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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!"
would I want Vista anyway?
I have XP and I don't have any need for Vista.
Of couse at on point, support stops for XP. But then Linux for the desktop will hopefully be awesome.
what about places like new zealand where it is illegal to sell a region coded piece of hardware. does this count as like rpc1? does this mean Win Vista will not run in new zealand? if not then whatever new zealanders do will be able to be used anywhere else to get region free dvd drives on windows. if yes, then microsoft loses new zealand to linux in ten seconds flat.
No more DVDs when Vista has come out? I'm sure Vista coming out won't affect my installation of Fedora Core in any way, nor other peoples installs of Windows XP...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Why do the big players not get the long tail fact that stopping people from seeing your stuff is suicidal? There is so much other good stuff out there fighting for attention, be it news sites, blogs, podcasts, videocasts, flashfilms, indie films, et bloody cetera.
The money is in editorial branding. And that is because editorial choice is a way of dealing with information overload. It's so freaking obvious, yet none of the majors seem to get it. Even when some english nightclub goes on to form a top selling dance mix brand, just by picking good tunes. This is the way it is done.
Not by making your software even more anti-usable. FFS.
I _upgraded_ most my DVD drives to RPC1.
:)
Having to suffer from region restrictions is not acceptable (locally both region 1 and region 2 dvds were easily available and I also order stuff from both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.
Of course, I usually play DVDs under linux, so this is not really a problem
Can anyone explain how the hardware protection should work anyways? On my powerbook, i can't play DVD's with the wrong Region code using Apple's DVD Player (unless i switch my drives Region code, which would make the drive useless after a while, since you can only switch 5 times). However, if I use VLC instead, it doesn't care which Region code the dvd has. It just works. So it doesn't really seem to be a "hardware" protection, if it can be worked around just by using different software.
Because Linux isn't exactly known for being user friendly, especially in the desktop market.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Or if you think you need to upgrade your OS, why don't you consider Linux
;)
I use linux for all my daily work, but I still dual-boot into XP when I need to do DTP. I haven't seen a single piece of DTP software on linux that is useful. (Yes, I mention this from time to time hoping that somewhere, somone knows of a DTP application for Linux that's actually usable which I've missed. In that case, let me know so I can ditch XP altogether
You're right. I was totally appalled to learn that one of my favorite Congressmen, John Conyers, and one of my least favorites, Sensenbrenner, have teamed up to cosponsor a law that plugs the "analog hole," making any copy, anywhere, illegal. You can't make a digital copy now, and you can't make an analog one if this bill is passed. I sent Conyers a "Say it ain't so, John" message, and Sensenbrenner a polite cease-and-desist. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117934938?catego ryid=1009&cs=1
...will it be purposedly hard-blocked or will it be just "unsupported" so that by installing 3rd party drivers you get your old DVD support back?
Vista may of course not support lots of obsolete hardware and there's nothing wrong with that. It's ancient, hardly anybody uses it anymore, developing drivers costs money and time, so cutting back on these costs is understandable. If someone wants to have their ISA gfx card or some obscure SCSI scanner supported, they'd have to write the driver themselves or pay someone to write them to work, cool. But if some hardware is blacklisted as in "This kind of hardware may be used for illegal purposes, we won't allow you to use it", it's a different matter.
Anyway, I strongly believe that in both cases the hacker community will be more efficient that Microsoft.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Isn't regional code locked devices illegal in Australia..? Does this mean that they'll have to sell a modified version here?
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
That aside, this is just more good news for Apple. If this bugs you, get a Mac. The new ones with Intel will be able to dual boot Windows, Apple has said, so your usual excuse about not being able to play games doesn't work anymore. Use OS X for work and switch over to Windows for the games, all on hardware that doesn't look like crap. Watch DVDs with any operating system, as long as you use VLC.
To be perfectly honest.... i've read threads of all sorts where tons of people have said they won't switch to vista for various reasons. But I'm feeling a bit of deja vu, twice over infact. Tons of people declared that they'd never switch to XP. To go back further tons of people said they wouldn't switch to 98! ***Rant Begin*** The simple fact of the matter is: if widespread use of Vista warrents the end-user changing, either through enhanced or added functionality that just isn't availible in XP or the discontinuation of support, people will switch to Vista plain and simple. It might be one hard long fight, but eventually it will be the standard. The US military in most offices has finally made the switch to XP, and moreover (in some departments) to Server 2003. Heck, even some parts of the military are using Media Center Edition for different types of briefings and training because it works well with media. So for all of you that say this is just one more reason for you *not* to switch to Vista, come talk to me in 4 or 5 years and let's see what operating system you are using. Disclaimer: For you linux geeks out there, I think it's fair to say you don't have all that much of a say in the Vista switch. Granted a great deal of you may use XP as an alternative OS, but you have already made the great leap into the alt-beyond. You have survived and came back to tell about it. For those of us that are comfortable with a Windows environment (and would consider ourselves power-users in the realm) we are the ones that really get a final say as to what is unreasonable and what is not in the implementation of a new OS. ***Rant Over***
What the heck are they thinking??? It's amazing that they still feel they're going to bully consumers into purchasing new hardware and acting a certain way... completely beyond comprehension. What was the story about the old Model T? Any color as long as it's black? People now have options. And one option that I'm sure a lot of IT managers as well as home consumers will exercise is, "Hey, I think I'll just run my old copy of XP/2000... *OR* I'll give that fancypants Linux thing a try! *OR* Heyy... check out those delightful Macintoshes!" Microsoft will declare lower sales than anticipated this year... The market will speak directly to these knuckleheads! Gartner, WSJ and all those other MS fellaters can bank on it!
