Hello!

I'm attempting to read a DRM DVD ("National Geographic", which I bought and paid for so no
copyright issue here).

I've just installed fedora 23 and added libdvdcss-1.4.0-1.fc23.remi.x86_64
but I'm still getting "I/O error" when I'm attempting to "cp"
one of the *.vob files.
Similary, k3b can't rip the contents, I guess for the same reason.

I thought that adding "libdvdcss" should be enough for reading DRM DVD
but apparently it isn't.

When I took the disk to a friend with a Windows laptop it played OK.

So, what am I missing?

TIA for ideas,
kaza.

For some of my DVDs (all purchased at retail) that I can't rip with HandBrake or OGMRip, I use MakeMKV. It's proprietary, but you can run it for 30 days before being prompted to buy. It rips the DVDs to MKV (Matroska) format instead of others, but you can convert from there if MKV won't work for your preferred media players.

So far, MakeMKV has only failed for me when the DVD was pretty badly scratched.

Good luck!

Are you sure you have the correct region encoding set on your DVD player? Support for region-coding is built into the hardware of many (most?) DVD players, but you can change it via software - a limited number of times, to prevent people from just setting it for each DVD. (Yes, this is fucking stupid and yes this forces some people to buy multiple DVD players so they can watch DVD from multiple regions. DRM sucks.)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Re...D_Region_Codes

1 members found this post helpful.

Does VLC show the video and audio in linux?

Can you rip other movies on this new install?

I also have some instructional materials from NatGeo, for a textbook they have licensed. I tried to copy and paste the video materials and it doesn't work. Checking with them (I am shameless, they were shocked, shocked I say, that someone would want to be able to carry the video on a pendrive rather than on their DVD. Even pointing out that it made it possible to watch their video on a laptop without a DVD drive (really, a computer without a DVD drive? Who would have thunk it?)
Anyway, they bake the DRM into the DVD so that it can only be played directly from the platter. No platter=no playback.

On a similar note, when I mentioned this to my admins who make these buying decisions, I got stares of incomprehension. How could you expect to be able to play a DVD without the DVD. That is just crazy talk!

Thanks for everyone for replies!

The solution came in the form of "dvdbackup": it created a copy
of the video directory with all the *.VOB files on my disk and from there -
we know how to play a video file.

And as for the region: yes, I already had to change the DVD region to "01",
before that I couldn't even see the directory listings.

Thanks again,
kaza.