Subject: Re: Reading DVDs on a Mac mini

From: Tom Parker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 02:27:43 +0200

Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 22:07 +0200, Tom Parker wrote:
>>The version of libdvdread in use is 0.9.4 (the Debian 0.9.4-5 
>>libdvdread3 package).

> Does the debian package of libdvdread contains the CSS stuff ?

No it doesn't, but it does include a shell script to download it if 
you're living somewhere where libdvdcss is ok, and libdvdread will 
dynamically load libdvdcss if it exists. I'm using libdvdcss 1.2.8 (latest).

> Have you tried booting OS X and playing the DVD once ? Maybe the drive
> wants a zone to be set at least once, which MacOS does the first time
> you play a DVD

Had to reinstall OS X to test this, and yup, it wants a zone to be set. 
Returning back to Linux, some fiddling with regionset and some region 1 
and 2 DVDs lets me come to the following conclusions:

1) It's an RPC-2 DVD drive (i.e. evil, CSS-in-hardware drive), with the 
whole "5 changes and then it locks" policy.
2) It appears to be a really evil variant of RPC-2, in that if you've 
got a CSS-locked DVD in the drive, and you're set on a different region 
to the disk, you can't even get at the encrypted contents. The 
aforementioned read errors keep turning up, making libdvdcss useless. 
Or, this may just be an ide-cd bug with this drive...
3) If drive region == disc region, it plays DVDs fine.

 >>hdparm -i says the drive is a "MATSHITACD-RW CW-8124".

If anyone happens to have an RPC-1 firmware for this drive, or fixes to 
ide-cd, I'd be most grateful! Some googling for the former is currently 
unhelpful.

Thanks,

Tom Parker