the timing of releases in different markets. They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever. With VCRs this used to be taken care of by the serendipitous (from their perspective) incompatibility between PAL and NTSC; now that that technical brokenness has been fixed, they have built such brokenness into the system deliberately.
  • I have a friend who routeinly burns movies to vcd and plays them on his TV's DVD player--I would imagine that it wouldn't be any harder with a DVD RAM

  • They don't want American Matrix DVDs available in England before it's finished the first theatrical run there, or they've sold the pay-per-view rights, or whatever.

    Note that a large part of the reason for different release dates is the cost of producing the films, and thus the reels of films shown in the US head overseas as theaters stop showing them. The upcoming digital methods of distribution and display may eliminate this expense and thus make simultaneous distribution possible, and region code less necessary.

    I suppose one concern might be widescale pirating that occurs in some regions of the world, and thus the attempt to stop pirated DVDs flowing out of those regions. I doubt this would have much success, though, the sellers would just make US/Europe-encoded DVDs anyway.
  • I too got tired of rebooting, but I solved the problem in a somewhat roundabout manner. I had a spare box lying around, and my Linux box had a Hauppauge WinTV card, so I set up the spare machine with the Encore kit and Win98 right next to the Linux box, connected video out on the decoder card to video in on the WinTV card.

    With autologon, scandisk disabled, and vncserver, I was able to get rid of the monitor and input devices on the Win98 box and control it with xvncviewer.

    So basically, the Windows box is now a standalone DVD player and the Linux box can function as a TV and remote.

    Not very practical for most folks, but it sure is interesting.
    --

  • You can get set-top players that are easily made regionfree...I believe the Samsung ones can be done from the *remote* and several Pioneer players can be modified with a single soldering connection or something. There are also places in the UK that will region free almost any player, if you can take the wait.
  • If you're after something that's not part of your computer, I can highly reccomend the Panasonic DV-505. Although it's not mentioned in the manual, you can change what area coding it thinks it is. It plays PAL and NTSC, does AC3 decoding, and is dual-voltage. I bought one while in NY, and am taking it back to Australia with me, along with all my area 1 DVD's.

    Any idea how I get in on that refferendum if the consulate here doesn't want to know about me?
  • The only reason it seems woefully short is that users don't accept the existance of commercial software on it. BeOS, which seems to have eclipsed Linux in 1/4th the time has a user base which is more accepting of commercial software so they're not woefully short. If you're willing to count commercial software, Linux becomes very competitive.
  • I'm certain that it's just a little more complicated then that. I have creative's 6x PC-dvd drive, with a dxr3 decoder card and not a problem at all has gone wrong with it. So, Creative's DVD isn't at all sucking. As on the topic of region selections, Australia has a wide wide range of DVD titles out. Just look in your local video store. The Creative 5x drive has the region built in to it, whilst the 6x drive had it built into the decoder card. Unfortunately, you can only change the region 6(?) times before it permanently gets stored on the hardware. Region 1 anybody? =)
  • can someone explain to me why the DVD and movie people want to stop people from watching foreign movies? it makes no sense to me. doesn't make much sense to me when it's done to video games, either (eg, playstation); though at least in the case of games, i can understand that they may have deals to keep the markets segregated(sp) to US game makers don't have to worry about competition from japan.
  • Doing so would be a case of *massive* overkill. We're talking about 40bit encryption, here.

    -Paul Volcko
  • I got about 11fps on a pII-300Mhz w/o sound. For some reason I couldn't get sound to work at all. Now under windows using software only I get what appears to be a full 30fps with sound. Someday...
  • I thought I made my point pretty clear. You're in no more trouble REing DVD stuff than you are anything else. It's the manufacturers who would get in trouble, so they have a reason to want to hide it from you.
  • Perhaps that was a bad example. I wasn't saying you bootlegged anything. I was saying that there are a lot of similarities between the legal protections/punishments provided by copyright and those provided in the case of the DVD specifications.

