FreeBSD vs Region Code DVDs

[Sean C. Farley]

On Thu, 3 May 2007, Ulrich Spoerlein wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm having a hard time getting my external (USB, Firewire) Plextor
> PX-755UF to read any retail DVDs at all. I can read any kind of CDs
> and also DVD-Rs. But mastered DVDs are invisible to FreeBSD.
>
> I can not even read a single sector from such a DVD with the external
> drive, but it's working just fine with the internal one. It's really
> driving me nuts.

<snip>

> The NEC drive can read DVDs just fine (although it sucks).
>
> % recoverdisk /dev/cd1
>        start    size           len state          done     remaining    % done
>            0 1048576    7411912704     0             0    7411912704 0.0000000^C
> (130)% recoverdisk /dev/cd0
> recoverdisk: DIOCGMEDIASIZE failed: No such file or directory
> (1)% dd if=/dev/cd0 bs=2048
> 0+0 records in
> 0+0 records out
> 0 bytes transferred in 0.000093 secs (0 bytes/sec)
>
> If I attach the device via Firewire, it's just the same. Perhaps it
> requires some sort of quirk? Where should I start looking for debug
> output? Which test should I run. Any help would be greatly
> appreciated.

I had an issue with ripping some DVD's to my laptop before a trip I made
(note:  no distribution occurred (for the lawyers :))).  I wanted to
just use dd to do it, but dd would fail after a small amount of data was
read.  If I first played a little of the DVD with mplayer, then dd would
work afterwards.  It probably had something to do with mplayer
whispering sweet nothings to the DVD player.

Sean
-- 
sean-freebsd at farley.org