Alexander Gromnitsky's Blog

Playing an encrypted DVD in Fedora

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There is (please don't laugh) a sewing machine for which a video instruction exists only on DVD. There are little chunks of it available on brother.com, but the entire movie is absent from the internets.

What do you do when you suddenly find yourself in dire need of playing a DVD? It's probably still possible to buy an external Blu-ray drive, but I decided to reuse an ancient laptop from 2014 that has a DVD-RW drive.

I started VLC, clicked Media → Open Disc, and the player showed a DVD menu with the model selection. Clicking on any menu label drew a black VLC window with its logo, as if the player couldn't read the corresponding file.

I naïvely tried to copy .VOBs from the dvd to the hdd, but every .VOB file (except for the one that had the initial menu screen) resulted in a 0-length file.

Did the disc itself go bad? Google told me there is a program called dvdbackup, that can rip the whole disc. Fine, I tried to run it like:

$ dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -M

but it said "libdvdread: Encrypted DVD support unavailable."

The disc that contains instructions on how to use the sewing machine is copy-protected? Why? But, of course, why not.

Another question is why libdvdread (which VLC also uses) has no support for "encrypted" DVDs. The choices Red Hat makes.

Here's how temporarily force VLC to play such discs or help dvdbackup to rip them:

  1. make an rpm for libdvdcss (download a working .spec here);

  2. clone libdvdread repo & compile it

    $ autoreconf -i
    $ ./configure --prefix=`pwd`/1 --with-libdvdcss
    $ make install
    $ find 1 -name libdvdread.so | xargs ldd | grep libdvdcss
         libdvdcss.so.2 => /lib64/libdvdcss.so.2 (0x00007f8c11ada000)
    

Then run VLC as

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=path/to/dir/with/libdvdread.so vlc

Tags: ойті
Authors: ag