Problem with (perhaps encrypted) DVD

[cesss]

I'm using VLC media player (official 3.0.17.3 binary release for Mac) for playing my backups of my collection of purchased DVDs. By "backup" I mean a bare copy of the DVDs to a hard disk, so a raw copy of the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders. Up to now, everything was working fine (except for a few DVDs where you need to manually skip an specific moment or otherwise playback quits --maybe vlcplayer could try harder when some points have some extra difficulty instead of giving up so soon --anyway I can live with that, not a too serious problem, just slightly uncomfortable).

But today, I found something completely new: A set of DVDs doesn't play video at all, and I just hear the audio from the menu screen (but crippled audio anyway). The only special thing I find in these DVDs is that there's no AUDIO_TS folder, just VIDEO_TS (but I've read AUDIO_TS is not needed). In fact I created a dumb AUDIO_TS and it doesn't help.

Before you suggest to rip my DVDs, no, thanks but that's not an option. I'm doing this because I wish to preserve the life of my DVDs, and play them more conveniently, but without any rip: I want a real complete backup with all the raw content in the DVDs.

I saw that VLC media player is supposed to come with libdvdcss included. However, I took a look at the package contents of VLC, and, while I can find libdvdnav and libdvdread (in the plugins folder inside the app package), however I cannot find any traces of libdvdcss. This is just the official binary release of 3.0.17.3 for Mac. I don't know if I don't see libdvdcss because the Mac official release comes without it, or because libdvdcss is included but with another name, or because of any other reason. I tend to believe several of my DVDs were protected, and they play fine, so I'm guessing that libdvdcss is somehow there in VLC even if I cannot find it.

Anyway, just in case it could help, then I installed the libdvdcss package (latest official binary installer for MacOS). Installation went fine. I'm not sure if by installing that package VLC media player will locate libdvdcss at startup, or if I have to copy a dylib into the player app package, or if I need to do any thing special, or, if as I said above, this doesn't change anything because libdvdcss was already present in VLC even if I couldn't find it.

But no, it didn't help.

Is there anyway for checking if VLC is actually using libdvdcss? How can I know?

Any other things I could try come to your mind?

Thanks!

[cesss]

It seems that VLC 1.1.12 was the last version to ship with libdvdcss on Mac. This weekend I'll test if 1.1.12 can play this problematic set without problems. BTW, the website says that VLC media player ships with libdvdcss on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It seems the website is outdated, because, at least on Mac, libdvdcss is not included in the app package in all versions after 1.1.12.

[cesss]

Found a workaround, and started a new thread in the general troubleshooting forum, both detailing the workaround and the description of the problem: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=161355