New DVD copy protection???

[petar]

Make sure you close the curtains when ripping then?

[Sabro]

I know your prolly trying to make another DVD outta this, however Sand/Fog ripped, as usual, excellent with EasyVCD. No problems what so ever.

Sabro

[petar]

Sorry to revive an old topic but I thought maybe you'll find this interesting.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the next movie from the same studio came out on DVD today (it's Run for the Money aka Hard Cash with Val Kilmer/Christian Slater). And exactly the same issue as before. Plays just fine but it can't be ripped. I played some more with Sector Extractor (great tool, btw, thanks Sefy) and it finds a sector error on the first movie VOB file. Tried the House of Sand and Fog again and same thing.
In the meantime I tried all other new DVDs I got and they all ripped fine (so my "ripping kit" is OK).

I also got PMed this:
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/9833

Looks like some movie studios may have found some trick/workaround to prevent a disc from ripping by introducing bad sectors on purpose.

The same issue has been found here as well:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=506745#post506745

[Sefy]

From what I remember, both Smart Ripper and DVD Decrypter have a bad sectors check which can be enabled to skip those errors.

[petar]

The problem is neither manages to even open the discs. According to the posts on the cdfreaks website, the discs also contain a mastering error which prevents these tools from reading the structure.

[Sefy]

Since i've yet to encounter such a disk, I can't really do much to assist, but if all this is true, I know which program will work perfectly again, the good old "DVD Squeezer" which unfortunatly for most people, only does VCD

[fritzi93]

Sector Extractor available at:

http://www.spin361.btinternet.co.uk/download_page.htm

EDIT: Oops, missed Chicola's post. Anyway, the link works.

[petar]

Thanks fritzi, I already got it from Sefy

I know which program will work perfectly again, the good old "DVD Squeezer" which unfortunatly for most people, only does VCD

Another of Sefy's super-secret tools .

An extensive google search found this only:
http://www.dvdsqueeze.com/?hop=hdomains

Is that the one? If so, do you know if there's a trial available for download somewhere?

[Sefy]

Nope, that's not the one I ment
What I was talking about is/was one of the very first encoding/ripping tools ever made for DVD to VCD which used the famous Panasonic MPEG1 Plugin, and one of the very first programs i made a guide for

http://sefy.iwarp.com/guides/direct2.html

[Biodroid]

try a different Sand and Fog disc , ciclyc redundandcy means bad disk , scracthe etc.

So , Try another disk of the movie...

[petar]

Sefy,
That's DVD2MPG Squeezer then. You mean .
I'll give that a try. Just curious if it can rip it, not planning on making VCDs.

Biodroid,
No, it's not that. I tried two and both were brand new. All points to a deliberate error introduced by the DVD producer to stop it from ripping. The two links I posted before claim the same thing.

[Sefy]

Petar, i'm positive this program will work, because of a simple reason, it does not "rip" literaly, it simply "grabs" the frames one by one, you will however need Panasonic MPEG1 Premiere Plugin to make it work

This program is a DVD Player which simply grabs the frames

[petar]

Oh, in that case it will definitely work... but... it's not really stripping the protection though. That's what I was curious about - if there's some tool that can rip the disc.

Hasn't anyone yet come across this issue? Maybe it's just in Europe. The guys on the cdfreaks site found it on one german and one spanish DVD and on the doom9 forum on a UK DVD.

[Sefy]

True, but it does create one of the best quality VCD's

[Gurm]

This will fizzle and fade away, because I GUARANTEE YOU that there are DVD players out there that can't read that disc. Same reason that Macrovision and Sony have both weakened their protections to the point where anyone with a decent CD burner can copy them.

Also, different burners may be capable of reading these discs... I'm sure the Doom9 & CDFreaks guys are trying that as we speak.

Last but not least, any disc modified in this way isn't a REAL DVD at all... Philips has said as much, and is forcing the issue in court.

- Gurm

[jbelder]

I'm trying to rip the House of Sand and Fog but with no luck.

DVD Decrypter 3.2.2.0 reports "InterfaceThread Runtime Exception!" "Message = EAccessViolation" while checking for RCE protection, right after I open the disc.

SmartRipper 2.4.1 reads the disc up until "Authentication successful" and then reports "Access violation at address 0041FAEA in module 'SmartRipper.exe'. Read of address 014A8001". Can't read the disc anymore.

DVD Shrink (tried 2.3 and 3.0 Beta 5) locks right after the Analysis phase starts (about the same time the movie starts; analysis of the menus is fine). If I cancel the analysis and backup anyway, it stops at around 4% with the message "CDvdCSS::Read failed!" "The reason is: Data error (cyclic redundancy check)".

