morriscroy

(On a tangent).

From an historical perspective, were there any other well documented cases of bluray or dvd discs which wouldn't play on a large class of disc players?

The only ones I can think of offhand, were ones like:

- Starship Troopers bluray
- the 2007 Sony dvd version of Casino Royale which didn't play on many Sony manufactured dvd players

MooMooMooMoo

I'm embarrassed to admit none of my pc's currently have a br player, or I'd just copy the discs in question to a flash drive.

MooMooMooMoo

I did discover what the 2011 Sony Midnight In Paris & the 2014 Alliance Frida blu's have in common:

MIRAMAX is the film producer. I suspect they are the ones to blame. I hope it's that simple; I just don't buy any Miramax films on blu-ray.

thetao

Interesting. While it might be a costly experiment, since you're region-free, I'm now curious if a European release would fare better.

morriscroy

The most problematic bluray discs I have come across over the years, were ones manufactured by Cinram. (Cinram doesn't exist anymore. They were bought up by Technicolor more than a year ago). Discs where I encountered too many bad sectors due to manufacturing defects.

Cinram's biggest bluray clients were Fox, Lionsgate, and Alliance. (Also Warner before mid-2010). If you look at the ifpi codes written on the first inner ring (from the center) of a bluray disc, Cinram will have codes like IFPI 2F** or IFPI 2U**

(The ** are wildcards). One may need a magnifying glass to see these codes.

http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/...tion-guide.pdf

IIRC, the IFPI 2F** manufacturing facility is a Cinram plant in Huntsville, Alabama. The IFPI 2U** facility is a Cinram plant in Olyphant, Pennsylvania. (Cinram had another plant with code IFPI 60** which was in Toronto, Canada but it didn't appear to be manufacturing bluray discs. The Toronto plant made a lot of Fox dvds).

Both the Huntsville and Olyphant plants are now owned by Technicolor. (Technicolor's main dvd/bluray manufacturing facility is in Guadalajara, Mexico with code IFPI KK**). Before the Cinram buyout, Technicolor's biggest clients were Disney, Universal, Paramount, and Warner (after mid-2010).

Sony's main dvd/bluray manufacturing plant these days appears to be in Terre Haute, Indiana with code IFPI QW** (Sony DADC's other current clients are Kino-Lorber, eOne, RLJ/Image, etc ...)


In my experience, stuff that was manufactured at Sony DADC Indiana (IFPI QW**) and Technicolor Mexico (IFPI KK**) seem to have the least problems with bad sectors due to shoddy manufacturing.

morriscroy

I'm sure the movie companies know this very well. (At least the technical guys working there would know). It was the risk they were willing to take more than a decade ago, that some hiccups are bound to happen.

As to why the movie companies went hardcore with the DRM for bluray (and hd-dvd), it probably dates back to when they were "burned" badly on the dvd css encryption system being completely cracked back in October/November 1999. By then, it was too late to recall everything since dvd was so widely available by late-1999 and early-y2k. The subsequent legal cases over decss were largely ineffective too.

Even if the technical guys knew that DRM was largely ineffective, most likely they had no veto power on the final decisions to use aacs for bluray/hd-dvd.

morriscroy

At least with aacs, the designers were smart enough to use standard government grade encryption (AES) which was well vetted previously by the cryptography community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanc...ption_Standard

Most of the insecurity in the aacs algorithm, involved how the decryption keys were managed. Basically hacker types figured out how to get the keys in various indirect ways, which didn't involve directly attacking the AES encryption algorithm itself. (So far there is no known easy direct attacks on AES).


In contrast, the dvd CSS algorithm was so weak (and fortunately for non-hacker types) that the css encryption algorithm could be easily cracked directly by brute force and only taking a few seconds to recover the encryption key in the vast majority of cases. If one examines the actual CSS algorithm, it looked like it was a "homebrew" designed by an amateur who just looked at a engineering textbook (or Schaum's outline) and cherry-picked stuff which looked easy to implement.

My suspicion is that the DVD designers might have been relying on "security through obscurity" and legal ways, to secure the dvd format.

It's been known for a long time that "security through obscurity" doesn't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securi...ough_obscurity


This is the primary reason ^ why I still like dvd a lot. Also the error-correction algorithms are better and more robust in the dvd specification, than in the older error-correction schemes on audio cds. (Too bad dvd-audio never became ubiquitous).

MooMooMooMoo

I've thought about that. Expensive experiment!

MooMooMooMoo

I THINK the Alliance Frida is "I2IM". There is a second code; again I THINK it's "IW25".

