What a fucking shit show. You buy an original DVD but cannot watch it because of a stupid copy protection system.
"Injects purposely damaged sectors into the DVD in places not read by most DVD players."
Well tough luck, VLC reads all sectors and chokes on the corrupted ones.
Here I am, sitting with a legally bought laptop, a legally bought DVD and a legally owned playback software, yet unable to enjoy my property.

THANK YOU HOLLYWOOD! >:(

AFAIK it not illegal to torrent media for which you have purchased a license.

@HiFiWiFiSciFi if you bought the license, and not the media itself, then it should be fine. It is the same reason Microsoft lets you download Windows 10 as an ISO for free. You pay for the license to use it rather than the actual software, as the former is more difficult to redistribute than the software itself.

IANAL, though.

It's 2020. The fuck are you doing with a DVD?

@TheBeardedOne I still use DVDs. It is usually faster than storing stuff in cloud storage/streaming because we live in the middle of nowhere, so mobile and broadband is slow and erratic at best.

@HiFiWiFiSciFi Take care that you don't seed the torrent when downloading, which torrent programs do by default, because that counts as uploading and is definitely illegal.

What show is this? I don't want to buy it.

I do all my movies DVDs cause blue ray is a cluster.

They keep getting rid of the good shows and putting garbage on movie streaming.

libdvdread4

could use a distributed license network/marketplace to recognize licenses are more important than the data itself.

eulas probable forbide it though.

In other words: DRM annoys customers (buyers) while it doesn't affect pirating. Thus pirating is easier and/or more comfortable than buying.

I gave up on buying legal media for the most part because a) I don't want to deal with the hassle and b) I don't want to support such business practices.

I prefer a DVD over streaming because usually, I can access a DVD anytime I want and am not in the hand of a streaming provider. Who could terminate my account in a second because I "violated their ToS" in some way (and I don't have the money to fight a long legal battle against a big corp to prove my innocence). The result would be, I have lost my digital collection and a pile of money.

As @saucyatom already wrote, copy protection does nothing to prevent pirating and is a hassle for the legal owner. And I also agree on the point of such protections making pirating more attractive. I have a file, which plays without issue.

I assume VLC player already has the appropriate libraries present, I will look into libdvdread4 nonetheless. According to VLCs output, the disc is protected by Sony ARccOS and the libdvdcss should "match" that protection system. Yesterday evening however it failed, leaving a unsatisfied user and increasing the grunge against copy protection.

@stop I tried libdvdread4 and found out it has been superseded by libdvdread6. Sadly, it did not fix my issue. I assume, I have to dig out my trusty PlayStation 2 to view that bastard of a DVD. After all, it is a Sony product and it should not struggle with a DRM made by Sony, right? ^^

(For those too lazy to dig out the ARccOS wikipedia article: Sony had a series of DVD players which were not capable of playing ARccOS protected DVDs. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot)

@DBX12 here in Germany i never had a dvd which hadnt CSS (the encryption). and CSS is broken by default and can be read by libdvdread.

@stop Yes, same country :D

The DVD in question is using a CSS as encryption too, but it uses Sony ARccOS (according to VLC log output) and this is the "better" implementation of CSS and apparently too much for libdvdread. My DVD had stutters and after the first chapter, it skipped to an chapter in the last third. The progress bar showed no jump, so the software thought the content of chapter 20 is the one following chapter 1.

But I'm over it. I put a note with the DVD to use the Playstation 2 to view it ... and a mental note to think twice before buying a DVD.

Like the simpsons dvd i have buy 5 years ago