I tried two different drives and both report the same things.
The DVD plays fine on a standalone and with WinDVD.

Win Explorer can read the VIDEO_TS directory OK but it can't copy the files to HD. I know the files would be useless because of CSS but the strange thing is it can't copy them at all; it reports error - "Cannot replace or create VTS_<whatever>: File system error (-2147351799)" when I drag a VOB file to my desktop.

Disc is region 2, the edition for videoclubs (not pirating, I own the videoclub). In fact, the disc has been rented quite a few times and no customer reported a problem viewing it.

A friend of mine told me he couldn't rip the same movie (different disc) and had the same symptoms with DVD Shrink (he didn't try other tools). So it's not a faulty disc I've got. What's going on? Did they come up with some new type of protection?

There is no new encryption it will always be CSS/CPPM. Anytime someone has a problem it's new encryption.It's a read error on the disc in that sector.

[petar]

jbelder, we've been through all this before. I've never had a problem out of several hundreds of DVDs I've ripped. Please read the previous posts (I know there's lots of them) because I've explained this quite a few times already.
Yes, it's a bad sector and no, there's no new encryption. I'm talking about a possible new protection method of introducing bad sectors on purpose. You can read about it on the cdfreaks web site (I posted the link above). The author of CloneDVD also believes there's an attempt at introducing a new protection method by putting a ring of bad sectors.

[Vanderlow]

So have you tried the latest AnyDVD then? There's a 21 day trial period.

http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html

[petar]

Yeah, I did. It hangs when it gets to the bad sectors. Same as DVD Shrink. DVD Decrypter has the option to ignore them but it can't open the disc (apparently there's a mastering error as well).
Sector Extractor may be the only one that can get something out of it because it can open the disc and it can also ignore the bad sectors but I gave up after the 20th bad sector since it doesn't have "ignore all" option. I'll probably try again once I find some small heavy object to put on the "I" key.

[mazinz]

do you have more than one dvd-rom drive in your pc? Have you tried to rip it on a different drive?

I had a similar issue like a year or so ago, the dvds would actually copy fine, but absolutely NO shrink apps would process them (file ifo mistmatch errors, etc). I finally picked up a liteon drive (original rom was a pioneer) and like magic the problem went away

if you can, try the films on a friends computer, try using a different drive,etc

and do not overlook the fact, that maybe/perhaps the discs are defective, or that a bunch of defects got out and it just happens to be the ones doom 9 and yourself are having issues with

[petar]

I tried it on two different drives I have and a friend of mine tried his copy on his drive.
I tried two different discs of House of Sand and Fog and one of Hard Cash, all brand new from the box. Both movies come from the same movie studio and are their last two released on DVD.

and do not overlook the fact, that maybe/perhaps the discs are defective, or that a bunch of defects got out and it just happens to be the ones doom 9 and yourself are having issues with

Yeah, this is the only logical thing I can think of, apart from being done on purpose by the studio to prevent ripping, that something went wrong with their mastering process and affected the new DVD releases.
But the weird thing is, according to doom9 and cdfreaks websites, the same issue has been found in two other countries.

I tried to rip again with Sector Extractor (put a heavy screw with its head on the "I" key) and after couple of hours found over 1000 consecutive bad sectors, so I gave up again. I was afraid I may damage the drive (or the "I" key).
1000 sectors is about 2 MBytes of data, isn't it? How is it possible that a player doesn't have a problem with this? And it's not just the 4 players I have but none of my customers reported any problems with either of the movies.

[jbelder]

jbelder, we've been through all this before. I've never had a problem out of several hundreds of DVDs I've ripped. Please read the previous posts (I know there's lots of them) because I've explained this quite a few times already.
Yes, it's a bad sector and no, there's no new encryption. I'm talking about a possible new protection method of introducing bad sectors on purpose. You can read about it on the cdfreaks web site (I posted the link above). The author of CloneDVD also believes there's an attempt at introducing a new protection method by putting a ring of bad sectors.

Well for starters I have backed up 600+ and never ever have I ran in to any problems. I backed that same movie with no problems

[petar]

Well for starters I have backed up 600+ and never ever have I ran in to any problems. I backed that same movie with no problems

I have ripped probably close to a 1,000 DVDs and never ran into any problems either. You're in the US, I'm in Spain. Your copy of the same movie is produced by a different company and quite possibly brought to you by a different distributor to start with.

[Gurm]

I love it when people won't read the rest of the topic and just start arguing for no good reason. *sigh*

- Gurm

[petar]

OK, I think I figured the issue out. It definitely is something done on purpose and it does seem like a workaround to stop people from ripping the disc. I'll try to explain.

