[Techtalk] Trouble with DVD

[Mary]

Hey folks,

A dive videographer in Thailand sold my partner and I a DVD of a boat
dive we went on, but the DVD doesn't seem to work.

The major symptom is that inserting it into a DVD computer drive (on
Linux machines) causes all read requests to the drive to block and then
time-out after a minute or so. (Among other things, this causes Nautilus
to freeze -- it not unreasonably supposes that reads from local drives
are fast.) The DVD is never recognised as a valid disk at any point.

We don't have a lot of access to non-computer DVD players: an Xbox we
put it in said it was in an unrecognised format.

We assumed the DVD was faulty and sent it back to Thailand, but the new
DVD sent to us by the maker behaves exactly the same way, so we have to
presume it works for him. (And since he is located on Koh Lanta in the
Andaman Sea off west Thailand, we must now assume he has more important
things to worry about and cannot contact him to ask about it.)

Anyone know of anything else that might cause this behaviour? One theory
I had was region incompatibility (our players are region 4, Thailand is
in region 3) but I wouldn't have thought that would cause a freeze at
the level of the read() system call.

Log messages in the syslog are totally uninteresting: all we see is the
error message when the read call times out. (I will try and get the
exact text of the message tonight and post an update.)

-Mary