[plug] DVD "encrypted"

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 00:48 +0800, Kev wrote:
> Richard Meyer wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I need a bit of advice. I am running OpenSUSE 10.1, and have SMART
> > installed to do all the hard work for me.
> > 
> > I have got Xine working with "libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1" and it works perfectly
> > for every DVD I've tried - EXCEPT for "The meaning of Life" - it tells
> > me that is encrypted.
> > 
> > Any ideas what is going on? Is there a different encryption algorithm on
> > different DVDs?
> > 
> > Any help gratefully acknowledged.
> 
> I don't know what's going on with your program, but I'm sure that if you 
> install dvdauthor and k9copy It'll read, play, rip and write any 
> encrypted DVD you have.  (Well at least it does for me.)

No, not in my experience :-( I have the same system as Richard
(including smart) and have anything and everything installed that is to
do with dvd and encryption.  

I mostly use k9copy, with rare fallback to dvd:rip (still trying to work
out all the options on that one!), Xdvdshrink, and vobcopy. I find that
95% of discs are no problem, but about 5% just refuse to be "backed-up".
I don't see the log message that Richard reports - my system just balks
on certain discs and either segfaults the app. or hangs while spending
forever and forever trying to read it with no head way made.

This answer overlaps into previous threads where I asked: 1/ how to kill
a process that refused to die; 2/ what was the best dvd ripping app. to
be considering; and, 3/ how to upgrade dvd firmware in linux.  In the
case of 1/ it sadly turns out that when the hardware is tied up and
waiting on signals from an app, then you can't kill that process by any
means other than rebooting (that answer gleaned by googling and help
from this list).  In the case of 2/ I settled for k9copy, like Richard.
Finally, in the case of 3/ there seems no easy/possible way for every
type of drive to be flashed in linux :-(  

Gavin.