I bought 2 surplus HP dc7700's with LG DVD burners that are acting kind of funny. They will read CDs and data DVDs no problem, but not (most) commercial DVD-Video discs. It complains that there is no media found if I try to dd from it, vlc says (via the libdvdread/libdvdcss2 libraries) that it can't open the device. It does this in Windows XP as far as I can tell, as well as each of the Debian squeeze/wheezy/sid releases and every version of libdvdcss2 I tried from debian-multimedia, and every debian kernel package since 2.6.32. So I don't think it's a driver issue. There aren't any firmware updates for the drive that HP has published, and LG has deferred any such update to the OEM.
Some internet forums suggest that the DVD laser is burned out, but that doesn't explain why it has no problem with a data DVD (assuming it has 2 separate lasers), and I've even (while partly dissassembled) gotten it to read a DVD-Video home movie I made with Cinelerra and DeVeDe (burned from a different machine of course). The really funny thing was, when I ejected that home movie, a warning was displayed in Gnome3 to leave the disk in the drive while it finished writing to the disk, though I had only been using it with VLC and Xine, and I thought writing an ISO would finalize the disk. I'm a KDE user, so I don't know if this is normal or not, nor what it might be writing (access logs? MPAA spyware/trackers? "HP wuz here"?). I thought it might be a DVD region code problem, but the correct code is displayed in Windows. When I use regionset to see if resetting it will resolve the issue, it says it can't open the device. Yes, I'm a member of the cdrom group, but I have problems even when trying things as root. I'm starting to wonder if there is a DVD-Video enable DRM signal that the bios or windows driver is supposed to send to keep all those open source linux pirates from watching videos on purchased media, rather than getting it from bit torrent like everyone else. Or if the this is supposed to be an MPEG licensing scheme for enforcing periodic payments for DVD codecs by disabling DVD-Video support at a predefined obsolescence date, requiring a replacement purchase. I have a third (much older) LG drive that as far as I can tell stopped working with DVDs out of the blue one day as well (though I didn't have data DVDs to test with at the time). Or am I totally forgetting some obvious -enable-dvd-video kernel parameter that I've long since forgotten about? Grazie, ;-Daniel Fussell /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
