[DVDnav-discuss] frustration with rip-protected DVDs

[Bryan Henderson]

I have what is probably a pretty stupid, but at least easy, question.

I have wanted for many years to build a DVD player (primarily for the
purpose of having one without user control restrictions), and my attempts
have been unsuccessful so far.

I joined the dvdnav-discuss list about two years ago when I was trying to get
Mplayer to work with libdvdnav (just for me -- I'm not an Mplayer developer).
With a few small fixes, I succeeded at getting the dvdnav: stream to work,
menus and all, for me, but the resulting playback was too jerky to watch.

Figuring that fixing a timing problem would be way too hard for me, and that
lots of people were playing DVDs on Linux systems without doing any coding at
all, I decided to start over with all new hardware and software and see what
developed.  I installed Debian 5, including every DVD playing and ripping
package I could find (about six, I think, half of them using libdvdnav), and
every single one of them crashed and burned on a Sony movie DVD from 2003
(which works fine, albeit jerky, in my original system).  Error messages were
mostly unhelpful, but seemed consistent with a failure to navigate around bad
sectors put there for rip protection.

So here's the question: Is it plausible that nothing in Debian 5 is capable of
reading a 2003 Sony movie DVD?

And: can someone give me names and version numbers of something - anything -
that has been seen to work on rip-protected DVDs so I can continue my quest?
Web search for this kind of thing is difficult because it has changed over
time.

-- 
Bryan Henderson                                   San Jose, California