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Vista Won't Play With Old DVD Drives

Posted by Zonk on from the taking-their-ball-and-going-home dept.

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!"

2 of 726 comments (clear)

  1. Won't stop VLC, presumably by Stephen+Williams · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:What about places like new zealand? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.