libdvdcss without regionset?

[chiefengineer]

I have never set the region on any of my dvd drives, and now am attempting to play a dvd on VLC which fails a third of the way through a 3.5 hr movie. The sr0 drive says "7.6Gb udf". I threw an mplayer command line at it and one of the VOBs a third of the way through says libdvdread chokes on a CSS key. It is a new factory clean commercial DVD, and I have played many others in this drive. It does something similar in a high-end USB DVD writer I have around (which also has no region set--I am a little fussy about doing things that have limited reversibility of change).

So in doing my homework many note that without setting region libdvdcss throws errors (just previously never for me?). Others claim libdvdcss is region agnostic. One thread I read said I need libdvdcss2 but it seems to me libdvd-pkg has "libdvdcss.so.2" . I have a fatdog laptop driving HDMI to a digital surround and big screen for DVDs and would hate to have to get a standalone player for this one disk. Should I compile a newer version of libdvd-pkg?

[jamesbond]

The current one in Fatdog is version 1.4.2.
The latest one is version 1.4.3, and changes between the two are:

Code: Select all

commit 23d8e2097648708708ef6e413fc892405461549a
Author: Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb@videolan.org>
Date:   Tue Apr 20 17:21:52 2021 +0200

    Update NEWS for 1.4.3

commit 17ec02569acb40c13b8b3329faf027ec62676af0
Author: Petri Hintukainen <phintuka@gmail.com>
Date:   Mon Apr 19 17:45:34 2021 +0300

    Fix opening non-ASCII paths in Windows

commit a0a738eb315e7907a457da3035adb645078c8e6d
Author: Konstantin Pavlov <thresh@videolan.org>
Date:   Sun Mar 28 00:34:38 2021 +0300

    CI: Build developer documentation
    
    while at it, bump debian image

commit e4b84dedccda51e94e774d2d70498b9c86b5593f
Author: Konstantin Pavlov <thresh@videolan.org>
Date:   Fri Jan 8 21:59:04 2021 +0300

    CI: Updated to use modern builders

commit eb1f6ed7a012b390e23549778bcc7b54c55869d4
Author: Chad Dougherty <crd@acm.org>
Date:   Wed Apr 29 17:44:11 2020 +0200

    update instructions with modern host targets

commit 8398d94d70b4693086649d066dcb7aefe35ce1fa
Author: Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb@videolan.org>
Date:   Sun Oct 13 20:39:07 2019 +0200

    Update NEWS for 1.4.3

commit f93ae872f22bc404aa998ef127242d2e10de1b3c
Author: astian <astian@elude.in>
Date:   Sat Mar 24 23:17:00 2018 +0000

    Squelch potential buffer overflow warning
    
    GCC 7.3 points out that a buffer of size PATH_MAX is being written to
    with data that can theoretically overflow (a string of maximum size
    PATH_MAX plus other constant-size strings).  Fix this by replacing
    sprintf with snprintf.
    
    Signed-off-by: astian <astian@elude.in>
    Signed-off-by: Jean-Baptiste Kempf <jb@videolan.org>

commit d7f5aaaeee962a991df89ec92c325b1f26559f1e
Author: Konstantin Pavlov <thresh@videolan.org>
Date:   Fri Nov 30 18:17:14 2018 +0300

    CI: added debian, macos, win32 and win64 build jobs.

If you ignore those that starts with "CI" (these aren't real end-user changes), you will see that there is no changes at all; so I don't think updating will help.

From personal anecdotal experience, some DVD refuses (or have problems) reading data if you never set the region. I had one of those drives. They would seem to work - until they didn't. The solution that "fixed it" for me was to set the region __at least once__. It doesn't matter which region you set it to, but you need to set it at least once. Then libdvdcss will work (for all regions).

But don't trust me on this. As I said this is just personal anecdotal experience. Your case may be cmpletely different. Please do your own research before doing it, because as you said - there is a limit on how many times you can set the region.

[chiefengineer]

Thanks for the direction: 1.4.3 is out so I found an ancient half-dead Acer laptop
that drives the stereo around my pool to set region on...same problem in same place.
Sought out actual standalone DVD player in the neighborhood and found disc sputters
and chokes at about the same place (pretty much unwatchable but it doesn't
kick me back to a menu).

Disk is new/spotless; it goes back. Sorry to be an alarmist. I still appreciate
the smart advice...no longer chasing my tail.

[chiefengineer]

Updated: got another new disk as a replacement and issue resolved.
Moral: even when there is no scratch one shouldn't assume there isn't.