Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

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aaron2018
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Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by aaron2018 »

Hi,

I am a college professor who teaches an undergraduate media literacy course. At the end of each semester, students undertake a video editing project in which they create a movie trailer that transforms the genre of the source material. They rip a DVD using Handbrake, and then they use this as the basis for their editing project. It is a terrific way of teaching them about video editing, film theory, the role of sound, and genre conventions.

Every once in a while, we encounter a DVD that is unrippable through Handbrake. In those situations, my colleague will use a different way of encoding the disk: We will loop the content back through a DVD player and save/encode it in real time on an SD card. The drawback with this approach is that it takes much longer because it rips the movie as it plays.

This semester, a student had a great idea about a project related to Night at the Museum (2006). She tried to rip it several times with Handbrake, and it would consistently stop working at the 54-minute mark. I tried to rip the disk on my Macintosh, but encountered the same problem. The student bought another version of the DVD in widescreen format, and the same thing happened. It stopped again after 54 minutes, at the end of the 11th chapter. Of course we tried to just rip chapters 12 through the end, but Handbrake would crash altogether.

My colleague just returned from the NAB conference and broke out the usual equipment for a real-time DVD rip. Guess what happened? It stopped again at the same exact point after 54 minutes. He said "I have never seen copy protection that waits an hour before it kicks in."

Does anyone have any thoughts about what might be causing this? I have tried other third-party video transcoders, and I also tried make-MKV, but these fail also.

I will circle back with the exact Handbrake error message in case it helps others debug the problem.

This is so strange!
Aaron
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s55
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by s55 »

Trying to encode DVD's directly with HandBrake hasn't been a good idea for years. Your better off using a tool like MakeMKV to take the raw data of the DVD into a mkv file, then compressing that with HandBrake. Better yet, editing the Raw Mpeg2 if your editor supports it rather than using HandBrake at all. Each time you encode, you lose a layer of quality, so if you can avoid it, it's best.

HandBrake has never supported any of the hundreds of types of copy protection out there. While libdvdcss kinda works for some sources, it fails on many that have more than just css protection. That's where tools such as MakeMKV come in. It's a ripper but doesn't compress.
mduell
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by mduell »

Please be aware, this forum is not for support or help related to HandBrake. Please keep such discussions to the Community Support forum sections.
aaron2018
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by aaron2018 »

Hi everyone -- I am not asking for support or help related to Handbrake. I am genuinely interested in understanding what type of copy protection causes something to stop exactly 50% of the way through. I figured that this forum was more focused on conceptual issues. However, I *do* have a copy of the Activity log now: https://pastebin.com/La9ZEHMz

BTW, I used MakeMKV in an attempt to rip the DVD without compression, and it also stopped exactly 50% of the way through. This is what mystifies me.

Thanks everyone for your insight and thoughts. If you'd like me to move this to another forum, I'm happy to do so. It just seemed hard to imagine a place more likely to have a bunch of experts on various copy protection schemes.

Aaron
mduell
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by mduell »

Ok, we'll be sure not to help with HB.

It may be one of the forms of non-CSS structural protection, although for a 2006 disk I'd expect MakeMKV to make quick work of it.

Is the disk scratched? Does it play through on a set-top box DVD player?

edit: Oh, you already did this with the SD card thing hooked to a DVD player. Yea it's likely a bad disk, not an intentional protection.
Last edited by mduell on Fri Apr 13, 2018 9:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Woodstock
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by Woodstock »

If both stop 50% through, the "copy protection" is probably a scratched or dirty disk.

As shown by:
[14:27:02] sync: expecting 156087 video frames
error: dvdnav: Read Error, Error reading from DVD.
aaron2018
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by aaron2018 »

The weird thing is that we purchased a second copy of the DVD in an attempt to help the student out. It was a brand new, never before played DVD. Is it possible that there was just a widespread bad run of DVDs back in 2006?

In case it sheds light on things, I'm also pasting the Make MKV thing: https://pastebin.com/Ti4UEYvb

Thanks everyone for the help!

BTW, the student has redefined her project and is now just fine, so this is really just curiosity at this point.
Woodstock
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by Woodstock »

Yes, it is possible to have a bad manufacturing lot on optical disks. It is also possible to have a disk that "just barely" on one edge of a specification, and a drive that is "just barely" on the opposite side.

That's why I have 5 different Bluray and 3 different DVD drives here, and sometimes a particular disk will only read properly in one of them. It's surprising how many DVDs cannot be read in a Bluray drive...
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BradleyS
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by BradleyS »

54 minutes could indicate the hang happens at the layer change for the dual layer DVD disc. Probably a manufacturing fault at that point, one that some set top players manage to work with but PC drives struggle with.
aaron2018
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by aaron2018 »

Thank you everyone for the theories about what caused this! Even though our need to rip the DVD has passed, my colleague and I will probably keep attempting to crack it just so we can get to the bottom of this. The next step is trying this with a different DVD-R drive. If we find out anything, I will circle back to close out the thread with our solution.
erikohgr
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Re: Mysterious copy protection from 2006 (?!)

Post by erikohgr »

A possibility:
[15:00:10] sync: "Chapter 11" (11) at frame 73157 time 274609335
error: dvdnav: Read Error, Error reading from DVD.
error: dvdnav: Read Error, Error reading from DVD.
[15:02:31] reader: done. 2 scr changes
...
[15:02:32] mpeg2video-decoder done: 79127 frames, 0 decoder errors
[15:02:32] sync: got 79127 frames, 156087 expected
I'm getting a similar error myself with some discs I'm ripping -- Handbrake is expecting X number of frames, but only getting Y number of them, so the encode stops at that point.

As far as I can tell, it does appear to be some kind of copy protection. I'm ripping a set of discs by the sketch comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, and each season has a bonus disc that includes recordings of sketches from their pre-TV live performances as bonus content. I'm two seasons in, and each time, the disc title that contains those recordings won't rip correctly/completely, in Handbrake or MakeMKV. The computer's DVD player software plays the content just fine; it's the ripping programs that choke on it.

I haven't been able to find much more of an answer than that for now, but I thought it might bear mentioning.
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