[ILUG] Re: [ILUG-Social] Hackin' DVD Regions

[Ronny B .]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 06:31:48AM +0000, Paul Jakma wrote:
> > What's the story with deregionalizing a DVD player? Is it a standard
> > operation or does it vary from model to model? I'm looking at one which is
> > Region2...
To that, I quote the CD-ROM driver maintainer: "Buy Pioneer, or I'll personally
hunt you down and beat you up with a baseball bat!", or something much like it.
He was probably in a grumpy mood that day.

I have an AOpen 16x DVD-ROM, which really is a Pioneer 105. Hackable. If it at all
had any protection in the first place. I do have a serious problem with it, though;
DVDs and music CDs stop playing after only a few minutes. I can play DVDs fine in
Linux, from what I remember, as it reads a bit, pauses, then reads some more, but
it just can't handle sustained reading. I've ruled out faulty powersupplies and even
had it replaced once. I am about to find out if it's a faulty batch here in Dublin...

> speaking of which.. what's the status of DVD on linux? i need to buy
> a CDROM, so i was thinking i might as well buy a DVD - will i be able
> to watch DVD's? (and which DVD's will play any region, or is it a
> software thing?)
Software player(s) are on the way; there's one (on linuxvideo.org, I think) which
is supposed to handle decoding of 200 frames per second on a PIII-600, leaving the
extra processing power to actual display+motion-compensation etc.

There's also LinDVD (WinDVD for Linux) from Intervideo out soon. Several hacks exist
to make the reference mp2dec thingies work along with ac3dec.

Finally, there's one Linux native MPEG2 cards w/CSS authorisation, and one Creative
card that is mostly well-supported in Linux. I have the latter, Dxr2 original.
If you see a Dxr2 with 2xDVD included, it's most likely that. Check out
opensource.creative.com.

> i have a matrox G200 graphics card, athlon 600 CPU, XF4.01. Is DVD
> playing possible? and if so, is there hardware accell for G200? (or
> does it need that little 'rainbow something' daughter board?)
Yes, yes, no/yes (I think; I don't follow Matrox too closely, although experts tell
me I'd better ;). Again, linuxvideo.org have alpha-stage players and beta-stage
drivers. Worth a try.

-- 
O- Nny