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Comment by trotsky | Hacker News Reader

How do you know there isn't a manufacturing error with the disc, or that your dvd player hasn't gone bad? If you're really talking about a DVD and not a bluray I'm surprised there is actually a way to add "new drm" to a disc. Googling salt+drm only finds your blog discussing that movie - are you sure this passes occam's razor?

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It's common for some of the major studios to implement intentional errors - DVD format spec errors that are designed to make copying disc data difficult while not hindering playback. The efficacy of their plan is pretty questionable, but they've been doing it for years, so at minimum it makes them feel better.

Source?

edit: I'm not disagreeing, just asking for more information, why the downvotes :/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARccOS_Protection

Since it did play on my other DVD player it would seem that the only errors are intentional.

Try Googling Sony+drm - they have form for this type of nonsense.

It definitely happens that one dvd player will be better at playing scratched or defective content than another - just like happens with CD players. And I'm certainly aware of the sony "rootkit" computer drm they put on a few audio discs some time ago... But that was on a cd data track and had nothing to do with an audio cd player pushing audio out.

I'm not asking if they would be willing to add new DRM to a DVD - obviously the answer to that question is yes. I'm just asking how you know that is what's going on, or if it's even possible to do. Can play in player A but not in player B so it must be new DRM is pretty thin.

The disc is physically perfect - no scratches.

Sony use an additional DRM system called ARccOS on their DVDs. ARccOS keeps changing, so my assessment is that this latest version is another stinker - it's happened before.

It seems that ARccOS has evolved into 'structural protection' - http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=23291

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