Sony Fixes Problems With New DVDs

An anonymous reader writes "Following up on reports that DVDs for some Sony titles were causing problems, Video Business is reporting that Sony has fixed the copy-protection problem on recent DVD releases, and will provide replacement discs to customers. The problem was with the ARccOS DRM system. The company issued the following statement: 'Recently, an update that was installed on approximately 20 titles was found to cause an incompatibility issue with a very small number of DVD players (Sony has received complaints on less than one thousandth of one percent of affected discs shipped)... Since then, the ARccOS system has once again been updated, and there are no longer any playability problems.' Customers can call 800-860-2878 to inquire about replacement discs."

Comments

I wouldn't be too sure...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Look at the way their DRM currently works:

The system deliberately creates a number of sectors on the DVD with corrupted data that cause DVD copying software to produce errors. Normal DVD players never read these sectors since they follow a set of instructions encoded on the disc telling them to skip them. Less sophisticated DVD playing programs do not follow these instructions and instead try to read every sector on the disk sequentially, including the bad ones. Slysoft's AnyDVD, Fengtao's DVDFab Decrypter, RipIt4Me + DVD Decrypter + FixVTS + DVD Shrink, MacTheRipper (freeware), along with VLC media player[1] and MPlayer/MEncoder (for Linux) are usually able to overcome ARccOS protection.

Which really, really makes me wonder exactly what players it was intended to kill...

I think I've seen these before, incidentally. But it seems that the whole point is to fuck up their disks exactly enough that they won't play on certain players (God knows which ones, if mplayer can play it), but not enough that they won't play on real players. Thus, it's based not at all on actual standards (like CSS), and entirely on existing DVD players.

They could be calling it an "update" meaning an actual removal, as a marketspeak word. Or it could really be an update, basically figuring out exactly how the cheap DVD players play discs, and making these DVDs playable in that, but still a PITA for something like dd.

Re:So few complaints?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

CD standards are defined and policed by one organisation.

DVD standards are the product of a large collaboration between double-figures of large businesses originally, one of them being Sony themselves. There are now hundreds involved, and AFAICS there is no single group with the authority to take enforcement action is someone is abusing the "DVD" description.