Linux region free question

[dafuzz]

I've burned a movie to DVD-RW as a test - twice - and it turns out my rewriter will burn an NTSC disc but not read one! So now I can't blank 2 discs.

Does anyone know of a Linux utility that make my drives region free?

I've explored some Windoze options, the last of which corrupted hal.dll and a few others meaning I had to repair XP with the installation disc which neatly restored the mbr etc etc - bloody nightmare. I know I can change the region a limited number of times under the device manager but don't want to if I can help it, also I could buy more discs but that's tantamount to failure.

Besides, this is an excuse to get more familiar with ubuntu. Can anyone help?

Ta either way peeps

[strumstrum]

Shrink and Decrypter work under Wine...

http://www.mrbass.org/linux/ubuntu/dvdshrink/

what program did you rip and then burn dvd with? could it not remove region protection?

[digitalscream]

Not sure what you mean....NTSC has nothing to do with region encoding, as far as I'm aware. In fact, I don't believe that any kind of DVD encoding affects whether the output is PAL/NTSC (on the basis that it's handled by the player after the video stream has been decoded).

Are you sure you've done everything necessary to encrypt/decrypt DVDs? It's restricted software (because it's not legal to write such software in the US unless you've paid the piper/MPAA lest you incur the wrath of the DMCA). If you haven't done such things as installing libdvdcss2 etc, try the instructions here:

http://www.ubuntumini.com/2008/10/me...rtainment.html

If that's not it, give us the details of any errors you've got.

[dafuzz]

Sorry peeps, I've had a play and eliminated some things, I'll start again.

Basically I've burned an NTSC movie to DVD-RW using a demo of ConvertX2DVD, and now the rewriter won't recognise the disc. The other non-writing drive is happy enough with it and I can play the DVD using Windows Media Player so it can't be a region issue after all. Both drives show as Region 2 under Hardware Manager.

When I put the disc back in the rewriter it doesn't register at all - not even under My Computer. So I can't blank it. I've actually made two discs this way (yeah ha ha ha) and they both behave the same, so its not a rogue disc issue. I tried to blank it with the same app but it says the drive the is empty, ditto Nero 7.

Any thoughts anybody? I guess the rewriter itself must be at fault / new drivers needed but it seems fundamentally daft that a drive can burn a disc it can't read!

Everything I've done has been under Windows - I only threw Linux in there cos I'm not spending enough time with it and thought this might be a good opportunity to learn a bit more about it.

There's no reason I couldn't just throw the discs away and buy new ones but that's not my style at all