    In both cases, someone gets access to something under certain conditions (you get your tape/DVD under the condition that you don't share it; they get the DVD specs on the condition they don't share it). You (presumably) said "Once this happens, it's not an industry cooperative consorium deal anymore." I was simply pointing out that enforcement of the contract between the DVD Forum and the DVD implementors is no different from the implicit contract between you and the company that produced the DVD/tape. I was just saying that it was not unconstitutional in any way, not suggesting that you bootlegged.

    Again, you would not so much be in trouble (though DVD is laced with patent upon patent, so you would be in trouble if you implemented it). The company whose product you RE'd would be in trouble. Sorry for the confusion.
  • Oh, I see where you got that. Strike "you" in that other post and put "nameless DVD hardware manufacturer"
  • Besides that, plenty of countries have rules about movies (i.e., they're censored), and various things about american portrayal, all that political junk.

    Another reason for the region codes is just out of pure money making. North Americans may just buy DVDs for US$20, and consider, say US$40 to be expensive. But other regions may price it differently, to make more money out of it.

    Oh, btw, I seem to recall that the DVD group is making it mandatory that all DVD-ROM drives must have non-changable region codes by sometime 2000.

    As for copying the DVDs to DVD-RAM/DVD-R/etc, I'm told that the decryption key (stored on the disc) is in an area that, while readable, is already pre-burned/unburnable/unrecordable on the DVD-RAM surface, to foil image copies. Of course, I'm 99% certain there is a trivial workaround.
  • Any word on if Sigma's H+ will be one of those?

    I already have acquired myself one (as part of Creative's Encore Dxr3 6x DVD kit), and hope to be able to play my DVDs on Linux someday instead of rebooting to Win95 for the job.
  • You need to do a little looking around, Creative supports Sound Blaster Live! in Linux (developer.soundblaster.com/linux), nVidia supports the TNT and TNT2 Ultra in Linux (www.nvidia.com), ATI just announce Linux support (article can be found here at slashdot.org), John Carmack of id Software announced his decision to increase and improve the performance of the Matrox GLX extensions so that he can cross-platform support the next level editors (meaning OpenGL or other hardware acceleration) for the newest id game. The support is building, it's just a matter of time before it builds up enough steam to become EXTREMELY widespread! And with the LSDVD project, this will make things very sweet for all of us caught up in the world of Linux!
  • The sooner we have a viable DVD implementation, the sooner I can be rid of my Windows partition forever. It sucks to have to reboot to watch a movie.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • Does anyone know if that (#*$*#ing) regional encoding scheme used in DVD movies is implmented in hardware, and if there is a way around it?

    Here in Australia, we are part of some useless (ie, non US & non Europe) region, so we can't get many DVDs (although it does seem to have improved in the last couple of months)

    I'd buy a DVD player, if I could play US movies on it.

    A DVD recorder would be even better, of course.....

  • Re:Regional Encoding (Score:3)

    by kijiki ( 16916 ) on Wednesday October 20, 1999 @02:17AM (#1599858) Homepage
    You want the Creative Labs Dxr2 drive, and a utility called remoteselector. Much more information is available at: dvd underground [welcome.to]

  • Re:Regional Encoding (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yep, you can get around the region code, because it is usually implemented in the decoding card only.
    A little application called Zone Selector helps you around it.

  • my girlfriend laughed and said "now there's something that windows is 'better' for."

    I think we all agree that you need to get rid of this one.
    Or at least tell her you'll be making her part of a Beowulf cluster of girlfriends. ;>

  • 5 minutes, 3 answers.

    That's quicker than looking for it myself.

    Well done, people

  • Re:Maybe I'm Missing Something (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps the interviewer was asking the wrong questions, but it doesn't sound like they have anything but big plans. All they key software seems to be being developed as part of other projects and they have a group of programmers just waiting to rubberband a Perl/Tk, or similar, wrapper around it all.

