Mac vs PC

[wigsf]

Just thought I'd share this little story with you fine people.

My brother's running Handbrake on his Mac and I'm running on my PC. We both ripped the same disc on our respective machines. Using normal settings, his end result was a nicely encoded video with sound. Just the way he intended. My result was an awful mess of squares and high pitched, almost modem-like sounds.

Never one to give up, I fooled around and tried a bunch of things. Eventually, I tried decrypting the DVD then giving Handbrake another go at it.

Huzah! This time, Handbrake provided the intended result.

Any ideas why the Mac implementation would not require a decrypting step while the PC would?

[baggss]

The Mac version has the open source decryption library built in. Now, I'm not a Dev, but as I understand it said Open Source Library is not available on the Windows side, so a separate decryptor is needed. This is neither new nor likely to change, ever.

[Cavalicious]

...to Piggy-Back,

...the next Mac release won't have the lib either.

[baggss]

So we'll have to use a 3rd party app?

[s55]

yes. If you have VLC installed, the next release will be able to use that. (in other words, it works a tad like fairmount), otherwise you'd need to pre-rip it.

[baggss]

May I inquire why this is being done? Seems like we are taking a simple process and making it more difficult.

[jbrjake]

May I inquire why this is being done? Seems like we are taking a simple process and making it more difficult.

It's not difficult at all. If the user has VLC on their system, HandBrake automatically and seamlessly utilizes VLC's copy of libdvdcss. And if it isn't on the system, a dialog box pops up asking the user if they want to download it in order to decrypt DVDs, and provides a web link to the videolan server. At the worst, it's a one-time hassle.

HandBrake being libdvdcss-free is something that a developer asked for over a year ago, because it made him feel uncomfortable openly contributing to the project. At the time I promised him we would try to get rid of it, and while it took quite awhile, dynaflash found a way to do it on the Mac side that I feel works very well and doesn't make the process any more difficult in regular usage.

In Linux, if users have libdvdcss installed on their, it will utilize that at run-time.

And anyone can still build it into HandBrake if they start from the source code and tell the configure script to include the lib-- only, I changed it to download libdvdcss's code from videolan, not the HandBrake servers.

Basically, we're wiping our hands of storing and providing the decryption code ourselves. It won't be in HandBrake's binaries and it won't be on HandBrake's servers.

[baggss]

I guess that makes sense, cya. Thanks for the reply.