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But when it comes to prohibiting or blocking people from viewing the movies they bought or rented from the video shop, on their own computers, then the anti-copy rage has clearly overstepped the boundary of decency. Let's mince no words here. Have you noticed that the cost of hardware (which is difficult to duplicate) has gone down and down, and the cost of blank DVDs and CDs also, isn't it ironic then that the cost of Microsoft software and movie DVDs and music CDs (which are easy to duplicate) has remained high, and even increased? Why?

Quite bluntly put: if the giant monopolies of software, film and music stopped their criminal behaviour of bullying others and fixing prices, their problem of illegal copying would almost disappear. For now their posturing and blaming innocent people like you and me is just propaganda and brainwashing to draw attention away from their own criminal behaviour. One could even say that (illegal) copying has become a social obligation to break the power of monopolies that unleash terror on the community, for the sake of greed.

So why would one wish to make (legal) copies?

• to safequard a movie from damage, made by children or others - making a backup.
• to play a movie at a later time, like the 'time-shifting' one does with video tape.
• to bypass ads and movie trailers. Just think about it: you buy a DVD to view a movie without any intrusions, and guess what? It begins with over 10 minutes of advertisements for B-grade movies, and even for entertainment parks! The movie people just have no respect.
• to change the recording format from USA NTSC to International PAL - many movies are NTSC.
• to view movies from the hard drive when travelling.
• to view movies without breaks, shudders and jitters caused by copy protection.
• since the quality of pressing DVDs leaves much to be desired, many DVD players when ageing, have difficulties playing commercially available DVDs. However, copies made by in-house burning, are still viewable without breaks. In such cases it is necessary to make a copy first before viewing.
• and so on.

So on this page you'll find the instructions to regain the functionality of your DVD drive.

Now the DVD should work, but oh dear, Xandros won't mount it in /media/cdrom0, but mounts it in /var/autofs/cdrom.1/cdrom.1 with ownership to root. It also mounts it in /disks/Removable/cdrom.1
I may sound paranoic but by mapping the DVD this way, no application will ever find it. Notice the Removable folder spelled with a capital-R? This is a Linux no-no. So we need to do some re-mounting.
 

Navigate to /var/autofs/cdrom/cdrom.1. It shows as a folder, but a strange one at that. It is the true mount point. Right-click properties. It shows that the owner is root, so we need to switch user and log  in as root.
Navigate to /disks/Removable/cdrom.1 and it has a different symbol. This is a link to the true mount point.

As administrator, drag the cdrom.1 from /disks/Removable/ to /media/cdrom/ which puts a copy there.
In /media there is already a cdrom0 mounted and there are two links to it. Delete cdrom0; two links disappear too. Rename cdrom.1 to cdrom0. The two other links reappear. Now packages can find the dvd.
For reasons explained in the CrossOver Office chapter, I also drop a copy of cdrom.1 in /disks and rename it dvd.

Place a protected movie in the dvd drive. Use XFM to look at it. All protected files are now visible but your DVD player still won't work and copying these files fails. You must see the dvd through /disks/dvd and /media/cdrom/cdrom0

The breaking of copy protection follows an evolutionary process: as a defence is broken, nature comes up with stronger defences, until predators break these too, and so on. One of the latest and simplest and nastiest copy protections is the inclusion of bad blocks on the DVD. These are sometimes made mechanically to the DVD master, or electronically by writing wrong checksums. The DVD player does not see these because the program that guides it (.IFO), skirts around the bad sectors. But copy programs work on a file by file basis, and they hit the bad blocks head-on. So how does one get around this?

One obviously needs a copy program that does not give up at the first bad sector, but carries on. One would have expected this of the cp file copy command, but it can't do it. In Windows the program dvddecrypter can do it, but skipping 400 bad blocks could take over 2 hours - who cares?

