HandBrake

It's not just HB, it's some hardware too...

http://sonystrikesagain.wordpress.com/

Fantastic - I was watching Casino Royale on my 5 - 6 year old Sony DVD player and could've sworn the sound levels kept jumping all over the place. At the time, I had all sorts of trouble trying to rip it (yes, yes, zero cell DVD - the things I've learned) and wondered if the sound issues on the regular DVD player could've been related. Well, at least I know something's messed up with the new, improved copy protection.

Thanks for giving me motivation to continue my dvd rip/encode/burn education Sony.

re: Sony Tech: We know about this problem. Its our new copy protection that’s making these discs unplayable in some players including our own, we do not intend to change the copy protection.

Oh come now. Sony'll ditch it in a heartbeat once enough people take the only action that really matters: return the damn disks for a refund. Breach of contract on their part if you ask me.

You would've thought they had learned a lesson from the audio CD copy protection rootkit debacle, but apparently not. Sony used to be such a good company (albeit still a little hung up on proprietary technology) until they got into the movie business.

Update: they will replace the disks with modified versions. No word yet on whether they rolled back to an older version of ARccOS or patched the current. http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6434584.html

I had some measured success with the new Sony DRM on macppc. It has worked with all but 1 DVD ("Rock Balboa", I think).

Set DVD player to open on DVD insertion.

Insert the DVD. Leave it alone for 10 minutes. You will hear all kinds of thrashing sounds coming from your DVD drive.

When the thrashing stops, play the DVD with DVD Player until it gets to the main title.

Quit DVD Player.

Rip the DVD with MacTheRipper.

Run handbrake over the VIDEO_TS folder.

I simply used MTR 3 r14d on Rocky Balboa and had no problem. The DVD played fine on my Mac.

For all the foot-shooting Sony is doing, I happily backed up my discs in the usual way and never noticed a thing.

Really, if they have their heart set on shooting themselves in the foot, they really should get something for their trouble... Like actually preventing copies from being made, or something.

Sony hasn't done the math about DRM: They may have 20 programmers working on creating new copy prevention schemes who have a limited amount of time to finish (the upper limit being when the go ahead and release the scheme to the world), but once released, there may be hundreds or thousands of programmers working to get around the copy prevention, and they have from now till the end of eternity to do it.

YOU do the math. (Sony isn't.)

i can see the following scenario caused by sony's new copyright protection scheme:

1- i go out, bye the DVD movie with the money i worked hard for.
2- i come home and put the movie in my DVD player that i paid with the money i worked hard for.
3- i press play, and it doesnt work.
4- i get [Censored] and do some research.
5- i download MTR, AnyDVD or any other ripping software that is up to date on sony's silly copy protection.
6- i rip the copy protection out of the DVD and put it on my hard drive.
7- i compress the DVD if its too big and then burn the movie to a DVDR.
8- now i can watch my movie and im happy

had sony not been stupid about this whole deal, i could have stopped at step 3.

You forgot Step 9, Return intentionally crippled DVD to store due to breach of contract. (not that I'd want to go toe-to-toe with Sony's lawyers, but there it is.)

Really, the only message that will filter back to Sony is the one that hits them in the pocketbook directly.

And I'm not advocating anyone buy or rent, rip and burn and return as a practice --- but when the industry has this level of contempt for its userbase I don't shed many tears. Besides, it takes me time, effort and money to fix their product.

Rocky went down with MTR 3.0 14 (PMac G5 Quad)

Casino Royale would not rip on any of 4 PPC Macs (different failures on each), but was successful with RipIt4Me on Windows.

Casino Royal worked fine for me with MTR 3 r14d.....

sheckylovejoy wrote:Rocky went down with MTR 3.0 14 (PMac G5 Quad)

went down ?

It's a pun. "Rocky Balboa" is a fighter ... fighters go down when knocked out etc. ...

sheckylovejoy, I too was able to successfully rip Casino Royale with MTR 3.0d r14. Has Ripguard+ARccOS but as I recall the coupé de grace is the inclusion of fake .vobs or fake .ifo files.

MTR's Main Feature Extraction in particular has been tweaked to get around these, whereas Full Disk Extraction has not.