DVD5 User Prohibited Functions
Posted by: Ancipital on 15 February 2005
Hi
I know Naim can't answer this one but has anyone managed to find a way round this little "problem". For those who don't know, user prohibited functions are those parts of a DVD that the publisher doesn't want you to skip. For instance, The Simpsons Season 4 (the latest one out) has a copyright message at the start of every damn episode rather than just at the beginning of the disc that you have to wait for to go away.
I'm surprised nobody has put advertising on discs that can't be skipped yet.
What I don't to do is get so irked to rip off every single disc I have taking off the region coding and macrovision. Would cost me a fair bit in blank discs as well.
Bizarrely, some discs I can skip bits on my old Pioneer and not the DVD5 and vice versa.
Steve.
Posted on: 15 February 2005 by Tam
quote:
Originally posted by Ancipital:
I'm surprised nobody has put advertising on discs that can't be skipped yet.
They pretty nearly have - I have a couple of fox discs that start straight in with trailers that I can't seem to skip. The whole thing really annoys me because, of course, back with vhs we could skip over whatever we wanted to.
Something else that is nearly as annoying is overly-elaborate menus - animations/clips and the like that are fun the first time but soon become extremely irritating.
However, in short, I don't know the answer to your question.
Posted on: 15 February 2005 by Martin D
This makes me mad too!
I've taken to copying some disks I like with dvdshrink so I can remove the shite from the original, I can also keep the quality at 100% and still cant tell the diff
Posted on: 15 February 2005 by Martin D
Spoke to soon, just sent
this by a mate
Posted on: 15 February 2005 by Ancipital
Martin
Read about this earlier, hopefully just like the other stuff like RCE discs, there will be a way round that as well.
Tam, I know what you mean about the menus as well, gets annoying trying to get past them.
Guess we'll have to wait and see what happens.
Steve.
Posted on: 16 February 2005 by Adrian F.
At the time I bought my first DVD Player, I wanted one, that was as few "crippled" as possible. I found out, that they could take out region codes fairly easy, but macro...protection and UOP's being problematic. The Sony's where the only ones they could take out UOP's then. So I chose the DVP-NS 900 QS, also because he had no switched mode powersupply. Now they can also do it at others like mostly Pioneer. Have a look here, if and what they can "hack" at yours:
http://www.dvdupgrades.info/No info about naim though, I think it is not profitable to develop it for the relative low pieces of high-end makers.
Posted on: 01 March 2005 by gusi
DVDs contain quite a bit of meta data, such as the country code, how the menus and video streams hang together, whether to play a clip once or always etc.
The player chooses to use or ignore these. Home appliances would normally use these, probably part of the license agreement to supply DVD eqt.
Some items like country code can be easily set in the software, probably to keep manufacturing costs down. I haven't heard of any players that can skip/ignore other metadata but then I haven't looked for any.
In the computer domain it is another story. PC DVD players can play in DVD or media file mode. In media file mode it just plays the files as is and ignores all the metadata. This can be handy if you want to skip ads but depending on the file layout you may not get all the scenes in sequences, or worse get the wrong language or mixed up camera angles.
If you are really keen there are open source players like mplayer that can be tweaked to your hearts content. However you are then playing video of the computer and not the DVD5.
I think the MacroVision product is doomed to failure. If it doesn't protect against all video rippers then the others will undoubtfully be "upgraded" to handle the latest protection scheme. I think that data will be impossible to protect if it allowed on PCs.
cheers
Gus
