In addition to my previous post:

It is important to slow the writing process down when burning the DVD to avoid errors. For some reason SuSe caused my DVD Backups to have many, many errors. I have now resorted to burn my DVDs at 2.4x. Also make sure that you are not creating Multi-Session DVDs as most DVD players do not read multi-session.

Quality media is also of great importance. I have had success with TDK and Verbatim. Memorex is crap (burn at the slowest speed and write verify when burn is completed). Also consider using DVD -R if you are having compatibility problems with your DVD player.

Another note: Studies have shown that DVD +/- R media will last as long as pressed media (aka. Store bought DVDs) as long as you treat them gently and avoid scratching them. Only the DVD -R is certified by the DVD consortium as evidenced by the DVD logo. DVD +R was initially created by Sony and others to avoid paying a royalty. If you are considering archiving your DVDs for a great number of year consider the history of Beta-Max tape.

Beware of a newer version of Sony's ArCcos protection. It not only writes fake sectors in the ISOs of DVDs, but also does something to the movie itself that makes it uncompressible. I have only been able to rip these under windows using DVD Fab Decryptor and cleaning up the cells in the movies with PGcEdit. I have not tried either program under Wine, but hear that they are rated Garbage at WineHQ. Examples of such movies are: The Fog, The Cave and Lord of War.


Hope you find this post useful.

usaf_sp, your posts have made this an interesting thread. Thanks for contributing and sharing your knowledge.

Update:

Since wine has come out with many newer versions, I thought I would let you all know which version is best in regard to DVDDecryptor running on a SuSE machine.

I tried wine 0.9.7, but it was getting the typical wine error of not being able to find any drives, so I downgraded to 0.9.6. Everything works fine now.

To get DVD Decryptor running you need to go into the Wine Configuration utility in the terminal and type: winecfg. Add DVD Decryptor to the programs and set its emulation mode to NT 4.0

DVD Shrink appears to work fine as it is.

DVD Fab Decryptor:
This program is supposed to remove the new Sony ArcCos protection from a movie and allow it to be processed by DVDShrink. It can not however back up PS2 games like DVD Decryptor. You might keep both on your machine for these purposes.

To get DVD Fab working you need to:
1. Copy windows mfc42.dll from any source into the fake windows directory: c:\windows\system
2. Set the windows emulation under winecfg to windowsXP.

If I find anything new I will update.

usaf_sp,

Thanks for such a great post! I got DVD FabDecrypter working, but it required a much longer list of DLL's to be placed in wine's win-sys directory. They are listed here:

http://appdb.winehq.org/commentview....threadId=10644

That being said, I have a movie here, "Capote" which is not compressible.. DVDShrink wont do it.

I was wondering if you had any info to share on PGcEdit. I have it installed and running, but its rather intimidating.

Was there one particular thing you need to do to clean up arccos's uncompressible data? In reading the commands, I can see that the main title does a JUMP TO and points to a dummy VMGM. Am I even in the right neighbourhood? Any help you can offer would be awesome!

Thanks
Jiggs

If you are using PGC Edit, make sure that you get the PSL2 plugin. That will start a wizard (have not tried it in wine) that will rip the dvd and mark the bad sectors of the original (ArcCos and ArCos 2). ArcCos 1 just makes dummy sectors in a single file that DVD Decryptor can remove, but ArcCos 2 does it with many diferent files confusing DVD Decryptor. Just rip the ArcCos 2 movie with PGC Edit PSL2 plugin. Without having run this under wine, I would guess that you should run it under M$.

With uncompressible movies, you need to remove the junk code in the movie files themselves. PGCedit has an automated tool to do this. Just look for "remove junk" in the menu.

I recently added VMWare to my machine because I was getting tired of Wine's updates breaking my installs. VMware with Windows 2000 appears to run great, but it does not come with DVD Decoders. This makes it impossible for Windows 2000 to read encrypted DVD. To get the DVD decoder, you need to install a comercial DVD player like WinDVD. Nero Showtime does not work.

I also found a little program that will work with DVD Decryptor and DVD Shrink that will automatically remove all the ArcOos protections as well as Rip Guard. To find it Google: RipIt4Me

You will need to install DVD Decryptor and DVD Shrink in order for this to work. These are windows programs and they work well with VMWare.

Good Luck.

P.S. Hurry up before MacroVision shuts this guy down like they did LightningUK!

Has anyone had luck getting DVDFab 3.0.2.0 working in Wine 0.9.26?

I get nothing but mangled video when I run it through dvdshrink.

By mangled all i can say is green. Its mostly just a green "preview" screen, with the occasional digitization of squares, its quite lovely.

Any help would be appreciated!!

Jiggs

If all you want to do is play a dvd under windows, you can just install vlc on the system. It won't enable anything else to access dvd's but it will allow you to watch them. Also, you might try power dvd. It'll enable windows media playback of dvd's, so that might have what you want too. Their software ships free with lite-on dvd drives and a number of other manufacturers as well. So if you know enough people, you will probably find someone who has a copy.

I currently have several installs of (legally registered) windows (3.11,95,98,2k,XP) running under qemu in my linux box. Have you tried qemu, and if so, how does it compare to vmware?

This post is not about reading DVDs but backing them up. Kaffeine and Mplayer works very well along with libdvdcss to play movies.