    I don't think so. The MPEG implementations of Linux are just the public ones submitted at the MPEG comittees, and are just proof of concept ; some have tweaked them to get something useable, but it is more likely to segmentation fault or be sloooooow, than not. Linux is far behind the quality of Windows Players. The other problem is patents. I think Paul Volko is overly optimistic: they do apply to software, and yes, the MPEG contributors do want money for them. They have a whole company to manage the MPEG patent portfolio, and they claim royalties even per stream. For me this was a show-stopper when I considered contributing.

  • Posted by cookieman.k:

    With that "Thank God" you are right.

  • http://www.dvdutils.com/ (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.dvdutils.com/ is dedicated to dvd cracking.
  • Right now companies are not going to produce "desktop" software or drivers for Linuc unless they can be shown there is enough support for it to be profitable. Try writing polite letters to the customer service departments of the manufacturers for whivh you would like to see Linux support. For example of you want Creative to support their PC-DVD write them and let them know:

    Creative
    c/o Customer Service
    1523 Cimarron Plaza
    Stillwater, OK 74075
    US

    I got an e-mail address from a CSR, but she "did not know if it would reach them," the address is custserv@clok.creaf.com

    Remember: Polite requests go much farther than flamage.

    "Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"

  • Volko says that the unlocking code was ripped 'almost verbatim' from a Windows DVD player. I assume that this is okay becasuse 1) he mentioned it and 2) it's just a plain ol' generic hardware unlocker that can only really be done one way (since it obviously wasn't written in perl).
    Or am I missing something?
    BTW: woohoo!
  • I'm surprised, but not displeased, to see that there are DVD players with modifiable regions (short of using a soldering iron). The only reason they exist, IIRC, is because movies may have different copyrights in different areas of the world.

    From the producer's standpoint, different regions cost them more money because they have to produce seperate versions of the same product. So I'm sure they'd rather just produce one version if they could. Instead we wind up with discs that are "for sale in US or Canada only" or some such nonesense.

    In short, I think this is more the work of the Big Bad Lawyers rather than the work of the Big Bad Producers. The moviemakers *do* want your money for their product, after all.

  • Linux is always lag behind ...! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you browse thr' the /. archive, you'll find pattern like this : (1) The only reason why I keep Windows{200?,9?} is that I need to use * which is not available on Linux. (2) I can't get rid off of Windows{200?,9?} because I need to ... (3) I have to setup a dual boot machine because I need to use Windows{200?,9?} ... * -> {USB hardware, OCR software, Office suite, real games, Palm Pilot HotSync stuff, or any other new software/ software ...} I've been using Linux for 2 years and I still come across these problems from time to time. I'm really frustrated. Please don't tell me this is so because the manufacture of so and so don't support Linux! Don't need to tell me something about Oracle, Borland, Adaptec ... I also read /.
  • I have a Sigma Designs card, which allows you to alter the zone setting some specific number of times (around five, if memory serves). If you're a grotesquely rich bastard, of course, you could just have a machine set for every zone you want access to.

  • Why all the secrecy on DVD specs? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why does everyone seem to be so secretive when it comes to region coding, CSS encryption, macrovision, and the tech to defeat these. Rampant confusion seems to exist over wheather or not defeating these is illegal in the USA (Note that defeating macrovision and defeating region coding are seperate questions. One is explicitly a copy protection scheme the other is not). Codefree players and region/macrovision defeating mod chips are out there. What's curious though, is that these are largely available only in Europe and virtually nonexistant in the US by comparison. Sales clerks at major US enectronics chain stores cringe at questions about circumventing region encoding, preferring to cover their ears and shout "It's illegal! It's illegal," yet won't site any reference for this other than nameless management and ill-define corporate "policies". Those that will talk with you about seem to pull you aside and look about before talking to you quietly. I'm not asking for crack cocaine here [Hi Echelon!]. I PAID for my imported DVDs legitimately. Why am I catching so much slack trying to find a way to view them? The whole issue smacks of GOV'T BACKED INDUSTRY CENSORSHIP and is therefore 100% equivalent to straight gov't censorship.

