Hello all.

I usually backup my DVDs to HDD so I can watch'em later via network.
Too bad with some titles ("black hawk down" just t say one) I realized that the movie was missing! The ISO size seems ok, but there's no way I can play back the image. Playing the dvd, on the same drive (region-locked, BTW, no "strange hacks" -- it would be cheaper to have a reader for every region than waste time trying to unlock one for all regions ) via vlc works without problems. I could even use vlc (and mplayer) to rip the main title, but I'd prefer to have the iso file so that it's exactly like playing the original disk (same menus, subtitles and all).

I'm using the disc-copy function, selecting "only create image".

If I use another (non region-locked) drive, I get a bunch of read errors.
I'm using Mandriva cooker w/ "restricted" repo for lib64dvdcss2-1.2.10-3-plf2011.0.x86_64.

Is there something I'm missing?

Tks for any help.

Some manufacturers and studios introduced non-standard copy protection mechanisms to deliberately prevent this sort of copying. I suspect you may be encountering it here, which explains why you end up with a corrupt image using one drive, and read errors with the others.

try K9copy it will copy the dvd to a dvd file structure which you would then use with K3b to create an iso

Sure, I can use k9copy or dvdbackup, but doing so I risk losing extra contents while re-authoring...
Moreover, it requires twice the space
And even more, it seems at least k9copy blocks on read errors, so it's not really a viable alternative...

What I can't understand is... why a sector-by-sector copy (after authenticating to drive) doesn't work? Like DD-with-DeCSS,

IIRC, while "fail-ripping" I saw progress bar going really fast over what should have been the main title.

Update: ripping w/ "dvdbackup -M" and then trying to use k3b to generate the ISO file results in an error (something like "unable to calculate the resulting ISO size").
The debug messages say:
Used versions
-----------------------
mkisofs: 1.1.11

mkisofs
-----------------------
/usr/bin/genisoimage: Implementation botch. Video pad for file VTS_02_0.BUP is -1
/usr/bin/genisoimage: Either the *.IFO file is bad or you found a genisoimage bug.

I've also had issues when ripping with K3b, lately, and k9copy author is no longer interested in linux. I've turned to handbrake, it's a GTK frontend, but it still does the job. Not really an answer to your problem, but you still might want to check it out.

gdebure wrote:I've turned to handbrake, it's a GTK frontend, but it still does the job. Not really an answer to your problem, but you still might want to check it out.

Well, that's a completely different thing. It's a transcoder, but I can currently rip the movie w/o problems with mplayer or vlc (didn't try ripping from k3b) and encode it with ffmpeg. But that's not what I'm looking for.

What I'd need is a way to have a complete ISO file on my disk so that I can watch it via network from the players connected to my TVs just like if I brought the original disc to the player (selecting language, subs, extra contents, etc -- sometimes extras are more interesting than the movie itself, that's why I'm not interested in having an avi with just the main title).

I followed hint from last message in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/219577 : used PgcEdit (from windoze) to fix all the errors in the image. After that I could actually recreate the ISO.

But IMVHO that's just a workaround, not a solution, because it requires the use of a collection of different programs (dvdbackup, wine/virtualbox + PgcEdit, genisoimage).

Hope a "native" solution can be implemented.