The Hollywood movie industry needs to wisen up. While I am for the protecting the rights of creators from unfair use, this is taking it a bit far. Protect DVD-Video is a DVD copy protection technology like Macrovision that prevents a DVD from being played on a Windows PC. The technology is used to create a non-standard Universal Disc Format (UDF) file system on the DVD such that the IFO file, used to store chapter, subtitles and track information, will appear to the PC as zero-length file.
ZDNET says,
The upshot of this is that if you have a DVD disc protected by Protect DVD-Video and you try to play the disc in a PC-based system using, say, Windows Media Player, the process will fail. Now, lets be clear here, we are taking about a genuine, legitimate DVD disc not working in a PC, not a pirated disc or a download via a torrent. Protect DVD-Video protects a DVD by basically making it un-playable in a DVD drive that's in a Windows-based PC (I've no information on whether this also locks out Linux users - I would imagine that it does).
So, if you recently bought yourself an expensive Media Center PC rig or are using your PC to watch DVDs (on, say, a flight), you are fresh out of luck. Even though the protection mechanism has been circumvented by Slysoft in their AnyDVD software, this is reflection of the hunger for profit by the suits in the movie business. As usual, a technology like this ends up hurting the paying consumer more than anyone else. I call all movie-goers to unite and boycott DVD purchases till these people get their heads out of the sand.
[via ZDNET]
Tags: dvd, protectdisc, macrovision
