Reading DVDs on a Mac mini

I recently bought a Mac mini to try out a few things, but have been having some problems trying to get it to read DVDs. I was using the 2.6.10 kernel (the Ubuntu linux-image-2.6.10-5-powerpc package) and I get the same results with 2.6.12-rc4 (kernel config for that is attached). Whenever I try to read a DVD-ROM (my test app is lsdvd, but same results with mplayer) I get the following error message:

libdvdread: Invalid title IFO (VTS_02_0.IFO).
Can't open ifo 2!

Varying the DVD sometimes gets ifo 3/VTS_03_0.IFO, but the result is the same. Looking at dmesg shows the following:

hdb: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: command error: error=0x54 { AbortedCommand LastFailedSense=0x05 }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 42872

Repeat lots and lots of times with values of sector jumping by 8 each time. I'm not sure where it starts, because my entire dmesg output is filled with these messages. Trying to play/copy stuff from burnt off DVD-Rs works fine, but store bought DVDs don't like the drive (region 2 discs, the mini was bought in the Netherlands, a region 2 country). I have occasionally *rarely* managed to persuade some discs to occasionally read, but repeating the attempt then generally fails. Failure always happens within two or 3 reads.

The version of libdvdread in use is 0.9.4 (the Debian 0.9.4-5 libdvdread3 package).

hdparm settings for /dev/hdb (the DVD/CD-ROM drive):

 IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  1 (on)
 using_dma    =  0 (off)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)

readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

hdparm -i says the drive is a "MATSHITACD-RW CW-8124".

Any ideas? Because I'm all out of ideas, and I hope someone on here can help.

Thanks,

Tom Parker

Does the debian package of libdvdread contains the CSS stuff ? Also, the lack of "using_dma" is annoying... It looks like our CD/DVD kernel driver is still dumb and still switches DMA off on any stupid error...

Have you tried booting OS X and playing the DVD once ? Maybe the drive wants a zone to be set at least once, which MacOS does the first time you play a DVD

Ben.

No it doesn't, but it does include a shell script to download it if you're living somewhere where libdvdcss is ok, and libdvdread will dynamically load libdvdcss if it exists. I'm using libdvdcss 1.2.8 (latest).

Had to reinstall OS X to test this, and yup, it wants a zone to be set. Returning back to Linux, some fiddling with regionset and some region 1 and 2 DVDs lets me come to the following conclusions:

1) It's an RPC-2 DVD drive (i.e. evil, CSS-in-hardware drive), with the whole "5 changes and then it locks" policy.
2) It appears to be a really evil variant of RPC-2, in that if you've got a CSS-locked DVD in the drive, and you're set on a different region to the disk, you can't even get at the encrypted contents. The aforementioned read errors keep turning up, making libdvdcss useless. Or, this may just be an ide-cd bug with this drive...
3) If drive region == disc region, it plays DVDs fine.

If anyone happens to have an RPC-1 firmware for this drive, or fixes to ide-cd, I'd be most grateful! Some googling for the former is currently unhelpful.

Thanks,

Tom Parker

Yah, I googled too and ended up with the same conclusion =P

Ben.