I extracted all readable sectors from the disc with Sector Extractor. There were in total around 10 MBytes of unreadable data sectors. Using a hex editor and a file merger I replaced them all with zeros (all were in the VTS_01_1.VOB file so I extracted the good parts before and after, then created an all-zero file in the exact size of the bad sectors and merged it all together). I played it from my HD and it worked perfectly.

Strange, so I looked into the structure of the VTS_01_0.IFO file where the movie is. And here's what is happening:
The PGC of the movie starts with 4 cells with running time of 0. It's actually the same cell physically on the disc (same cell ID and VOB ID) but repeated 4 times. Using Vobedit I looked into the VOB file and all bad sectors (which were now all zeros because I replaced them before) were in this cell.
Then I checked the IFO file again and there's a PGC command that skips these 4 cells and goes straight to the 5th cell. I extracted then the 5th cell with Vobedit and what did I find? That's where the actual movie starts.

So in summary, there's dummy cell which never gets played and there are thousands of bad sectors in this cell. This explains why the DVD plays just fine on any player - the bad sectors never get accessed. But you can't rip the disc because there's just too many of them - around 5,000 in total I think. Well, you can rip it but ignoring 5,000 errored sectors will take ages (took me 2 hours for 1,000 with a heavy screw on the "I" key).

Also the latest version of DVD Decrypter (3.2.3.0) can now read the disc. From the changelog:
Added: Crash recovery for 'Checking for RCE Protection' code - so corrupt IFO files shouldn't mean the disc can't be copied - as all other IFO parsing can be avoided if required
So this means the IFO files are corrupt on the disc - that's why the previous versions couldn't even open the disc. They were crashing exactly when checking for RCE Protection.

I don't know, it all seems too much to be just a coincidence. Looks to me like a try to protect the disc from ripping. Well, it can be ripped but it's a lot of manual work.

[Sefy]

Actually, from what you jsut said, it's just an RCE protection, and the latest version of DVD Decrypter does know how to handle it

[petar]

No, actually there's no RCE protection on the disc (at least DVD Decrypter is not reporting that there is and it's been able to detect RCE for quite a few versions already). The fix they've put is regarding checking for RCE protection. To check for this, it needs to look at the IFO files. So until the last version a corrupt IFO file would crash it.
This disc definitely has one corrupt IFO file - Ifoedit crashes on it too. But it's in one of the dummy VTSs which never get accessed. Another reason to think all the errors on this disc were done on purpose.

[Sefy]

Maybe this protection is for tricking the ripper ? cause basicly there is none! it simply puts false information in those blocks to get the ripper to crash, which now is being solved on the latest version which knows how to handle it

[Roderz]

Been following this thred for a while now - makes intresting reading, ppls oposing opinions etc.

Then I checked the IFO file again and there's a PGC command that skips these 4 cells and goes straight to the 5th cell.

This explains why the DVD plays just fine on any player - the bad sectors never get accessed

So if this is right (and I cant see how this is NOT possible) we got (deliberately inserted) dodgy sectors that cant be read but are not accessed (isnt this an old protection method used on games etc..)

now all we is for some smart programmer to write a program that only rips what is actually accessed via the IFO - woundn't that solve the problem, i.e. look at the disc as a dvd player does and rip only those parts, not just blindly ripping everything

My programming skills aren’t up to this (and IFO files are just full of black magic aren’t they?)
But I sure someone will pick up the baton and run with it

just my tupence worth

edit

Also the latest version of DVD Decrypter (3.2.3.0) can now read the disc

you said DD wass crashing on opening the disc before
so can DVD Decrypter rip it now?

[petar]

Maybe this protection is for tricking the ripper ? cause basicly there is none! it simply puts false information in those blocks to get the ripper to crash, which now is being solved on the latest version which knows how to handle it

Looks like it. However, the amount of bad sectors (around 5000 of them) makes it very time-consuming to rip, even though DVD Decrypter can now read the disc and has the option to ignore read errors. If it took me 2 hours to skip 1,000 bad sectors, it would probably take me 10 to skip them all. I'm no expert on electronics but I can't image this would be too healthy on the drive.

The other option is what I did - rip only the good part of the disc, then add the missing sectors manually as all zeros (they never get accessed anyway).

Roderz,
I'm not a programmer but I think what I did manually can be automated by the ripper (though some programmer may tell me I'm full of s**t). The only problem I see is how to jump to the end of the bad sectors ring without trying to read through all the bad sectors.

you said DD wass crashing on opening the disc before
so can DVD Decrypter rip it now?

I'm sure it can by telling it to ignore the read errors but, as I mentioned before, it will take ages because it tries to read each bad sector for few seconds before it ignores it (and the drive makes a very scary noise).