DVD DRM and Regions

By chimo on (updated on )
A quick note-to-self regarding DVD drives and regions.

If you've been hitting your head against the wall like me due to dvdbackup throwing "read error returned - padding 512 blocks" even if you've triple-checked that you have libdvdcss installed, then it might be due to your DVD drive not having its region set.

  1. Install regionset
  2. $ regionset /dev/sr0 
Current drive parameters for /dev/sr0:
  RPC Type: Phase II (Hardware)
  RPC Status: no region code set (bitmask=0xFF)
  Vendor may reset the RPC 4 times
  User is allowed change the region setting 5 times
Would you like to change the region setting for this drive? [y/n]: y
Enter the new region number for your drive [1..8]: 1
New RPC bitmask is 0xFB, ok? [y/n]: y
Region code set successfully.

You can find the list of regions here: http://linvdr.org/projects/regionset/

  1. North America (USA and Canada)
  2. Europe, Middle East, South Africa and Japan
  3. Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Korea
  4. Latin America, Australia, New Zealand
  5. Former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, etc.), rest of Africa, India
  6. China

Thanks to the Archlinux forums for the enlightenment.