Re: Can I play a region 1 DVD in my region 2 dvd recorder?
- From: rodsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rod Smith)
- Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:54:21 -0000
In article <o532t4-qgd.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
markhobley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mark Hobley) writes:
....
I would like to play a region 1 dvd on my region 2 dvd rewriter drive.
My drive is a Lite-On DVDRW S0HW-012S rewriter.
I have mounted the disk, but when I try to play the video files, I get errors
as follows:
mplayer *.vob
Playing vts_01_0.vob.
Seek failed
Presumably this is due to the region code not matching the region of my drive
(I am in the United Kingdom.)
Actually, the problem is more likely due to the fact that you've tried to
mount the disc and play the files from the mounted image. Instead, you
should use xine or some other Linux DVD-playing tool to play the disc by
pointing the program at your DVD-ROM drive's device file:
xine dvd:///
Details will vary depending on what program you use, though. Note that
mplayer isn't the best choice for this because it can't handle DVD menus,
which makes DVD navigation difficult. You'll also need the decss libraries
installed to play most commercial DVDs. These libraries are illegal in the
United States (thank you Congress for criminalizing the playback of
legally purchased DVDs), but AFAIK they're legal in the UK. You don't need
decss to play most home-made DVDs, but those usually lack a region code
and so will play in any player, video format permitting.
As to region codes specifically, it's my understanding that most DVD
drives for computers ship with the region code unset, meaning that the
drive will play discs from any region. In most cases, Windows or MacOS
DVD-playing software sets the code the first time the software is run, but
Linux software doesn't do this. Thus, if you've never tried to play a
video DVD in Windows or MacOS on your system, you'll PROBABLY be able to
play media intended for any region in Linux. If you've used the DVD drive
to play videos under Windows or MacOS, though, the region code will
probably be set. You can check this detail with the regionset utility
(http://linvdr.org/projects/regionset/); just insert a CD or DVD, type
"regionset", and examine the output. On my systems, I get several lines of
output, including:
drive plays discs from region(s):, mask=0xFF
If the region code is set, it would appear just before the comma, as in:
drive plays discs from region(s): 2, mask=0xFF
At the end of the output, regionset asks if you want to change your
drive's region code. Most drives limit the number of times you can do this
(regionset reports how many are left), so don't do it unnecessarily.
One further point: I've seen a claim that the decss library can get around
region coding and play discs for one region even when the drive is set to
another region code. I've only seen this claim on one Web site, though,
and as I'm in the US and so can't legally use decss, I can't verify that
it's true. The Web page that made this claim mentioned a brute-force
attack on the encryption key, so I'd guess this process could take a
while, but I'm not positive of that.
--
Rod Smith, rodsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux, FreeBSD, and networking
.
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