    ------------------------------------- -------
    This is a constitutional issue, IMO.
    --------------------------------------------

    Gov't appears to be sanctioning free speech (movies) from being heard by people in a detailed list of countries. Conversely, gov't is sanctioning the deliberate blocking of its own citizens from hearing the speech of others from foreign lands by meking it "illegal".

    I think that region lockouts are unconstitutional if there is any gov't involvement in the industry sponsered lockout scheme whatsoever. And gov't making region defeats illegal is making free speech illegal. I'd call that BIGTIME involvement.

    I just wanna watch the movies I buy. Does this make me a criminal?

  • The whole reason electronics makers created the region locking and macrovision scheme as part of the DVD spec was to appease Hollywood movie studios into supporting the format. And it worked. The electronics makers don't like it. It hurts their product sales. But the elimination of region lockouts was planned from day one. And it was all over the moment they released the first software decoder. They knew the code would be reverse engineered and released to the 'net. This was planned. Because by the time this happened, the DVD format would be entrenched and it would be too late for Hollywood to reneg or switch to a different format. (DIVX demonstrated this in stunning fashion.) The article asks, what happens once free code to decrypt CSS is out there. The answer is nothing. DVD is entrenched now by public demand. Players will still be locked by default, but those who work a little to get around it will be able to with ease in the near future. Manufacturers want us th vrack their players. They'll sell more of them if they can be cracked. All according to plan.
  • There are plenty of places that sell DVD players with the region lock removed. I bought a Pioneer DV-606D from DVD City [dvdcity.com]. It autodetects the zone and you never even notice that it has zones. In England Code Free DVD [codefreedvd.com] sells really nice ones that are guaranteed to work on all DVDs, even in the future, but they are more expensive, and most of them require that you change zones on the remote everytime you change to a disc with a different zone. I'm sure that there are more places too, but those were the two main ones I looked at.

  • Why doesn't the cosulate want to know about you?

    If you are a citizen and over 18, you should be able to vote.

  • I thought the current DVD-RAM were a catridge only format that can only be read by that drive? You're right about the capacities as far as I can remember, but I was talking about a drive where you can make a regular DVD and pop it into a DVD movie player right then.

    I'm reasonably sure that DVD-RAM currently is only useful as a backup medium. At least I haven't seen anything about writers that will do what I want. Which is write a DVD, then take it over to a friends house, so they can read the disk on their crappy $80 IDE dvd-rom drive.
  • It's 100% different. To most cd players cdrs look like a standard cd. The only real difference being they reflect slightly less light. I think it's about 80% of what a cd reflects. DVD-RAM is not a DVD at all. It's essentially a high capacity cd-rw in a cartridge which can't be opened. The only reason they called them DVD-anything was to be buzz-word compliant. They do make DVD-R drives which from what I understand burn true DVDs in the same sense a CD-R is a true CD. But they cost about $18,000 a drive and I have no clue what the media is, but I imagine it's not cheap.
  • It never stops amazing me how often people drop the "c" from my last name. Oh well.

    At any rate, I would be overly optimistic if I were claiming that we intend to give the LSDVD player away for free. I'm not, though. I am most certain that it will cost something. If we are lucky enoguh to find a company willing to eat the cost of royalties (assuming they get some greater value from the distribution of the player) then and only then will this be freely available.

    I'm not sure what you're saying I'm being over optimistic about. If it is the patent issues, specifically with MPEG-2, I point you to the MEPGLA website: http://www.mpegla.com Their licensing structure is such that implementations of the mpeg-2 codecs are freely distributable. They don't want anything on them. But they do garnish royalties on use of an MPEG-2 codec in a player application. The per stream part is only really applicable to digital TV encoders/streamers and possible some really nifty multi-stream decoders. This does not apply to simple dvd playback.