One of my machines runs Win XP with a DVD burner. I recently started to pick up import Japanese Anime which are set to Region 2. When I got my first import, I put the DVD in and ran DVD Shrink. It insisted on changing the RPC-2 H/W Region Code. Of course, there are a max of 5 changes before the it is permanent. I ended up going out to pick up another DVD drive which is specific for Region 2 DVD's. What a pain !
I would like to meet the a-hole, probably a marketing executive, who thought of this Region coding BS.
On DVD Shrink, it is used for my own purpose of making dups of the DVD's i buy. The originals are kept at home and I play off the copies. I am about done with vacation and I recently bought some new Anime. I made copies and took the copies with me to watch when I have time. The originals are at home safe.
Um, guys, don't forget that there is already a level of region protection built into Windows itself. If anyone here has actually used a RPC1 firmware, you will know that to fully disable region protection, you will need not only a firmware "upgrade", but also some sort of software that hooks into Windows and disables the the region protection on the OS side of things.
So it just means that to get real region freedom, the software will need to do more.
And as mentioned earlier, region protection works simply by getting the drive to refuse to give you the CSS decryption key in the key exchange. Movies that are not CSS-encrypted won't be affected. And software that brute-forces the CSS key won't be affected either.
I RTFA and don't see what the hell this has to do with Linux. The way the article reads is that the "old" and "new" dvd drives (otherwise known as RPC-1 and RPC-2) handle things so differently that it's impossible to support both. This is not actually the complete truth... in fact to handle either is just as easy and they are almost completely the same. The difference is mainly how the drive responds to requests for a CSS key.
Also, the article is very Windows-dependent and has nothing to do with similar hardware/software in other OS's. For example:
"It was impossible for third-parties to compile their own CDROM.SYS from the source code in the DDK because the region code enforcement code was not included in the DDK."
This means that the source code was not present to include complete support. This is a decision that MS has made because they don't want people re-doing the region protection. That's not a "generic" issue, that's an OS issue. OS code to handle any type of DVD drive is available and (because of the GPL) always will be.
"The region code enforcement code would sometimes mistake a new drive for an old one, resulting in customers unable to play DVDs. Even worse, the driver test team could not reproduce the problem reliably, and the problem went away entirely once a debugger was attached to the system."
Strange how the new code would mistake the drives when the code in every operating system currently available that supports DVD's has no such problems (previous versions of Windows included!). Also, is it really the DVD's fault that their debugger was stopping the code from executing in the same way when it was activated or not? This definitely smells of bovine excrement.
"The code to support the older drives is complex, and the drives that the optical storage team purchased prior to January 1, 2000 are dead or dying. Consequently, testing the code that provides support for old drives has become increasingly difficult, and when the last old drive finally gives up the ghost, testing will become impossible altogether."
Strange, then, that they haven't noticed that almost every new DVD drive has firmware available that'll run it as a RPC-1 (or as they like to coin it, "old") drive. Also, I'm pretty sure that the "more complex" claim would not stand up to scrutiny (check out any OS code that deals with DVD drives, whether in the kernel, libdvd* or other places and see if they differ that much for RPC-1 or RPC-2).
"What does this mean for you? Almost certainly, the answer is "absolutely nothing"." Followed by the quote: "Only if you have an old drive will you notice anything different, namely that encrypted/regionalized DVD movies will no longer play."
That's not "absolutely nothing", especially for the budget-conscious who may well upgrade their PC a bit at a time.
"And since the average drive lifetime is only three years, the number of such old drives that are still working is vanishingly small. Not even the optical drive test team can manage to keep their old drives alive that long."
Strange... sitting here with DVD drives that are much older than that and still working. All of them "original" RPC-1, all of them the cheapest crap I could afford, all of them still reading the disks perfectly. None have died and, whoops, if they did you could always get a new RPC-2 drive and firmware it. This is just an excuse... for this paragraph read "We couldn't be arsed to support it and you're not allowed to use it anyway because you'll just use it to do naughty stuff you're not allowed to do cos the DVD forum said you can't and this sounds like a decent excuse to convince the idiots who are going to buy Vista anyway".
