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Does DRM Kill the End of a Movie??!?

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Stoic Joker:
Okay, I'm allowing for the possibility that I could be nutz, but this has happened way too many times to be coincidence.

I've got an old(er) 52" flat screen (CRT) TV with a built in DVD player. I start watching a movie (which plays fine), then about half way through it, it suddenly looses its' abinity to load the next segment. If I try to hop past the "bad spot", it simply hangs on the next one also.

These are not knockoff copies. These are movies rented from BlockBuster.

I have in the past taken a movie back to get a different copy, but all copies "hang" (/exibit the same ill behavior) in about the same (half way through) place. Yet if I take the "defective" disk back to my office, it plays flawlessly in my computer - Which has a newer Plextor DVD.

So... Am I crazy? or is there some DRM "feature" that is confusing the old DVD player in my TV??

mouser:
seems more likely that your built in dvd player has a problem.

Krishean:
i have seen similar behavior to this with a few of my CSS "protected" dvds, i get about 2/3s to 3/4s through the movie and it will hit a bad block or something and the movie will start displaying green video corruption all over the place, and after a little while it simply refuses to play at all (or in one instance actually crashed my xbox1) and like you said, trying to skip ahead does nothing.

i did some looking into the problem and it seems to be either a disc read error that happens precisely at the right spot to mess up the CSS or something is wrong with the CSS encryption itself, because if i remove the CSS and put it on a dvd-r, the same video plays beautifully in whatever player i put it in. while doing that i noticed the disc took several tries to decode proplery leading me to believe there was something wrong with it (but i could not see any scratches whatsoever on the surface) it did decode after awhile however, but by the time it did your average dvd player would have given up (thus the bad video output)

Carol Haynes:
If it is a very old DVD player then it may not work with some of the more recent copy protection mechanisms (as suggested by Krishean). Either that or it is failing at the layer break on a DVD9 format DVD (in which case it may be a hardware fault).

Best bet is to buy a cheap DVD player and plug it into the TV (they are really very cheap these days).

If you want to test the theory you could use something like DVDFab (free to try for 30 days but you will need a dual layer burner and dual layer bank disks to experiment with) to create an unprotected one-one copy (use the Clone option) of the DVD you are having problems with. If it still has problems with the unprotected disk it is likely to be a hardware fault but if it plays OK then you you are having a DRM problem.

If it is a DRM issue you could try the TV manufacturer's website - sometimes they issue firmware updates to cure this sort of problem (assuming the support page is still there). Alternatively phone/email the manufacturer and see if they can send you a firmware update.

Deozaan:
I'd guess it's a DVD9 error before thinking it was DRM. As Carol said, DVD9s are dual layer DVDs so when they switch from one layer to another (usually after the halfway point of a movie) there can sometime be a short pause during the transition. If your particular built-in DVD player can't handle the transition to the second layer, it would just hang.

Have you tried playing any DVD9s that you know have no DRM to see if they also hang during the layer switch?

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