Copy Protected DVD playback in Vista

devman said:
I didn't realize CSS was Vista's thing, o wait. If you can't play dvds in Vista from a clean install something is wrong (bad install, faulty DVD drive), its not DRM being forced down your throat.
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Not supporting RPC1 drives would be DRM being forced down people's throats (ie/ those who own RPC1 drives).
 
Oh FFS!

Why would you go hacking your drive's firmware for playback anyway? I've never had to do that for playback of DVDs with different region codes.

Matter of fact I just the other day put a new DVD burner in my rig because the old'n died. Vista saw it as a Region 2 drive when I put it in. Played all my (Region 4) DVDs without issue. I changed the (Vista) setting to Region 4 for the sake of tidiness and to avoid having any of my gear telling me that I'm in America rather than in the greatest country on Earth, and my (Region 2) disks still play fine. Anybody playing disks which come from outside the geographical region in any other OS is using a third-party workaround to do it anyways.

And, in any case, here in Australia region-encoding has been deemed illegal by our ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on the basis that it is anti-competitive. Removing region restrictions is not illegal here.

Lot of hot air being blown here by people who are seemingly incapable of lateral thought. Your alternative OS doesn't have out-of-the-box protected DVD playback capability. You need a third party solution both to play the things and to alter the region coding on disks during playback. Vista does have out-of-the-box protected DVD playback capability, and you still need to use a third party solution to alter the region coding on disks during playback.

Why are you so hard-on for Vista catweazle? Why do you feel the need to make excuses and defend it? I find it hard to see what your motivations are or where they come from.
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Nothing to do with 'defending Vista' and everything to do with a desire to see accurate and truthful answers given to people reading, rather than the drivel spouted by the MS-basher sheeples.
 
Hey guys, let's get back to the topic please.

I just bought a new HP PC with Vista Premium and I'm experiencing the exact same problems. All my DVD's play fine, except the newest few I've bought. Haven't changed region codes, still using the region 1 DVDs, etc. etc. Vista Premium should be able to play the DVDs in the Windows player without me having to install codecs or programs, right?

I get the exact same error message as the poster, and clicking on Help just gets me to the standard C00D1163 explanation that doesn't help at all...

So what now?
 
Found it -- downloaded the latest driver from NVIDIA (my graphics card) and now all seems to work...
 
Catweazle said:
Oh FFS!

Why would you go hacking your drive's firmware for playback anyway? I've never had to do that for playback of DVDs with different region codes.
[...]
Anybody playing disks which come from outside the geographical region in any other OS is using a third-party workaround to do it anyways.
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RPC2 drives check the region in hardware and will refuse to play if it does not match the disc. I can't comment on why you are able to play from multiple regions on an RPC2 drive, but this has certainly not been the case for me. It sounds like your drive is not RPC2 compliant; if it was you would be unable to play DVDs from differing regions without first changing drive's region (something which can normally only be done a limited number of times).

I made a point of specifically purchasing an RPC1 drive when they were available for the express purpose of playing DVDs from several regions. I also update my firmware on newer drives for the same purpose. I never buy a drive without first checking the availability of the RPC1 firmware. Regardless of your experience and typical usage habits, this is obviously an issue for me.
 
That's what I'd have thought too, jimmyb, until I popped this drive in the machine and found it playing back region protected DVDs both before and after I altered the region code.

It's a Pioneer DVR-212 SATA jobbie, by the way.
 
AnyDVD is NOT needed for successful playback of copy-protected DVDs in Vista. DVDs will play without problems and without a copy-protection removal tool installed.

A tool like AnyDVD is ONLY needed for copying such disks, not playing them back.
 
SO I stepped away from this problem for a while, with the end of school and my summer job, but I took a look at this post and it reminded me of my troubles with Vista's copy protection. This afternoon, after some digging on my hard drive I found what I was looking for, unadulterated DVD frimware. It turns out that in my quest to make my Memorex a region-free Pioneer DVR-106 (while using XP), I made a decision that would piss off Vista four years (FOUR YEARS!!!) down the line.

In Vista, the drive worked albeit oddly. I thought it was dieing. Since I've flashed back to the standard Pioneer firmware (Vista still can't read the outside of the drive) I can play both copy protected and non-copy protected DVDs. Now I know the drive isn't going dead, it just had bad firmware. It looks line I can clean out my Newegg shopping cart. ;)

To answer any questions as to the original firmware switch; at the time, Pioneer was releasing newer firmwares than Memorex was (so was the DVD community), and I wanted my drive to get the best "education" possible.

Update:
The drive is still having trouble reading some discs I guess its still dieng...
 
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