Sunday, February 21, 2010

Why DVD43 does not recognize an Internal DVD/CR drive in a VM

The reason that DVD43 does not recognize the fact that a DVD is copy protected in an internal DVD drive when you attach it to a Virtual Machine is because DVD43 uses a Packet Reading technique to read the CSS keys from the DVD.

To get DVD43 to recognize and defeat the encryption is to use an external (USB) DVD drive or not to use XP-Mode and install Virtualbox as described on other posts on this blog.


In addition, an internal DVD/RW drive connected to a VM will be Read-Only - so that the ability to use that drive to write a decrypted DVD back to that drive (compressed or otherwise) will not work.

The packet read/writing of the UDF [Universal Disk Format (Optical Storage Technology Association) - look it up] precludes these operations for an internally shared optical drive.

Links:

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Alternative to Cyberlink PowerDVD

The alternative to Cyberlink PowerDVD is to use VideoLan's VLC Player. In fact VLC is a good replacement for ALL DVD players that are either supplied with your computer (pre-installed) or that come with a drive. VLC, being opensource and having users and developers that are connected to the media community, has access to ALL KNOWN codecs. If VLC cannot play a file format I would suspect the file for possible malware.



I finally got fed up with the constant reminders to upgrade to the full version of PowerDVD that the version that came with with my BD drive displays every time I try and play a DVD.

Sure, the company has to make money, but, constantly bickering and making me dismiss the registration dialog is NOT THE WAY TO DO IT!

Even if you agree to register it tries to make you purchase the full product - THIS IS NOT REGISTRATION! (of the trial, limited functionality version that I was perfectly happy with!).

Please download and use VLC Player from VideoLan - it is free and open source.

I uninstalled PowerDVD from all my computers.


Thursday, February 4, 2010