Running ANYDVD V4301 and there is an option called,
COPY PROTECTION BASED ON UNREADABLE SECTORS.

What does it do as i am not sure if i should put a tick in it or not.


THANKS.

Yo-

Yes - turn it on - unreadable sectors is another form of copy protection-

Mike

Some new movies such as resident evil, apocalypse (if I spelled that right) have copy protection based on bad sectors. They intentionally put bad sectors that will make your drive slow way down trying to read them and will often make your copy program fail due to errors. Turning it on will make anydvd replace these unreadable sectors with dummy sectors (I wonder if this would help with a scratched/damaged disk that has unreadable sectors, if the content is not replacable).
Its a giant pain in the ass because you cannot even play it on your computer without installing thier software and who knows what thier software does. We know that they have programs that will scan your computer for copyrighted content and I have heard of someone getting a virus that tried to send that information out over the web (no proof that the virus came from the mpaa but it is probably one of they lackeys).
While stand alone players usally do ok skipping over minor errors, I wonder if this will make it unplayable on some players. You might be beter off using a copy with the bad sectors removed than the original. Anybody else have coments on that?

Thanks

The unreadble sectors work on similar principle to game protections. It would seem it makes no difference whether its a copy or original as the standalone will never have to read the bad sectors. The IFO's tell the player where to read. Depending on your selection, they tell it to read the title, special features, previews, and warning messages...etc. The bad sectors are between or at the start or end of the data. Programs that copy the DVD try to mirror the image of the disc, so it trys to mirror the bad sectors which as you said will corrupt the process. It seems Arccos and puppetlock v4 are the main contenders with this protection.

With resident evil, the bad sectors are at the begining of the first main vob file for the movie (both the first file on the normal version and the first file of the wide screen version) so it is not unrefrenced file. Does the ifo file just tell the player not to start at the begining of the vob file?

Thats different, very clever of the studio. The IFO knows all, so it must tell the player to start 25 seconds or so past the beginning of the title. No wonder people are struggling with this one.

I just used dvd decryptor and imported which sectors to replace with dummy sectors. The list of the sectors to replace are on several of the forums (afterdawn and the dvd decryptor forum to name a few). When you explore the original disk and try to manually play the movie file on your computer, the first main vob file of the movie is just a black screen at the beginning at will freeze up trying to play (the bad sectors I assume). You have to install their provided software to even play it on the computer (or copy it replacing the bad sectors).