virtualbox.org

It makes me wonder whether a native Linux machine will play copy protected DVDs

Yes it does.

Perryg wrote:

It makes me wonder whether a native Linux machine will play copy protected DVDs

Yes it does.

okay thanks Perry

Since the OP on a Windows host, and myself on a Mac host can play unprotected DVDs in a VB guest but not protected DVDs, is a bug report warranted?

loukingjr wrote:Since the OP on a Windows host, and myself on a Mac host can play unprotected DVDs in a VB guest but not protected DVDs, is a bug report warranted?

I don't know if a bug report is warranted since the documentation only suggests that it might work if one enabled passthrough. I can, however, definitely confirm that it is a VirtualBox issue. I just installed the same Lubuntu environment as a host on the same desktop with the same DVD drives, and they play encrypted movies just fine. (It's amazing what one will do when you're retired to keep the brain juices flowing.)

I was certain protected DVD's would play on a Linux box once Perryg said they would. Now that I'm up at this horrendous hour I may have realized what it going on. It may not be a VirtualBox issue at all other than it happens to be a virtualization program. Copy protection schemes are designed let someone play a disk normally but prevent them from making a copy. So in a sense, the DVDs do play normally on the host drive bur since playing them through to a VM is essentially "making a copy", the protection scheme works. At least that's what I'm thinking now. So I don't think a bug report is needed.

OK, here's where it gets weird. I then installed a Lubuntu VirtualBox guest under my Lubuntu host that's playing restricted DVD's just fine. Again, I set one drive with passthrough and the other not. With several attempts to play a movie, the DVD was recognized as a movie about 1/4 of the time. And it actually played once in the drive without passthrough, albeit with a hickup every few seconds. The video just had a jerk periodically, and audio was fine. The other drive almost played it once, i.e., the video looked like it had a bad case of compression defects. In both cases, it was the first attempt to play that was (almost) successful. It almost seems that drives remember failed attempts subsequently.

So, I don't know what to conclude, other than this is about all the time I'm going to spend on this topic... unless someone else says that they have it working in VirtualBox routinely.

Jim, I don't know why I didn't think of this before but, if you are interested, you can stream a DVD from your host to a guest using VLC. I don't know if you want to bother of course.