t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

Snarkout · 2006-11-08 14:50:27

I have recently picked up a t43, and am having some downright bizarre issues with the DVD drive. The t43 has ide drives, but uses a sata-bridge from what I can tell - this essentially means that both IDE drives are seen as scsi. My hard disk is sda and my dvd-rw drive is sr0. The drive seems to work ok for playing music CDs and for playing unencrypted DVDs, but as soon as a DVD with CSS is in the drive, it starts going batshit, and fills dmesg with I/O errors. I've tried Arch, Edgy Eft, and Frugalware -current -- all suffer from the same problem. I have a fully updated Arch install on it now, FWIW. Running kaffeine or mplayer or dvdbackup from the command line fills the console with "failure to crack" messages. I have yet to see how it behaves when burning discs, but cdrecord -scanbus doesn't find a usable drive, so my guess is it may not be pretty.

However, I have only been able to find a single discussion about this issue, and that was on the Gentoo forums. There was no remedy found, though some folks thought it was region related, and others thought it was related to dbus versions. I've swapped the drive out, and the issue remains, so I really don't think it has anything to do with the drive.

Can anyone out there with a t43 or later thinkpad actually view encrypted dvds on it?

Snarkout · 2006-11-09 13:46:27

As I suspected, it wouldn't burn anything - after a certain amount of dicking around, I discovered that it's expecting to see an sg* device in /dev as a burner which isn't being created by default. I created a symlink from /dev/sr0 to /dev/sg0, and cdrecord can now see the device - for some reason it didn't like being told dev=/dev/sr0 though. As far as I can tell at this point the burner does/will work, or at the very least I've burned a single copy of tpowa's base iso and booted from it fine. I still have no idea wtf is going on with reading - nearly every account I've seen online says that "everything just works" after about 2.6.15 - I've seen about 5 different libata module options, and none of them have changed anything (as far as I can tell) other than I get a nice stream of errors on boot with a couple of them.

This is just a personal observation, but it would be really helpful if people had their blogs and wiki's setup to log dates of entries. Thinkwiki is great, but it's very hard to tell if what you're reading there is from yesterday or two years ago. Also, if you're writing a how-to guide, please don't gloss over what "just works" about something that has been known to not work once it is fixed, and don't say "it all worked OOTB" if you haven't even tested it. A personal gripe there, I guess, but I get a little annoyed when I rely on community reports that "it all just works now," spend $1k+ on a lappy, and discover that it does not, in fact, all "just work" now.

I'll keep banging on this, though, and I'll post more specific error messages later on.

Snarkout · 2006-11-09 14:29:55

Oh, and to fix the sg* issue for good, I added sg to my modules array in /etc/rc.conf - I forgot to mention that step.

Snarkout · 2006-12-03 21:19:34

OK I figured out WTF the issue was - there was no region set on the lappy's dvd drive. I had looked at this as a possible issue prior to actually discovering this, but since I still couldn't play dvds using a known-good drive I dismissed this. In any case, I installed regionset and set my region to 1, and no more errors. I did have to remove all of the css keys that were in my .dvdcss directory before previously attempted DVDs would play, though. To hell with region coding.

byte · 2006-12-04 01:23:45

All DVD drives in my vicinity got modified firmware to take care of such issues.

Snarkout · 2006-12-04 13:55:48

What's particularly strange is that after posting this, I decided to see why the "known good drive" in my wife's t42 was ok, and lo and behold, it no longer plays DVDs either. It played them fine for over a year, but now, POOF! - nothing. I'm almost certain that this can't be enabled/disabled by libdvdcss/libdvdread so I'm baffled.

Oh, and thanks for the link - I've looked around some, even before posting the resolution, and it seems like these particular lappy drives haven't been cracked, and probably never will be. They're listed as dvd-ram drives for some reason. While it's frustrating, I only have a handfull of non-region1 dvds anyhow. For the time being, I'm just glad that the thing works at all.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-11-08 14:50:27

t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

#2 2006-11-09 13:46:27

Re: t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

#3 2006-11-09 14:29:55

Re: t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

#4 2006-12-03 21:19:34

Re: t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

#5 2006-12-04 01:23:45

Re: t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

#6 2006-12-04 13:55:48

Re: t43 dvd drive playback issues [SOLVED]

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