DVD rumunerations
Jan. 12th, 2003 01:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
topazSo I swapped the CD-RW drive in my laptop for a cow-orker's DVD drive. Nice! Now I can play movies!
Or so I thought, anyway.
The background here is that the laptop I have for work, when I received it, had been wiped and had Windows 2000 freshly installed. It is not clear who, if anyone, has the OEM disks for this machine. I didn't consider this a major issue -- if I'm missing anything important, of course, I can just download it off the manufacturer's site, right? Right.
So I popped in my new DVD drive, ran home and inserted Ocean's Eleven. No, the computer pointed out, you do not have a DVD decoder on this machine, so you can't watch a movie. Right, of course I don't have decoding software. Each DVD hardware manufacturer has its own decryption key; in order for an application to play movies off a DVD drive, it must have the drive's hardware key, which in turn has to be licensed from the drive manufacturer. All this rigamarole guarantees that you have fewer options for DVD playback software than for, say, word processors, spreadsheets or virus-writing kits.
So I check the laptop manufacturer's web site, and while they have a very complete knowledge base they don't seem to offer their DVD player application for download. Stinky. But they do mention that the DVD player they distribute with their machines is FabulousDVD from Bazfoo Incorporated. Great news! ... until I visit Bazfoo's web site and learn that FabulousDVD is an OEM-only product. Mere users like me can't get it.
Well, actually, I could buy it for only $39.95. This seems like double-dipping to me, since they were paid for the software when my computer was manufactured, but why should they be concerned with technicalities?
Fortunately for me, an open source DVD player has been written based on DeCSS. It can be found at http://www.videolan.org/. Using it will probably make me a felon, but it probably won't be the first time for that. :-)
Or so I thought, anyway.
The background here is that the laptop I have for work, when I received it, had been wiped and had Windows 2000 freshly installed. It is not clear who, if anyone, has the OEM disks for this machine. I didn't consider this a major issue -- if I'm missing anything important, of course, I can just download it off the manufacturer's site, right? Right.
So I popped in my new DVD drive, ran home and inserted Ocean's Eleven. No, the computer pointed out, you do not have a DVD decoder on this machine, so you can't watch a movie. Right, of course I don't have decoding software. Each DVD hardware manufacturer has its own decryption key; in order for an application to play movies off a DVD drive, it must have the drive's hardware key, which in turn has to be licensed from the drive manufacturer. All this rigamarole guarantees that you have fewer options for DVD playback software than for, say, word processors, spreadsheets or virus-writing kits.
So I check the laptop manufacturer's web site, and while they have a very complete knowledge base they don't seem to offer their DVD player application for download. Stinky. But they do mention that the DVD player they distribute with their machines is FabulousDVD from Bazfoo Incorporated. Great news! ... until I visit Bazfoo's web site and learn that FabulousDVD is an OEM-only product. Mere users like me can't get it.
Well, actually, I could buy it for only $39.95. This seems like double-dipping to me, since they were paid for the software when my computer was manufactured, but why should they be concerned with technicalities?
Fortunately for me, an open source DVD player has been written based on DeCSS. It can be found at http://www.videolan.org/. Using it will probably make me a felon, but it probably won't be the first time for that. :-)
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no subject
Date: 2003-01-12 07:59 am (UTC)Glad you were able to find something that will work for you tho.