DVD Playing, CSS errors, Regions

[Void Main]

My old Compaq laptop finally came off lease and I just got a new IBM Thinkpad R40 yesterday. I tried to play a DVD on it last night and noticed most of my DVDs would not play. All DVD apps (ogle/goggles, xine, mplayer, etc) were giving errors about not being able to crack the CSS. Since I copied the raw partitions from the old laptop to the new one all of the software was identical and they would play on the old laptop. This told me that something was either different or broken about the actual DVD drive.

I did a lot of searching and finally realized it might have been something to do with the region setting in the drive. Sure enough, setting the drive to region "1" solved all of my problems. Here's the utility I used:

http://linvdr.org/projects/regionset/

This is probably old news for many of you out there but I guess I am still a DVD n00b. The thing that bugs me is I just want to play movies that I have purchased and they make me feel like a criminal for watching them. In fact I am sure I am a criminal since the player has to crack the encryption. Can I have VHS back please?!?!?!?!

[worker201]

What region was the drive set to originally? Region 1 is US/North America. I can't imagine why IBM would set a drive to another region on a ThinkPad destined for sale in the US.

[Void Main]

I think the problem was that there wasn't a region set at all (I saw a note that they sometimes come from the factory that way). So now I can change it 4 more times before the drive is junk. Sounds like crippled hardware to me!

[worker201]

Thank god for the DVD Group. We would be so lost without them.

[X11]

I use a little program called DVD Shrink which is windows based on my brothers computer to rip DVD movies to his harddisk, which gets rid of the encyription and everything so I can quite freely create "backups", and play them from mplayer on my linux box with no big issues at all. In fact with Linux (impossible with windows-windows), I can play them right over a SMB/CIFS mount from my brothers computer in perfect quality.

Offtopic:

Doing some testing with NFS, SMB, CIFS, and other things I have found Linux>Windows and Windows>Linux filesharing far faster then Windows>Windows. And NFS never ever lets me down (sometimes nload reports upto 40-60mbps from my Linux Server/Media System (which runs dillo, bittorrent, xmms, and mplayer on windowmaker and is badass as a server with much ram to spare, even gnome 2.8 is pretty lineant on ram and other things these days, does more then my xp home lappy and has a lot more free memory)

[Void Main]

lxdvdrip works great.

[X11]

Badass, my brothers computer has the fastest DVD in the house, so I will use it...