_some_ DVDs won't play




Troubles playing about half of the 12 _Lord of the Rings_ DVDs
in a set purchased from amazon,
and on its replacement,
and on a third set set from Best Buy.

Drive: a Sony CD-RW, CRX320EE, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM
Using libdvdcss, from libdvdcss2_1.2.8-1_i386.deb
xine-ui 0.99.3-1

Most of the bad discs just won't play.
On some discs, the video has a lot of square holes in it.
On some, the DVD makes xine crash.
One disk even made X crash.

No trouble playing almost all other DVDs.
A borrowed set of LOTR discs will play on all machines.
Don't know when they were purchased, but not recently.

QUESTIONS:

Are the failures in reading LOTR discs
known to be deliberately caused by the manufacturer,
perhaps in revenge for DeCSS?
So that common equipment will play the DVDs,
but not read them error-free?
A sort of kludgy copy-protection scheme?

Just speculating ...

I was told recently that the cheapest DVD drives
have the best success rates and the least failures.

Any experience from the list?
Better to buy trash than quality,
because trashy drives work better?

- andrew porter, app@xxxxxxxx


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