    - Paul Volcko
  • There are possible copyright issues with the CSS disk unlocking code. The method is not patented, but since the code is based on a rip of disassembled code, I can see a strong argument for copyright infringment. I'm not a lawyer. This is only a laymans opinion. :)

    It is not okay simply because I mentioned it :) It's not a secret how that code was obtained. The livid list archives clearly discuss how it was arrived at, the subsequent C conversion, and I think the original "anonymous" source's name is actually in there somewhere. I mentioned it because it is already public knowledge.

    -Paul Volcko

  • they didn't tell me it'd be /.'ed! (Score:5)

    by davek ( 18465 ) on Wednesday October 20, 1999 @04:07AM (#1599889) Homepage Journal
    Well, its nice to be in the group and not be told that there's an interview. O well, I wouldn't have had much to say anyway, and I'm in France. Bummer.

    Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD [rit.edu] project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.

    One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.

    And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).

    Carpe Diem,
    -Dave Klint

    new Dream Theater [dreamtheater.net] Oct 26. Giddy!

  • I wouldn't go spouting your mouth off yet. We're still in development and the licensing processes that need to be gone through can be lengthy. Don't expect to the second phase program available for a while yet. The first phase one will likely be out shortly after a hardware vendor gets their decoder supported in linux, though.

    -Paul Volcko
  • This was written to the kernel list about a month ago:

    ------

    From: Dave Boynton, dboynton@worldnet.att.net

    Subject: UDF filesystem patch for 2.2.12

    Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 02:08:43 GMT

    I've made a new UDF filesystem patch for kernel 2.2.12. You can get it at: http://trylinux.com/projects/udf /udf-latest.tar.gz [trylinux.com] (about 70k)

    The module has been tested by a diverse group for some months now, with no reports of meltdowns, so it's probably safe to include in the 2.2 source tree. It was included in the 2.3 tree in version 2.3.17.

    I can say from observation that UDF use, in the form of DirectCD written CDRs, has become very widespread across businesses. Having at least read-only support in the Linux kernel would be a definite plus.

    Unfortunately, write support will have to wait, as the write support in this driver doesn't work with CDR/CDRWs yet.

    Dave Boynton

    dave@trylinux.com

    -----

    Looks like UDF will be supported in 2.4.

  • You are right to a certain extent. We do have some "big plans". We will not, however, necessarily be depending on other people's code to produce the second phase program (software decoding support). We already have a IFO parser all but done. VOB handling code is underway. And we have DVD specs access, which will allow us to work on the DVD Navigation API while we are getting the licensing we need to distribute the program. So we have more than simply "big plans", I would say. We will be opening up a web site soon that will go into what we have and what we are working toward specifically. We've also been active in the Livid project mailing list and helping on a "community" level.

    Note however that we may be approaching Arron Holtzman and Joachim Koenig about working out some kind of special license (non-GPL) so that we can do two things:

    1) Contribute back any optimizations that we make to the codecs.
    2) Be able to not publish the full version of the codecs which may end up haivng CSS code weaved into them.

    This all remains to be seen, though. We havce a few other things to get finished up first, before we start getting into some serious work on the software playback codecs.

    - Paul Volcko
  • It's not the government; it is an organization of corporations, which are not bound by the constitution (at least not to the extent that the government is).

    The DVD Forum came up with the DVD Spec. They then sell it to companies under NDAs for quite a bit of money. But built into the NDA that you have to sign to see it is the requirement that you make your player play only one region and don't let people reverse engineer your software (it has to be hard). If either one of these fails, you are in breach of contract with some of the largest corporations on the planet and will be in some serious trouble. It's only by their good graces or because they don't care enough yet that they haven't gone after the guilty yet.

    You would not be in any more trouble reverse engineering the stuff than you would REing any random program. It's the company which didn't obscure its program that gets in trouble.
  • If you're buying a hardware DVD player you may not be able to change the region (without a lot of tinkering at least if at all possible). The implementation probably differs per manufacturer as to how they set up their regions.

    If anyone has a windows based software DVD player it's easy to change the region. It's a simple egistry entry change for directshow engine based players (Cinemaster[this includes ATI]/WinDVD/Mediamatics/Newer Zoran players).

