Well,I just returned from a trip to China and saw a marvelous performance of the Sichuan Opera in Chengdu. Then I bought a DVD of the performance to show the folks at home. It will not play.
I know you are thinking that this is a region code problem, but it appears not to be the case.
I have run software to defeat codes, and it does no good. In fact, the DVD drives on my computers (I have tried it on two) just grind away without returning any results. I did manage to determine at one point that there are between two and three gigabytes of data on the disk. This is consistant with the appearance of the disk, which shows it was made on a burner, not pressed like commercially produced DVDs.
Hey, this is China, the land of the $20 Rolex watches!
Ok then. Is there a way that the raw code can be extracted and reassembled into a video.
All ideas are appreciated. I really want this video.
You’re not likely to get anything off it if you can’t mount it.
If you can mount it as a data disk (rather than a video one), and copy the files off it, there are programs that can load them, even converting PAL to NTSC and the like. But it sounds like you’re stuck even earlier.
On a burned disk, it’s unlikely there’s CSS protection (which is illegal to break in the US, even on a disk you own), so you’re probably looking at plain old corrupted data.
So have you used a DVD player instead of the computer drive. Old drives can have trouble reading new DVD’s. Different colors of dye can affect readability also, and some players won’t read them because of that.
Indeed. Probably an interrupted burn or really crappy media (the worst DVD media I ever bought was still readable, even though its error test results were terrible).
You can’t burn CSS keys to a DVD-R disc, which is why CSS is effective in the first place, such as it is. The most likely CSS related problem would be if you had an encrypted original disc and you tried to make a bit-for-bit copy, leaving you with an encrypted copy and no keys to decrypt it. But even then, you’d still be able to mount the disc and see the list of VOB files, etc.
Try something like DVDInfo to see if you can read anything at all off the disc, or tell whether the burn has been finalized correctly. I think your best chance for making a working copy is to find a computer with a really tolerant drive (burners are typically better than DVD-ROM drives). If it’s a burned disc, you won’t have to worry about decrypting it, so skip the DeCSS apps and use one that can continue past read errors.