vlc won't play region encoded DVDs

[cpghost]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 01:57:01PM -0400, Bob Johnson wrote:
> > I was under the impression that VLC ignored region-encoding when
> > playing DVDs, but this is apparently not the case on my BSD box.
> 
> In all but the oldest DVD drives, region encoding is supposed to be
> enforced by the drive itself, not by your software. You can change the
> region code setting on your drive a few times, but there is a limit (5
> times, I think). Have you succeeded at playing the same DVDs with VLC
> on a different O/S?

All RPC-2 drives behave that way. It is enforced by the firmware,
not the hardware itself; and firmware can be hacked / replaced,
so that the RPC-2 drive can be flashed to become RPC-1. You'll void
your warranty though:

http://www.rpc1.org

But IIRC, though I may be wrong, mplayer (proably vlc as well)
don't care at all about that. They grab the data directly off
the drive, and if it's CSS-encoded, they can DeCSS it on-the-fly
when linked with /usr/ports/multimedia/libdvdcss.

I've been able to view out-of-region region-encoded DVDs both
on RPC-2 and RPC-1 drives (both old and recent) with mplayer
without any problems; and, yes, I've switched regions much more
often that just 5 times per RPC-2 drive: no problems at all.

> I hope I'm wrong, though. The sooner this idiot DRM stuff dies, the better.

Yep. Region encoding and CSS are broken anyway and have
been no problem for a long time already; the real interesting
hacking is now being done on AACS, but that's another story in
the neverending race between good and evil. ;-)

> - Bob

Cheers,
-cpghost.

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