Categories
Blog News

Mr. and Mrs. Smith copy protection

Fox 20th Century are doing copy protection wrong, in my opinion. They’ve implemented a copy protection scheme on at least some dvd’s that does not allow you to watch dvd’s protected by it on your mac.

Today I hired the dvd ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ from our local video store, together with ‘Madagascar’ for Tom.

While Tom was watching his movie on the home cinema thingie, I tried watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith on my mac mini.

No Go. The mac-included DVD player software refused to see that there was a disc inserted, and if I quit DVD player the disc got ejected. At first I thought that this was a problem with the media, but that seemed ok.

On the back of the dvd box however, is a copy-protection symbol with the message : This DVD is protected from copying. This makes it impossible to make usable copies from it (translated from flemish).

All fine and well, but I wanted to watch the movie, not copy it ! Damn stupid way to go about it, if you ask me.

Videolan Client (VLC ) however, to the rescue. This open-source, cross-platform media player can read and play the disc without any problems, so that is what I used to watch my movie.

Oh, and after some googling, it appears that the new copy protection does not pose a problem for movie copiers : they either use Handbrake for Mac or AnyDVD for Wintel to copy the dvd.

So the end of the story is that once more, the guy who wants to watch the movie with the default software can’t, while the movie copier just uses another tool.

(Visited 29 times, 1 visits today)