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[Oenococcus]

Hi all, thanks for reading and helping.

My JRMC17 (newest version) can't play any Disney DVDs with copy protection.  Other DVD's are fine.  Interestingly, Windows Media Center plays the Disney DVD's just fine.  I find it hard to believe that MC17 which is a fairly robust platform is deficient compare to a MS product.

I have no interest in buying expensive software that evades copy protection, I expected the $50 I paid for this program to be able to negotiate the licencing issues BETTER than free MS programs.

Can someone please help figure this out?

What happens is the program gets stuck trying to analyze the optical disc, only way to break the loop is eject disc manually on drive and restart JRiver.

Thanks,
Richard

[Oenococcus]

Edited original post and am replying to bump and get SOMEONE to reply.

Many thanks,
Richard

[glynor]

Unfortunately, Disney is somewhat notorious for doing all sorts of nefarious things with their DVD Authoring to break playback on PC players.  Here's a long-standing thread on the VideoLAN forums about just this thing:  http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=85150

They intentionally make it so that Windows Media Player (which they "trust") is able to play them properly, but other 3rd Party players (small guys, who don't cough up tons of loot or work out "business deals" with them) are shut out.

You could try MC18, as MC17 is no longer being developed.  But, if it doesn't work there, the best solutions for MC17 are:

1. Try a different DVD-Rom drive.  Different players actually react differently (and give MC and its decoders itself different results) to the mucked up tables of contents and other crap they infect the discs with to intentionally break playback.  Newer drives often handle the errors better.

2. Return them.  It is bogus that they are selling intentionally broken, non-standards-compliant discs.  It is a joke, doesn't stop piracy, and irritates consumers.  They claim it is "DRM" to stop piracy, but it is really about something else entirely.  They won't stop, though, unless people stop buying them.

3. Get an on-the-fly decryption system like AnyDVD.

4. Rip them to your hard drive.

I think you'll find that most of the power users here just use AnyDVD (or something like it) anyway, which is why (other than that development on MC17 is closed) you're not getting much feedback on this.  That's the best and easiest way to support BluRay playback on PCs, and it solves the problems with DVDs too.  As the companies add additional idiocy to their latest pressings of discs, the SlySoft folks figure it out and work around it.

For MC18, which is still actively being developed, I'd post a bug report, and others can try to replicate it (or maybe they can look at the logs or something).

[Neco]

DVD Decrypter is a free program you should give a try with your DVDs.

There are still many new DVD's it has no issue decrypting, so you might get lucky.

If it can break the protection you will have all kinds of options for how you want to handle the data, (copy the disc, dump the ISO and mount and play that,  dump just the movie and play that, etc)

[Oenococcus]

Thanks for the help and the info, makes a lot of sense (well, except the reasoning for why a manufacturer would behave like that).

Glynor, same problem on two different Win7 machines, different mobo's, different manufacturers for the DVD's (brand different too).  It must be the piracy protection is throwing MC17 for a loop.

Another thought is that maybe they are intentionally pushing people to using Netflix and other cloud services.  Either way it sure is annoying and I"ll return the DVD's and cultivate my daughter's interests in other directions.

I'll look at the DVD decrypter as well.

Cheers,
Richard