"It is that software enforcement that is going away"
There's your answer - they've made a conscious decision to remove this feature. Why? Because if you believe the above quotes, their dev team is incompetent, can't get already working code to play nicely in Vista and can't find a single RPC-1 drive to test i
All RPC-2 does is prevent the drive from passing through the decryption information from out-of-region discs. So having an RPC-1 drive means 1) faster ripping of out-of-region discs, and 2) the ability to easily play out-of-region discs. I was wondering what the hell Microsoft might be thiking, so I RTFA'd and found out that there were apparently just too many technical problems for them. Hey, they can't even keep their OS secure, so I'm not too surprised. Awwwwww, poor Microsoft.
I suspect all this will do is cause the firmware hackers to start making region-free firmware that speaks RPC-2. I mean, after all, they're already patching RPC-2 firmware.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I still remember the time when my neighbourhood groccer stopped stocking my favourate cereals. I switched to shopping for what I want from the supermarket. Even though it was a bit further from my home and needed a drive by car, I still got what I wanted and was happy in the process. On a similar note,
If Vista don't allow playing of encoded DVDs on old DVD drives, then it is the right time to give Linux a try. It will allow you to play encrypted DVDs and more. And the good thing is Linux is not at all fussy at all and is very user friendly.
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Thanks! I bought my DVD-ROM drive that's mounted in my current PC back in 1999. It has even survived a murder attempt by an exploding power supply (which killed the CD-RW drive, mobo, CPU and graphics card) in the old PC. Plays DVD movies fine.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The thing about Linux is historically, pretty much all the halfway-sensible end-user software that has stood the test of time in Linux has had a community (rather than just a company) behind it - and in many cases hasn't started from scratch, as a codebase was either already available or donated.
OpenOffice: check.
X: check.
Netscape: check. Though I dread to think what would have happened had it not been open-sourced.
Jamie Zawinski has penned a beautiful essay on how basically groupware, because it's not sexy, will never get a particularly enthusiastic community behind it. I'd extend this argument to say that any software which suffers from a similar problem will meet the same fate - and until Linux is sufficiently well-known on the desktop, you can forget about high-quality commercial offerings being made.
So, what kind of things does "suffering from a similar problem" extend to? Well, IMO one of the biggest things is polish - to usability, to functionality which has limited use outisde of a specific field. I'd argue that this is part of the reason that people still complain bitterly about the Gimp's user interface but very few actually try and do something about it.
The whole point of DTP is polish. To produce a document which isn't just useful, it's stunning. Without significant polish to a lot of things in Linux (not just a specific app - fonts immediately springs to mind), there simply will never be a particularly successful community-led DTP package. The only viable alternative is for someone like Adobe to support Linux more widely - not gonna happen, at least not until there's a wide base of people demanding it. And most of the base likely to demand it isn't going to use Linux in the first place, so there's a catch-22 right there.
so what's the problem?
Wanna watch a DVD? Dual boot into linux or use a linux live-cd.
Problem solved!
It will be interesting to see how as more commerically available OS's restrict their users, more users will move towards free and open alternatives.
I object to this comment. There are computer-illiterates, users, power users, and "slashdot"-level users, and of those four categories, there *is* a population of people who are either users or power users that can re-install Windows despite not knowing what the hell they're doing otherwise.
You forget that the average person gets loads of spyware. Granted, they could just install anti-spyware software, but many just re-install Windows. BECAUSE THEY CAN. Don't be elitist prick.
>>>>abandon development until the necessary hardware is already in the field.
Vista isn't for OS upgraders. It will be Your ONLY choice on DELL, HP and all the other 'big' PC manufacturers. As PCs fail, adoption WILL happen. Those with the ability can delay for a while. At some point it will be Vista, Linux or Mac assuming linux does not get locked out at the hardware level.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Commercial DVD players (PowerDVD, WinDVD, etc) ask the DVD drive to hand over the keys to decrypt the DVD. A drive that respects region encoding will only do this if region encoding on the disk matches that of the drive. OSS DVD players don't do this, they just use DeCSS to decrypt the DVD, bypassing all of that region encoding crap. That's why you can play all your disks just fine in Linux.
So no, don't throw out your laptop.
Oddly enough, I have the tendency to watch movies at 1.1x. Really bad Hollywood schlock gets 1.4x. You wouldn't believe how many pacing problems this can solve.
The ______ Agenda
So, basically, you're saying that because we don't know what the real effects are, we should ban guns just to be safe?
No, first of all I was commenting on this:
Why are you against actions that prevent women from getting raped?
Calling on emotions to convince people when you don't really have a good argument. A technique popular with the current president of the USA, besides some others.
I argued that the 'it prevents crime' argument is at best unproven, and imho rubbish. That does not mean I think there are no good reasons for people to have a gun. Sports and hunting come to mind for example.
I do however believe guns are potentially dangerous items, and I think it is a bad idea to let people have them without proper training. That said, I'm not against people owning guns.
At any rate, you accused me of kneejerk responses, that is quite funny comming from you really.
That's quite a lot of people I guess, these things don't break that easily. Actually, just check the number of old standalone CD players around. I bet there are quite a number of them out there. And if they are broken, 10 to 1 that it is a dirty lens. My 4 speed CDROM recently gave up on me though :(. Cost me about 120 euro's (without inflation taken into account.