DVD playback working only after commercial Software installation?

[Martin Wilck]

Hello,

I have recently been installing Linux on two very similar Samsung
notebooks.
I have encountered the same phenomenon both times and I thought I should
post a a record of it here. The laptops both have a built-in Matshita
"DVD-RAM UJ-822S" DVD device.

On both laptops, I first tried to configure DVD playback using
libdvdcss2, but it failed reproducably with DVD read errors like those
documented in the attachment. I tried reading the DVD's and got read
errors, too.

In order to check whether the drive had some defect, I then booted into
Windows, installed the "PowerDVD5" software bundled with the laptop, and
found everything worked.
The really strange thing was that when I retried libdvdcss2 afterwards
the read errors were gone. It appears that the installation of the
Windows software changed something in the player's firmware.

I find this pretty shocking. It works fine for me now, yet I'd rather
not have to install "PowerDVD5" on my computer to use the DVD drive. I
found hints that this may have something to do with the region code, but
I doubt this was the point here (I didn't have  to enter a  region code
at any time during the installation, just a "PowerDVD5" installation key).

I have seen that other people have had similar problems than me. I
encourage everybody to try a similar setup procedure and find if it
works for them, too (I wouldn't have believed myself had I encountered
this only on one computer).

Regards
Martin

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