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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.
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
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.
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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.
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
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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