T61 Will Not Play Any Copy Protected DVDs

[eecon]

I have a T61 with the 140 Nvidia card, WinXP and a DVD-RW.

When I am docked in my Advanced Mini-Dock and using the mini-dock's DVI outputs to my 22" WS monitor, the T61 halts playback using WinDVD on all commerical DVDs with copy-protection and the following message is displayed:

"Playback Stopped. Protection Signal Detected."

I've tried dozens of retail legitimate DVDs from several sources and also rentals from Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.

When I open my T61 lid, the laptop's LCD automatically turns on and the 22" WS monitor goes blank ..... then all DVDs play okay.

Also, when using Windows Media Player, all DVDs will play fine on either screen. However, Lenovo's preloaded WinDVD will only play copy-protected DVDs on the T61's LCD. I used System Update to update the version of WinDVD, but that did not help.

Does anyone have any theories here? Maybe my Presentation Director settings? I have also fiddled around with the monitor settings in BIOS with no help.

As a side note, I cloned my WinXP system to a Hitachi 7k200 200GB 7200RPM HD using Acronis 11 and an external enclosure about 6 months ago (from the old internal HD to the new blank HD in the external enclosure and then swapped the HDs). However, I never tried playing a copy protected DVD before the cloning so I'm not sure if a hidden problem with the cloning operation has just now been discovered.

I have the original 100GB 7200 RPM hard drive with the original WinXP Preload still intact, so I suppose I could pop it back in and see if WinDVD will let the copy protected DVDs play on the 22" WS monitor. However, I'll bet that's not going to help either.

Maybe WinDVD is programmed not to play on external monitor? However, when I check my settings under Program Director it shows that I have no external monitor, even when using the 22" WS.

Very frustrating ..... Thanks

Editing Note: Some good news .... I tried it again with a different VGA cable and it plays the copy-protected DVDs okay on the 22" WS external Monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 225BW which is HDCP Compliant). However, the DVI connection continues to not play the copy-protected DVDs .... so my original question remains, but only regarding the DVI connection.

[agarza]

Why just not ditch WinDVD, for the majority of DVD titles I prefer to use VLC player, it uses so much less CPU power and playbacks with no trouble.

Haven't heard of the Advanced Mini-Dock problem, so weird

[basketb]

It appears your external monitor does not support HDCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandw ... Protection).

[EvilH]

HDCP should not apply to standard definition DVD movies.

I would also try VLC or Media Player Classic

[sarbin]

@eecon:
if you're willing to sign-up at experts-exchange, there may be more info.
see this link: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardwar ... 16021.html
which is someone's question and is similar to yours. sign-up is required to see the answer. i have no idea what's involved in the sign-up.

[rkawakami]

@eecon:
if you're willing to sign-up at experts-exchange, there may be more info. <snip> i have no idea what's involved in the sign-up.

Free trial for 7 days after which you pay $$$ ($13/month or $100/year). It didn't used to be this way several years ago when the site was free. Some older information from that site can be found using the WayBack Machine .

[sarbin]

"$13/month or $100/year"

crikey!

i'll hang here instead, thankyouverymuch!

[eecon]

It appears your external monitor does not support HDCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandw ... Protection).

Actually my Samsung Syncmaster 225BW-BLACK 22" WS is HDCP Compliant, but found some info that may point to the Nvidia 140 card as the culprit .... that the video card may have been intentially crippled by Lenovo with regards to HDCP output compliance using DVI.

Please note that I edited my original post to reflect that it works okay via the VGA output on the mini-dock after I tried a different VGA cable (my first one must have been bad). I also tried another DVI cable, but no luck there .... WinDVD still halts playback via DVI to the 22" WS monitor.

Before I reluctantly give out my credit card number for that free 7-day Experts-Exchange Trial, has anyone been able to use WinDVD with an external HDCP Compliant monitor via the DVI output from a docking station (X or T61 with or without the 140 Nvidia video cards)?

Thanks to everyone for all the quick help so far

[rkawakami]

Interesting.... when I clicked on the link provided by sarbin above, the "accpeted solution" was hidden. Using Google to find the same thread at experts-exchange.com reveals this as the solution:

It's crappy software that's the culprit. Since the introduction of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, an HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) compliant display device is required to watch these movies. The idea is to prevent people from circumventing copy protection by hooking the video out to some video recorder device. The projector you are using is not HDCP compliant.

InterVideo apparently has extended the HDCP requirement to ordinary DVD's as well (which is a load of crap in my opinion). Your best bet is to get some other player software for the machine

[eecon]

Interesting.... when I clicked on the link provided by sarbin above, the "accpeted solution" was hidden. Using Google to find the same thread at experts-exchange.com reveals this as the solution:

It's crappy software that's the culprit. Since the introduction of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, an HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) compliant display device is required to watch these movies. The idea is to prevent people from circumventing copy protection by hooking the video out to some video recorder device. The projector you are using is not HDCP compliant.

InterVideo apparently has extended the HDCP requirement to ordinary DVD's as well (which is a load of crap in my opinion). Your best bet is to get some other player software for the machine

Thanks for the info!

BTW, I edited and updated my post above to note that it works okay via VGA after all ..... just the DVI chokes. Since I can't tell any difference in PQ on the 22" WS between VGA and DVI for my old eyes, I'll just switch to VGA for now and investigate getting a better software player ..... I rarely, if ever, watch DVDs from a computer anyway but it's nice to know that I don't have a hardware problem regarding this WinDVD issue

[sarbin]

ahhh... now that makes sense. i always understood it to be hdmi and dvi interfaces that enforced hdcp.

[pae77]

I really can't stand that intervideo win dvd software. It's incredibly bloated and doesn't work well. There is so much better stuff available and most of it is free.

[eecon]

I found the solution to my original post at the start of this thread regarding the DVI connection

Turns out that I had an older original OEM WinDVD 5.0 software disk sitting in my old parts drawer. I had originally used it on my desktop computer a couple of years ago (to match the same player that was pre-installed on my older T42 at that time).

So on a hunch, I uninstalled the WinDVD version 5.0-B11.1194 that was on my T61 (from System Update) and installed the WinDVD 5.0 from the OEM disk, and guess what? ...... the older OEM version 5.0-B11.230 looks and works the same, except it plays all commercial DVDs (with copy-protection) via the DVI connector from my advanced mini-dock to my external 22" WS monitor.

No more need to use my VGA connector as a workaround and this older version seems less bloated and uses less resources (even though it looks and works the same as the Lenovo pre-installed WinDVD version)