    There are also other region selectors for Creative hardware based DVD players as well as Hollywood+. I'll leave it up to the unscrupulous to find the files themselves though :)
    ----------
  • There are also links at http://www.dvdutils.com [dvdutils.com] so that you can get around this (and Macrovision, I think).

  • we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.

    Great! So I can already watch The Matrix on DVD!

  • Umm, the DVD Forum. You know, the people who hold the DVD specs tighter than ... well, you know.

    If you don't follow their rules, they revoke your access to the specs and impose a rather serious fine.

    Go to the DVD Forum's web site and read this crap for yourself. (http://www.dvdforum.org/ [dvdforum.org])
  • Wow. Good post, Fizgig! So could someone set up a dummy corporation to sign the NDA, break the agreement, then let the dummy corporation take the heat and be litigated out of existance? Isn't incorporation supposed to shield individuals from corporate action? Or am I mistaken or hopelessly naive?
  • Sure. It's a simple (stupid) reason...

    Movies are released in different areas at different times. For example, a movie may be released to DVD in the US just as it hits the screens in Oz. But the industry doesn't like people being able to mail-order a US DVD from Oz and see a movie before they've cashed in on the box office sales.

    The error(s) in their logic... how much is a movie ticket? How much is the DVD? Would you never go to a theater to see the movie just because you own the DVD?

    Personally, I spend way more on videos (tapes/DVDs) than I do on movie tickets. And I often will see a movie in a theater even after I own the video -- not many people have a "home theater".

    For the record, region coding is NOT "copy protection" as such it's not illegal in that sense. If anything, defeating the region coding would be a breach of the EULA for the software and/or hardware.

    As was mentioned on the LiVid mailing list [openprojects.net], it's not the home user pimping gigs of MPEG files that MPAA should be worried about. It's the Asian copy houses capable of de-compositing a pressed CD to make a master and then spit out thousands of copies. [* [openprojects.net] ] Correct me if anyone's tried this, but the home user has no way of making a DVD-ROM playable in a stand-alone DVD player. I don't know of any that will read a DVD-RAM. (Disclaimer: I've not wasted my money on a DVD-RAM, yet.)
  • You can buy a DVD writer that will write DVD's you can play in anything just like a CD-R will (mostly) play any CD drive... If you have $18,000 dollars. At least that's how much the damn things cost last time I looked.
  • I'm fairly sure the current Samsungs at least are still easily defeatable. I could be wrong tho, this is only of casual interest to me...
  • Another important note, Dave, is that The April 2000 date is for alpha or possibly beta versions of the second phase player (software decoding support). The first phase one, hardware support only, will likely be out within a week or so of a dvd decoder card with Linux driver support hitting the market.

    -Paul Volcko
  • The actual players are implemented completely in software. All Software DVD players already lock on their region after 5 or so discs. All Software based DVD players are also easily modified to change regions.

    I seriously doubt pioneer PC DVD drives would try to arbitrarily read and find a region on every disc inserted into the drive.
    ----------
  • How slowly (on a 400MHz PII)?
    --

  • Re:Regional Encoding (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The stupid thing about this is that the region-locking crap was supposedly inserted to force us to buy disks from the region we live in. However, since I live in Europe and started off buying US disks, this means that *because of the region locking* I HAVE to buy US disks and can't now start buying disks in Europe.
  • I think it's better that all the pieces are developed in parallel. Trying to architect all the pieces required into one project would be a huge mess. Additionally, we're not sure how it's all going to fit together so we'd be wasting our time.

    On the subject of video codecs, I know of two people that are writing high performance video codecs from scratch. One of them is me, the other is a secret. Four months seems to be a reasonable target for the fruits of these efforts.

    - Aaron Holtzman
  • Do any of the current DVD drives/players work under Linux/FreeBSD under WINE? Granted, that's not the real point, but it would at least be something while we wait for a native player.

    --
    Ernest MacDougal Campbell III / NIC Handle: EMC3

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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.

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