[MPlayer-users] [BUGREPORT] I/O errors on DVD playback (totem plays it fine)

[Alexander Roalter]

Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> Actually I have a much better solution: Look up the DVDs you want to buy
> and don't buy them if they have such a protection.
> And in case they have the DVD-Video logo and do not work, you can still
> return them anyway, since it was wrongly advertised (broken DVDs simply
> aren't DVDs, I would expect that using the logo might even be illegal).

I wouldn't be too sure about the last one, since there are no dirty 
tricks used as with the copy protected CDs, only a more elaborate scheme 
is pulled which requires some more skills by the DVD player. To my 
knowledge the DVD standard allows this kind of 
jump-over-the-bad-sectors-behaviour, which is basically what is done. 
Returning them is quite a fuzz, since every DVD conforming DVD player 
plays them without problem, only a blank play the stream from sector xx 
to sector yy (as is done with mplayer) won't work on these discs.

Oh, and I really plan on avoiding these discs, but still once and again 
you run into them (which made me doing some research on this area in the 
first place), and contrary to audio CDs, where one could switch to 
unprotected discs from the U.S. (instead of protected german ones), this 
is not that easy with DVDs, especially if they're protected worldwide.

Cheers,
Alex