Crazy Encryption Story...

[LanceSteel]

I recently got my hands on a copy of "The Stoned Age: The Special Edition." When I tried to play it on my stand-alone dvd player, the video played for like 1 sec and then just froze. You could tell that the disk was still going (and at the root menu) so I just pressed play. The movie started playing with no video and choppy audio. "The disk is just scratched", I said. So I looked at the bottom of the disk and noticed that there were little to no scratches. I figured, "It must be dirty." So I washed the disk with soap and water. It still didn't play (no picture and choppy sound.) "Well let me try it on my computer. That will play anything.", I thought. I tried playing it in both my dvd-rom drives (which can usually read a ham sandwich) and still no go. So I fire-up dvddecryptor. It reads the disk and decrypts the streams to the HD (no errors are reported.) I try to play it from the HD and its still messed up. I load the individual vob files in DVD2AVI and the video is just black. I'm like, "The disk must just be bad." I weep silently to myself since I won't be seeing this great movie and put the disk away.

Later that night I'm thinking about it more... "Its suprising that this low budget, never theatrically released movie actually uses the full DVD encryption routine." Then I'm like, "The way the disk is playing seems like its not decrypting the movie or its decrypting a non-encrypted stream." So I pop the disk back into the dvd-rom drive and just directly copy the files off the disk on to the HD. I then load up WinDVD and point it to the directly copied files... bang, it plays fine.

Apparently, when they authored the dvd, they setup it up assuming that it will be (or was) encrypted even though the streams were never encrypted. Sorry for the long story but I just thought that this was such a weird deal that it had to be told.

[pacmania_2001]

I believe the moral of the story is:

DVD encryption sucks