Based on your post I bought a BluRay drive, admitidly not 6-7 yrs old, and I installed makeMKV - it works, but still misses the odd title, when I use dvdbackup on the missing title, or HandBrakeCLI it fails on that title as well.


So it's still a bit hit and miss - new drive and new dvd still fails.


I then tried the disk on my dvd player - it plays just fine. So how does my dvd player - not connected to the internet - cope with the most up to date encryped commercial dvds?

DVDs are AFAIK all one encryption and use libdvdcss to unlock them on linux

The player has software designed for all the different encryption methods of DVDs (I think only the one) and is also designed to read again & again & again until it succeeds.

BluRay disks, OTOH started with a different encryption method and after some time they changed it yet again to make BluRay+ disks, especially (I think) all the HD BluRay disks are BluRay+

I cannot answer why the computer with makeMKV is unable to handle some of the DVDs while the player succeeds, but it likely lies in the software in the player that is designed to read repeatedly in different ways until it gets the data from the disk combined with the condition of the DVD itself.

Please look at the disks that will not read on the PC and make 100% certain they are completely clean, unscratched, clear (not milky surface), with no fingerprints or other marks that can prevent reading. With your new equipment the most obvious cause of failure is dirt, scratches, etc on the disk.

In times past tools were available to clean and polish CDs & DVDs, but I have not seen them recently.

Dedicated players for TV's have all sorts of features that allow it to play disc's.

DVD player engineers must have been really clever to cater for encryption methods not even developed some 20 years on from their original design - and if they try brute force methods it's really quick because any dvd I throw at my dedicated dvd player runs instantly.

This leads me to think they ignore all encryption somehow - if only we could develop a method to do that with linux.

Thanks folks for all your tips, seems I should clean my disks carefully with a micro fibre cloth, and I believe you should wipe outwards from the centre, don't rotate the disk while holding a cloth on it. Check there is no foreign matter of fingerprints on the disk.

I'll close this thread in a few days so anyone can comment till then.

Those products can get by encryption and other disc security issues but it can't ignore any of them.

That's my point, how do they do it, even the oldest dvd player plays new dvds, but libdvdcss2 fails?

It isn't the encryption that is the problem since DVDs all use the same encryption method. If you can read & play one DVD then you can read & play all that are in good condition.

DVD players have a robust reading method and fault tolerance that is able to, with repeated reads, piece together the video, and possibly even skip a tiny amount of the data, for those disks that are damaged. Your PC, OTOH, does not have the same read resiliency that handles damaged disks so it can fail where the player continues to play the video.

I don't think your problem is encryption nor drive condition, I think it is disk condition instead and the software is not nearly as fault tolerant as what is used in a player.

I agree with everything you say, but would point out this:

1 New disks, never played, totally free from dust, fingerprints etc, still fail.

2 DVD players have a robust reading method - why can't drives on PC's have the same, some dvd/bluray players are dirt cheap and still play just fine.

3 Software not fault tolerant, surely we can write fault tolerant software.

Conclusion - it's not the cost of the drive, it's not the quality of the disk, so it can only be the software. We need to develop a better ripper/player for pc's - preferably linux

I have never (yet) encountered a DVD that can't be ripped using makeMKV. Although it is quite possible that they have recently changed the encryption on them I don't know of it and if your player is several years old and can still play the newer ones then that seems unlikely. I know that encryption changed between BluRay and BluRay+ and I had to update the firmware on my player in order to play BluRay+ disks but it does not seem likely they did the same with DVDs.

The quality of optical drives has continuously improved over time, since DVDs have tighter tolerances than CDs, and BluRay has tighter tolerances than DVD.

Maybe you can contact the maintainers of some of the disk ripping software such as handbrake and suggest a more robust error recovery mechanism.

The problem is not cracking encryption. The disc can have a few construction features that attempt to defeat what you are trying to do. I can't find a good web page on it but keep searching. Some place tells all the sneaky tricks they toss in.

I found this on wikipedia about HD DVD encryption and that may be what the OP is encountering. He has not said what the DVDs with problems are so this is possible. He did say that at least one of the disks he cannot rip is brand new and unused.

1 members found this post helpful.

The player itself can also be dusty/dirty/otherwise blemished. Quite common actually. Clean the lens.

This.

Playing back in real time might be a different matter.
But I usually just rip them anyhow because I don't like the noise my player makes.

Post #8 I said it was a Sony Production disk, specifically Bewitched boxset - I've read on this forum they do use AACS encryption.

It's brand new portable USB 3.0 Blu Ray drive - never benn used, with brand new disks never been played, but I take your point.

I'm getting better results now, almost trouble free ripping using makeMKV - the only difference is that I've stopped doing anything else on the machine while it's ripping, I was browsing and using youtube-dl to download videos at the same tome. I think that wasn't helping.

But it is a twin xeon machine, umptenn processors with 12Gb ram - plenty of grunt as it were.

Also I'm using an external Bluray drive instead of the internal cheap DVD drive on my machine.

The occasional title fails to be written, but I just retry writing that particaular title with a few different output options and that works.

makeMKV allows you to select what you write to disk for each title, so I only pick English audio and deselct everything else, i.e. foreign languages and subtitles.