Why can't I play a Sony dvd movie?

[Eddie Wilson]

Well what has happened now? Every Sony DVD movie I try to play on my pc will not work. Other ones will. Very strange. Is it something that Sony is doing? Does anybody know anything about this problem? These are the newest retail DVD's. And as I stated I have no problems with other brands of retail DVD's. I would like to hear everybody else's take on this.

Thanks,
Eddie

[2hot6ft2]

I know that my dvd drive has issues with HD DVD's but not with standard ones.

[mc4man]

Some Sony dvd releases have ARccOS structure protection but that has no effect on playback with software players, licensed or open source.

Even then they only use it on a few 'major' releases each year, more so in Region's 2 & 4, but very few overall.

Actually I've only seen 2 titles that wouldn't play on opensource players, both by Universal, so I'd think your problem would be elsewhere.

Have to ask - this aren't Blu-Ray titles are they?

[Eddie Wilson]

Nope, just standard DVD. Like I said its very strange. I've never really had this problem before. What it does say is video stream lost when I try to play the DVD. I don't have any problems with Universal. It could be something with my system but I've never had this problem before. Very strange indeed.

[mc4man]

If your inclined to, post a title and I'll ck. it out.

[Eddie Wilson]

Sure. I purchased the movie Hancock. It will play just fine in my home DVD player but not on my computer. Like I said it could be something with my system. I'm just not really sure.

Thanks,
Eddie

[mc4man]

Gave it a try with vlc 0.8.6, vlc 0.9.8a, and totem-xine, it played back fine.

It does have ARccOS but that shouldn't cause playback issues. (one element of ARccOS is the movie starts twice, the first time is bogus and has encoding errors, but a player should never go there.

Odd for sure...?

[Eddie Wilson]

Thanks I'll give Vlc a try. I've used it before and it does work well. I'll also try Totem-xine and see what that does.

Eddie

[jlp_engineer]

I have a similar problem. I have a Mythbuntu v8.10 installation and I have tried to play the following titles:

The Dark Knight - Warner Brothers
Hancock - Columbia/Sony
Resident Evil, Apocalypse - Columbia/TriStar/Sony
UltraViolet - Screen Gems/Sony

When I play any of these titles (and only these so far...), Myth will lock up or strange things happen with the system. Once in a while I can get the DVD to play, but not all the time. When I use the import function for these DVD's, my memory usage goes to almost 100%, and over half of my swap file gets used up and then it is several minutes to several hours of constant disk access. The constant disk access can only be ended by rebooting or killing a process.

I am using the default player for the DVD function. Should I switch to something else? Are other players more compatible with these DVD's and also MythTV friendly?

TIA for any advice.