MooMooMooMoo

My music collecting thing is the best sounding version of what I like. I agree, Hi-res music is currently a niche market I think that's partly due to poor marketing, poor education & ridiculous pricing in many cases); but there are still significant # of titles on dvd-a, SACD, & especially hi-res Flac, wav, Apple formats, dsd/dsf, etc available.

thetao

Morris, thanks for this! Great stuff! For some reason I didn't dig into DVD technology until perhaps 5 years ago in reaction to Moo posting a few Nero disk scans. It's scary what some companies (particularly Warner and Fox) were selling as retail products. And in my travels I've occasionally acquired two of some disks and the poor scans were nearly identical. From this, I'm guessing that Warner and others made half a million or even a million of some titles and every one was "bad". Perhaps it stemmed from a sloppy mastering process, but I really don't know. For major label DVD's, I'd rate Sony most reliable, then Universal (barring their early DVD-18's), then Fox, then Warner, with Paramount being a wildcard as they didn't release as many dual layer disks.

FYI, a couple years ago I briefly worked with a guy who worked at a Pennsylvania DVD manufacturing plant back when it was owned by Warner. I don't recall the city.

Just a few months ago I finally bought a Lite-On BD drive and started scanning my BD collection. So far I haven't found any really bad disks, and the worst of them had small scratches right from the start. Warner gets my vote for "most improved manufacturing process", but it's really the smaller labels like Kino-Lorber that impress me.

One of my current projects is reading old post at doom9 to get my BD drive working with VLC...to the extent that software support exists.

MooMooMooMoo

You may want to try freeware "Full Player" for blu's though you will need software to break the copy guards. It appears to have been abandoned with 8.22, but since you'll need DVD Fab, Any DVD, etc anyway to break the copyguards the player component should still be fine:

http://www.fplayer.net/download.html

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/6107-full-player.html

PhantomStranger

Oppo players have a long history of quirky issues with specific BDs. They used to have a policy of fixing it in a firmware update if owners would send in Blu-rays that didn't work on their players. This was pretty common a few years ago. The odd disc here and there simply wouldn't work unless Oppo fixed the firmware.

MooMooMooMoo

Makes sense. To repeat myself, part of why this feels so odd is that I bought the player in 2012, & the first disc of any kind that it wouldn't play happened last month!

The 9.x series is also really picky re: flac music files. Slightly damaged files that play through on my pc cause the Oppo to freeze; & I am guessing Flac has recently changed the algorithm for 192/24 files. This started a few months back: About half of 192/24's I acquire (& it's so far only impacted the 192's) won't play correctly unless I convert to wav & back to flac with Trader's Little Helper.

That was kind of frightening until I figured it out.

thetao

Right now I'll declare victory when I can get anything to play straight off a disk. Will rethink/fine tune after I cross that road.

MooMooMooMoo

I'm unsure how you can get anything to play straight off of a blu-ray on a computer without software to crack the copyguards?

morriscroy

I'm pretty much stuck with generic cds, and some lousy free downloads. (The only hi-res audio disc I have is a Beatles dvd-a which came in a multidisc set, where I was only interested in the audio cd disc).

In general the type of music I listen to, is the sort of stuff that has not really been released on higher-res audio formats like sacd, dvd-audio, etc ... (Frankly, at this point I don't even care anymore).


My theoretical preference for dvd-a vs audio cd, has to do with how unreliable the audio cd format is. It was good enough to be played in realtime with the errors being "interpolated", but as a data storage medium it was less than ideal.

Back in the early->mid 2000s, I was heavily into ripping audio cds and found that not every cd-r computer drive was created equally. Using many different cd/dvd drive models from different manufacturers, it was rare for any of them to create the exact same rip from the same audio cd disc. Back then, I found that the better "smarter" drives for audio cd ripping were older LG models (with a Panasonic chipset) and older Plextors (with a Sanyo chipset).

In contrast, data integrity/exactness is very important in the dvd format specification. (For all dvd-data, dvd-video, and dvd-audio).

MooMooMooMoo

Unfortunately, it's been years (decades) since any true Plextor cd burners were made. They were the best by far. I have quite a few used ones, but have been too lazy to get IDE to SATA adaptors & install them in my pc's (actually I only have 2 pc's with regular (as opposed to garbage laptop drive) slots.

And as I think i posted above, I don't believe any truly quality blank discs are currntly being made. Definitely worth watching for new old stock; especially on real TY's, & the old REAL unbranded dark blue dye TDK's (best cdr's I ever used).

morriscroy

For sure.

