[mythtv-users] Many new dvd's not working

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Thu Nov 18 17:32:55 UTC 2010


For those of you having problems playing back straight from the DVD,
have you ever attempted to investigate what exactly the problem is?
It's been a while since I played right from the DVD (I gave up and now
just rip the whole structure to disk), but when I used to, the most
common cause for failed playback would be that I'd find in the logs an
entry something like RANDOM & SHUFFLE titles are not yet supported by
libdvdnav. This itself does not seem to be a DRM problem, just that
the dvd processing libraries don't handle the full spec of what a DVD
could contain.

As far as ripping DVDs, yeah that's a whole different ballgame. So
many problems there. I used to use myth to rip it (I think this was
around the time of 0.21 ), but it would choke over the bad sectors. I
then started using ddrescue to copy the disc while ignoring the bad
sectors. The downside of that is that it takes forever when it hits a
bunch of bad sectors (as I recall, a rip can literally take several
hours). Also, doing so doesn't remove the CSS protection. That's not a
problem for myth, but when I later decided to start transcoding all of
my DVD collection to store on the hard drive, I discovered that the
windows version of handbrake chokes on them since it doesn't know how
to remove CSS (only linux and mac versions do). I tried a whole bunch
of ways, none of which were very reliable. They would break every now
and then, which got frustrating. I just wanted a simple, fast way that
worked every time and didn't require trial and error or much thought.

I ended up buying AnyDVD HD for windows, and it's worked perfectly.
I've gone through my 300 DVD library and it never failed even once. I
also rent quite a few DVDs from netflix (rip, watch, delete) and have
no problems there either (other than physical disc damage). I also use
it to rip blurays, and that too works great. One thing that's cool
about AnyDVD is that it tells you what sort of protection mechansims
it found on the disc. I know most people probably aren't interested in
this since it isn't free (I hesitated before buying) or because it's
windows only, but now 1 year later I'm quite satisfied that I did.


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