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Vista Won't Play With Old DVD Drives
tlhIngan writes "From a developer's blog, Windows Vista will no longer support DVD-ROM drives that do not handle region coding in hardware (RPC1 drives) - thus preventing playback of DVDs that are region/CSS encoded with those drives. Not a big problem, as RPC1 drives haven't been officially manufactured since 2000 (and Microsoft claims their drives are all broken), but for those with hacked drives (RPC2 with RPC1 firmware), or move the RPC1 drive to new computers, well, no more DVD movies for you!"
Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is very possible, I don't know much about anything besides Linux and Star Trek), the Windows version of VLC will presumably keep on working, doing all the decoding in software using libdvdcss. So people will still be able to use it to view their legitimately-acquired foreign DVDs.
-Stephen
Ah yes, but region-free encoding still requires encoding in hardware - to say it's region-free. Instead of saying "this drive only plays region 1", you're saying "this drive plays region 1, 2, 3, 4 etc..." - regardless of region, it's still gotta decode it. Region-free does not magically unencode the contents!
The story is a bit misleading - basically Windows Vista will only support drives that do something in hardware, rather than the old style drives that required it to be done in software. It's not a DRM issue, just dropping of support for older drives - and saves them a bunch of problems building a driver layer in for what are legacy devices.
You don't get it, do you? The problem is that the drive you can buy at newegg is region-locked, and the region can only be changed 4 times. This means that if I want to watch my American, Japanese and European DVDs, I need to buy three players (and a case big enough to accommodate them).
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*Art
NT4 was released in 1996, after Windows 95; you were waiting for NT5 before 4 was released?
with a bootable CD-RW of course...
Sigs are for the weak.
Actually, it is a DRM issue. You probably don't know exactly how DVDs work.
The DVD video data itself is encrypted. In order to decrypt it, a DVD player app is supposed to ask the drive for the decryption keys. On older drives, the drive will give the player app those decryption keys regardless of what region the disc is coded for. The drive doesn't know what region the player app thinks it's in, and doesn't care. It simply hands the keys over to the player, which then enforces region encoding. The encryption is separate from the region coding - it's possible to have a region coded disc without CSS encrpyion (although it won't be effective), and it's possible to have a CSS encrypted disc without region coding.
Newer drives refuse to hand over the decryption keys if the disc's region code doesn't match the drive's region code. That is the ONLY difference between older and newer drives. Official DVD player apps will not be able to read the decryption keys if the disc region code doesn't match the drive region code, because the drive won't give up the keys. This was added because some users started finding ways around the software-enforced region coding system (such as registry hacks, tricking the DVD player app into working in region-free mode, or whatever).
Of course, open-source DVD player apps (which are illegal in the US anyway) don't even attempt to grab the decryption key from the drive - they deduce the decryption key by examining the encrypted data, using a known-plaintext attack. They don't enforce region coding either, and are completely unaffected by hardware region coding. That's the only reason I've not bothered reflashing my DVD drive to make it region free - I don't need to.
The ONLY reason Microsoft are doing this is for DRM purposes. There is no other legitimate reason. Older drives do not need extra code (in fact, they need less code than newer drives), they don't need compatability layers, or any that stuff. All current (official) DVD player apps enforce region coding in software anyway, before they even ask the drive for the decryption key. This is only there to prevent people running patched firmware to make their drives region-free.
They'll probably add code to prevent DVD rippers and open-source DVD players from working as well.
Give Scribus a try..
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
"...new networking & audio stacks"
Those splendid new stacks include DRM and Trusted Computing... I just think I keep my Linux...
We don't think Vista is Aqua... there was no DRM or Trusted Computing on Aqua...
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I prefere to decide for myself what and whom I want to trust... and if I want or do not want to obey the law... that's a part of what I understand as FREEDOM !!
I'm not sure where this whole "region coding illegal in NZ" thing came from, but it hasn't been the case for a long time. I did try and find out if there was any truth to it once, because as far as I knew everything was region locked as elsewhere, but managed to find only one or two outdated official-ish references and a handful of foreign sites which referred to it but which were also old or had since been corrected. Simply put, we suffer under the same region encoding most other places do, particularly because it's often tricky to get stuff in Region 4.
Regards,
Jo Meder
The page you linked to is at rpc1.org. RPC1 is the non-region coded firmware which Windows Vista will not be supporting.
Uhh, yes, that's the domain name. If you spend two minutes browsing the site, you'll see they have plenty of RPC2 firmwares. link
(A bunch of savages in this place, I swear. I'm not even supposed to be here today.)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It really couldn't be considered for Linux.
As I understand it, if you connect an RPC-1 drive to your system, the cdrom.sys driver will emulate the region control. If you look at the drive's properties, it'll say that you have two or fewer region changes left. The region setting is saved in a fairly well-known location in the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\<random junk>). Vista will remove this emulation, and will probably refuse to pass key exchange messages to the drive. (As an aside, the cdrom.sys driver only checks the RPC level on startup. So, if you change an RPC-2 drive into an RPC-1 drive, Windows no longer shows the drive as being region controlled until the next reboot.)
On the other hand, Linux doesn't have any region control emulation. Since it's not encumbered by any DVD licensing contracts, it can simply pass the key exchange messages to the drive. So, it really wouldn't make sense for it to "be considered for Linux."
Or you can use a program like DVDidle pro that lets you switch to any region anytime you like.If I'm not mistaken anyDVD and DVD43 will also do the same.I personally like dvdidle pro for the fact that it'll load a movie into RAM so your drive doesn't have to spin so much.Great for saving juice and wear on my laptop dvd drive.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
VLC uses DeCSS to break the encryption. So it doesn't much matter, but WinDVD or any other commercial player will complain because the drive will not hando ver the decryption keys when the region does not match.
Indeed. A buddy of mine from work said he installed the beta version of Vista at home. When he fired it up for the first time, he let it load completely and then checked his system resources. With the system completely idle, 620 megs of ram were being used. Don't ask me how it's even possible for an OS to tie up that amount of ram while doing NOTHING, I couldn't tell you. He said the only real changes he saw with this build was the huge resource hogging, the "eye candy", and things are all (dis)organized differently.
No thanks M$. I pass.
You're nothing; like me.