It's unfortunate that Plextor stopped using the old Sanyo chipset sometime around 2006-2007. By then Plextor was just licensing Lite-On manufactured drives, and pasting a "Plextor" brand on the front. Basically attempting to fool unsuspecting customers into paying Plextor prices for a generic LiteOn drive. (I don't know if Plextor ever released a sata drive with the old Sanyo chipset).

LG drives also suffered the same disgrace around the same time period. LG stopped using the old Panasonic chipset sometime in 2007, and started using Renesas chipsets for all their cd/dvd (and bluray) drives with a sata interface. Unfortunately LG's Renesas chipset dvd drives were largely crap.

(Eventually LG abandoned Renesas and moved on to Mediatek chipsets. Currently both LiteOn and LG use the exact same Mediatek chipsets for their cd/dvd drives, but with very different reading and writing abilities).


My current setup for handling optical discs, are my previous desktop computers with the side panel removed entirely. I just use longer sata cables to connect the dvd/bluray drive to the desktop's motherboard, and leave the actual dvd/bluray drive sitting on same table next to the desktop computer. I also keep an additional small fan blowing directly on the dvd/bluray drive, which keeps it running cool for hours on end.

This loose setup makes it easy to swap out different dvd/bluray drives, where the sata interface can handle devices being "hot swapped".

morriscroy

I should be more specific about what I meant in regard to audio cds being an unreliable data storage medium.

Back in the early-mid 1990s, there were no easy cd ripping programs which were easily available. So at the time, I wrote my own program to extract the data sectors from a "red book" standard audio cd.

Since I didn't entirely trust the cd drive's behavior, I wrote my program to re-read the same sectors several times, and do a statistical analysis to see which sectors re-reads were identical. Much to my dismay, a particular sector did not always have a 100% statistical match with all of the re-reads of the exact same sector.

My very slow ripping program in those days, basically did multiple forced re-reads of a particular sector, and picked the re-reads which had the highest statistical count as the final "correct" version of a particular sector. This is similar to the "paranoid mode" on today's ripping programs like EAC.


In contrast, the dvd and bluray formats never had this type of data integrity problem as audio cds.

morriscroy

Most likely it was the Olyphant PA plant, which use to be owned by AOL-TimeWarner until late-2003 when it was sold to Cinram.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEA_Manufacturing
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cinr...-dvds-1.397838
https://www.discogs.com/label/291934-WEA-Mfg-Olyphant

morriscroy

Great find!

Unfortunately LiteOn stopped manufacturing computer bluray drives several years ago. If I ever see a LiteOn bluray drive again, I would certainly pick one up too.

morriscroy

I was heavily into the intricate details of dvd since I started buying a lot of dvds in 2011. (Prior to 2011, I had very little to no interest in dvd/bluray).

I attribute this attention to technical details, due to my prior bad experiences with ripping audio cds back in the 1990s (mentioned several posts up).

Since the 1990s, I don't trust the quality control of optical discs manufacturing. This is the main reason why I check every newly purchased cd/dvd/bluray disc on the computer, to see whether there's any manufacturing defects.


Most likely it was lousy quality control at the actual disc manufacturing stage.

Nowadays a better "test" would be to scan the same Warner dvd title, where one copy is an older Cinram pressing (IFPI 2U** or 2F**) and another copy that is a more recent Technicolor pressing (IFPI KK** or KM**).

morriscroy

Unless you're playing old discs from the dawn of the bluray era circa 2006-2007 (or early 2008), I wouldn't recommend this particular method.

The publicly widely known player related keys which were hacked back then, are almost certainly revoked by now. Playing a more recent bluray disc with this really old hacked player related keys, will most likely lock the bluray drive via a "key revocation" scheme that is built into the aacs specification.

To get around this problem without buying a new drive nor paying for dvdfab or anydvd, would probably involve hacking a bluray drive's firmware extensively. Not for the faint of heart.

morriscroy

More than a year ago I purchased a spindle of "made in japan" TY blanks, for archival purposes. It was one of the last ones on the shelves at local computer stores.

Though unfortunately I found out recently that this "made in japan" TY spindle is almost completely depleted, all behind my back. Apparently the gf used them all up, to rip/burn a bunch of lousy movies and tv shows (such as Sex and The City) for one of her friends.

Previously I told her to not use this TY spindle. (But it went in one ear and out the other).


So unless I can find another source of "made in japan" TY blank discs, it's probably the end of the line for me when it comes to burning dvdr discs. (No point in wasting time on CMC/Verbatim crap).