> On Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:02:07 +0200, Pascal Costanza wrote:

>> On 01/06/2010 12:46, Tamas K Papp wrote:
>>> On Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:17:34 +0200, Pascal Costanza wrote:

>>>>> If I recall correctly, I did get VLC, but it was not working for some
>>>>> reason.  I also tried various tools for circumventing the
>>>>> restriction, but could not get them working either (I think that I
>>>>> had a revised firmware or drive, Apple was one step ahead in the game
>>>>> at that point).
>>>>>    And more importantly, I was fed up with OS X by that point for
>>>>>    various
>>>>> other reasons.

>>>>> But at the moment I booted up Debian from the HD for the first time,
>>>>> I knew I made the right decision.  I didn't need to fight the OS any
>>>>> more, everything was just an apt-get away.

>>>> Your story doesn't make sense. Enforcing region codes is either done
>>>> in software, or in hardware (i.e., the actual DVD player). If it is
>>>> done in software it can be circumvented, if it is done in hardware, it
>>>> can't.

>>> If only the world was categorizable using these simple dichotomies :-)

>>> I think it was "hardware", but the circumvention method was installing
>>> a new firmware for the DVD drive.  I didn't bother, though.

>> If you didn't bother, this means that switching to Debian couldn't have
>> possibly solved your problem either.

> You appear to be very quick to jump to conclusions.  First, you claim
> that the story doesn't make sense, then you claim that I could not
> have solved my problem the way I did.

> Unfortunately, neither claim is warranted.

> Switching to Debian and installing the appropriate decoding library
> did solve my problem.  I don't know whether that was because
> Debian/Linux uses a different decoding mechanism (software instead of
> hardware?), or whether OS X enforced something which prevented similar
> software doing the same, but I do not care -- the important thing is
> that it worked easily in Debian after a few minutes work, and I could
> not get it to work on OS X, despite asking for advice on several
> forums and spending quite a few hours on it.

> Please don't feel that you have to defend Apple/OS X: I am sure that
> it works fine for you, it just didn't work for me.  I understand that
> it is possible to entertain the notion that this wasn't the fault of
> Apple.

> OTOH, I don't think they are very keen on open architectures and
> relinquishing even a tiny bit of control (the iPhone App Store is a
> recent example).  If you can live with that, that's fine.  I can't.