DVD, digital copies and stupid errors

[igator210]

For years, I've played DVDs on my iMac and never had an issue. I've never bother with the digital copies and just play the DVD directly with Apple's DVD player.

I just bought "Family Guy: It's a trap". When I loaded it, instead of auto playing the DVD, I get a splash screen asking if I want to transfer the digital copy or play the DVD. When I double click to play the DVD, I get the message:

"The operation couldn’t be completed. sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified"

Grrr....

Is there something I'm missing or is the new state of DVD protection (If it is, I'm not liking it).

EDIT: Currently running 10.7.2

 

[blueroom]

Try VLC

 

[r0k]

For years, I've played DVDs on my iMac and never had an issue. I've never bother with the digital copies and just play the DVD directly with Apple's DVD player.

I just bought "Family Guy: It's a trap". When I loaded it, instead of auto playing the DVD, I get a splash screen asking if I want to transfer the digital copy or play the DVD. When I double click to play the DVD, I get the message:

"The operation couldn’t be completed. sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified"

Grrr....

Is there something I'm missing or is the new state of DVD protection (If it is, I'm not liking it).

EDIT: Currently running 10.7.2

Launch Apple's DVD player first. Type dvd in spotlight and it comes up. Then insert the DVD you want to play. Ignore the menus. On your menu bar, (I'm not in front of my Mac right now) there should be a "go" item and from there you can pick any title number on the DVD and play it, ignoring all the menus, previews and other BS. And yes, there is a constant cat and mouse game going on where the studios assume we are all thieves and keep changing the way they master DVDs with mandatory menus, 99 bogus titles with the real movie sitting often siting at title 97. You might consider taking it back for a refund. If it doesn't play on your computer without troubleshooting, I would consider that to be a product defect.

On the outside of the DVD label, does it say "Enjoy hours of troubleshooting and compatibility issues, previews and obfuscated menus and if you are lucky you can watch this DVD?" So the studio's overzealous DRM and so-called digital copy scheme means what is in the package does not live up to the labeling on the package. Either return it or rip it with handbrake and watch it at your leisure.

 

[dgbowers]

Try VLC

This.

 

[igator210]

So, I manually launch both VLC and Apple DVD Player. Not working

With Apple DVD, all options under "Go" are greyed out. All I can really do is 'File => Open DVD Media' and explore the disk. So far nothing gives me the ability of playing the movie.

With VLC, it doesn't even recognize there is a DVD mounted.

Not sure if it means anything, but in the splash screen where it asks me to transfer the digital copy or play the dvd, if I bring up the properties of the play dvd, the name of the program to play the dvd is 'Play DVD.app'. When I launch it, it does open the Apple DVD Player, but I'm wondering if this is a PC vs Mac thing.

I did decided to go ahead with the digital copy, and that seemed to work fine. I'm gonna try and borrow a physical dvd player (since I got rid of mine years ago) and see if it plays that way.

 

[zbowling]

Oh so this is what is happening. The disk for family guy has two paritions. When you launch "play with Dvd Player.app" thing runs a grade school level design app that invokes a bunch of commands to mount the other disk. The problem is that this requires sudo permission to do and so it fails asking for the password on your system.

The guy that design it must not have a password or something on his system.

Here is a simple work around. Run this in a shell:

/Volumes/Family\ Guy\ -\ PTOE\ Tunes/Play\ DVD.app/Contents/MacOS/Play\ DVD

Then it prompts to put in a password, enter your password.

This app will run through every single partition on the disk and try to mount it as a UDF format partition. When it works, it launches the DVD player app and then registers another app to try and listen for when you eject the disk so it eject both volumes. Looks harmless, just badly designed.