Linux has dd_rescue, a command-line-driven program that keeps copying across bad sectors. For instance when copying files over in the normal way, stumbles over the file VTS_01_1.VOB, it can be retrieved as follows (notice the handy use of /disks/dvd):

dd_rescue -A /disks/dvd/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB  /disks/G/TEMP/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB

As dd_rescue does not have man pages, read its instruction manual here: http://www.debianadmin.com/manpages/ddrescuemanpage.txt

Update: the Windows program DVDFAB which runs happily under WINE, copies a movie the way a DVD player would play it, avoiding bad blocks and other traps. The purchased version even shrinks the movie to fit a 4.5GB disc.

The good news is that the Windows version of dvdshrink can be made to run in Crossover Office (XO) and Wine. Since Xandros supports XO, we'll use XO to install dvdshrink. Also read the special chapter on CrossOver Office and how to tweak it.
What we need to know here is that any Windows installation must be done from within XO.
>>launch> applications > Crossover > Install application.

You can safely install dvdshrink in the default win98 bottle but it also runs in a winXP bottle. It pays to take the older version dvdshrink317setup.exe if version 2.0 causes problems. You'll see that it installs in the folder windows applications, and it installs an icon onto the desktop. It has one problem: the preview window does not work, and viewing in large screen format with FK11, does not work either. Neither does it allow you to create a new folder, so create an output folder first with XFM.

Crossover Office has already configured a cd/dvd device as M: linked to /media/cdrom0 and this should make dvdshrink find the dvd device.

Your workflow now looks like this:

1. in the first instance, run dvdshrink taking input from the dvd and see if it stumbles over bad blocks. Go to point 6. In case of bad blocks, go to 2.
2. run ogle and open the dvd. Play it and close it.
3. copy the dvd folder /VIDEO_TS to a temporary folder such as /DVD or /TEMP on the workspace disk.
4. note whether any files fail to copy
5. use dd_rescue to copy the bad file.
6. run dvdshrink to compress the movie as usual to its destination folder, say, /MOVIE where it creates two mandatory folders: /VIDEO_TS and /AUDIO_TS
7. burn a new dvd (see next chapter)

Latest update: although dvdshrink is no longer supported, an even better program has seen the light, DVDFab. Its authors keep it uptodate to skirt around the latest obstacles presented to it by the film industry. Now the good news is that it also appears to run effortlessly in WINE (and CrossOver?) and that the authors find this important too. So no longer bother about dd_rescue to skip past broken blocks, since DVDFab copies files according to the way the movie runs. I think it always works when you select to copy the main movie only as it then also skirts around 'easter eggs' pointing to broken blocks. Further good news is that the purchased copy of DVDFab also shrinks the movie to fit a 4.5GB burner, which does away with dvdshrink, although it can still be used. Please note that I haven't tried it myself yet in Linux, although it has served me well in Windows. www.dvdfab.com/

For full dvd compliance you'll need DVD-R media. Nero will start with a new compilation dialogue, which can be rather annoying when you know how simple it all can be. There is a top left drop-down box to select dvd. First option is DVD-ROM (ISO). File system: iso9660 only. Maximum letters in file names: 11 (8+3). Un-tick all other boxes. Multisession tab: no multisession (this sets Disk At Once). Label tab: manual label of no more than 16 letters, all CAPITAL.
Drag the required VIDEO_TS folder into the compilation window, and AUDIO_TS (not strictly required). It is all very clumsy, and I don't understand why people like the Nero burner. Version 3.0.0 does not even qualify as a beta version, as it is a truly nasty bit of software.

Note that the Xandros' internal DVD burner can burn a DVD which is read by most DVD players, but not by all. For most applications, you would not need Nero. The Xandros DVD burner is part of the Xandros File Manager but as of today (July 2007), is bugsy and unreliable. Yet, if it works, it could be magical as one merely needs to drop files into a 'project'. Faults are: not burning reliably, sometimes leaving a whole disc unburnt or partially burnt; forgetting the settings of the project; being unable to import an existing session, and so on.