DVD played as audio CD

[bonny]

Hy there.

When I insert a DVD and load it from VLC, it gets played like an "Audio CD", no sound at all though. Where could the problem be?

Any help?

Thanks...

[Arite]

How are you opening it?

If you open VLC and go to "File >> Open Disc...", ensure "DVD (menus)" is selected and then press "OK" then it should playback as a DVD-Video.

Arite.

[bonny]

What you suggest is already what I'm doing... I noticed that on *some* DVDs it plays OK, on some others it doesn't. The DVDs I bought are read, the DVDs I got copied, many won't play at all. But what I did is just "backup" the disc: copy the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS data onto my HDD and then burn that stuff onto a DVD. What may be missing? Some sort of "descriptor" or what else?

Thanks...

[Arite]

Nearly all commercial DVD have CSS (Content Scramble System - for more info see here) encryption - only some very old commerical DVD-Video do not. In order to play them the hardware or software player needs to decrypt the video data first (in VLC's case it uses libdvdcss). You cannot just copy and paste the encrypted data and burn to a disc, you need to decrypt it first. The decrypted data can then be used to make a backup.

VLC can of course read and potentially backup the video, however the best method to make a backup of a DVD-Video would be to use something like DVD Decrypter of DVD Shrink which are designed specifically for making DVD backups (the latter is able to compress MPEG-2 video too if the video from a dual layer DVD-9 (8.5GB) needs to fit on e.g. a single layer DVD-5 (4.7GB) disc).

Cheers, Arite.

[bonny]

Thanks for your explanation.
The same DVDs which won't play with VLC happen to be playing with WMP11 and in stand-alone Home-DVD Systems...

I'll try to burn that stuff with another burning software: actually I use CD Burner XP Pro (latest 4.x version). Maybe I'll be trying Nero 7...

Do you think it could change something?

[Arite]

Burning the data using different DVD authoring software probably won't make any difference, the best thing would be to re-rip the DVD-Video using a tool such as DVD Decrypter of DVD Shrink first. DVD Shrink can output directly to an *.iso file (CD/DVD image file), which could then be easily burnt using e.g. DVD Shrink itself (require Nero), Nero, DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn, and probably CD Burner XP Pro.

It still worthing trying, in VLC, going to "File >> Open Directory...", selecting the "VIDEO_TS" folder on the DVD) and pressing "OK" - DVD-Video may playback.

Arite.

[VLC_help]

You can't even manually copy CSS discs, because protection is at disc levet, not at data level so if you have copied data from DVD to another DVD, copied version doesn't have any protections left.

And both DVDDecrypter and DVDshrink are outdated for pure copying, because some companies have developed newer copy protection schemas.

[Arite]

The last Content Scramble System version, as far as I know, was released early 2005 and the final version of DVD Decrypter was able to decrypt it.

Although of course for AACS and BD+ etc. then newer tools are required, but then that is for HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

Arite.

[VLC_help]

CSS hasn't evolved. But companies have developed stuff like ARccOS, CORE X2 and Settec Alpha to protect discs.

[Arite]

OK, fair enough - I didn't realise there were additional copy protection systems used on DVD-Videos.

Arite.