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!"

Comments

Won't stop VLC, presumably

[Stephen Williams]

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

Re:Won't stop VLC, presumably

[inquisitor]

This isn't going to happen; as Raymond Chen repeatedly explains in the article, this affects only the official Windows region-checking subsystem and does not affect data reading. It was removed because it was causing playback problems for some users of RPC-2 drives and was causing benefit for very few people. (As a side note, I flashed several drives RPC-1 and it was very often hard - requiring specific DOS configurations and IDE configurations and all that - it wasn't exactly a consumer-level thing to do.)

There hasn't actually been any need to flash drives RPC-1 for some time; Linux DVD players ignore the hardware region code and read the data directly, VLC on any platform ignores the hardware region code and reads the data directly, and on Windows AnyDVD provides a nice, easy-to-use solution for those who want to use any Windows DVD player (albeit for cost). Anyone who has flashed their drive RPC-1 will find it very easy to get an official manufacturer flash that makes it RPC-2 again, or know just to use VLC instead, so the problem is pretty much moot.

Re:What about places like new zealand?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:whooboy.

[arth1]

Save us from ourselves? Dude, if you're trying to pirate movies with one of those ridiculously slow 1x DVD-ROMS from 1998, Microsoft is doing you a favor in making you fork over 16 dollars on a new one.

(I don't see the big deal. I mean, does anyone complain they can't plug their 40 meg MFM hard drive into their new motherboard that only has IDE and SATA ports?)

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).

--
*Art

Re:Why

[HateBreeder]

with a bootable CD-RW of course...

Re:What about places like new zealand?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:whooboy.

[hairyfeet]

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.