[mythtv-users] Court rules commercial-skipping in recordings covered under Fair Use

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2013 18:48:34 -0400, you wrote:

>Tom Dexter wrote:
>> DVDs??...that you MUST watch all copyrighted content only in it's 
>> entirety, in order?
>
>Don't they do this with DVDs now?  I played 'One' DVD on a player, many 
>years ago, and it refused to allow me to skip forward past the coming 
>attractions. To date, I haven't bought a DVD or BD player.  I rip 'em to 
>MythVideo instead and skip when I please.
>
>Doug

You can do that to DVDs in various ways.  The first is PUOs =
Prohibited User Operations, where the DVD is programmed not to allow
the skip buttons or menu buttons to work.  That is easy to fix -
either use a DVD player that ignores PUOs or rip the DVD and run a
program such as PGCEdit on it to remove the PUOs and add navigation
options.  That is easy as PGCEdit has a menu option to remove PUOs
automatically.

The worse way that turns up on some DVDs is to make the "first play"
menu ie VIDEO_TS.VOB into a real bit of video, rather than a null file
or just a few seconds of menu.   If you look at the contents of a DVD
and VIDEO_TS.VOB is of any substantial size, then it probably has this
problem.  MythTV and an awful lot of DVD players and player software
do not do skipping inside a menu (as far as I can tell, the DVD
standard does not allow it).  So the fix for that is to rip the DVD
and restructure it - either replace the VIDEO_TS.VOB with a null VOB
file, or move it to a normal DVD "title" and change the DVD menu
structure to play it first only as a normal VOB file which can be
skipped.  That takes a program like DVD Remake Pro - I would love to
have a Linux equivalent of that but have yet to find one.  And it
takes a fair bit of knowledge and skill to get it to work.

Fortunately, mplayer seems able to skip in menus, so if you have DVDs
with real video in VIDEO_TS.VOB, you can install mplayer and set it up
as your alternate video software in MythTV and use the commands "I ->
Play -> Play in alternate player" to use it to play a DVD that does
this.  But if I am going to be playing a DVD with this problem
multiple times, I usually go the restructuring route, as I prefer to
play DVDs with mythfrontend as it works better for me - for example,
it remembers bookmarks and goes back to where I was playing the DVD
last when I play it the next time.