DVD Playback Question

[obrian93]

Apologies in advance for the horrible vagueness of this, but I'm hoping someone here might have had a similar experience. This began with SageTV, but turns out to be system-wide. nVidia's site, btw, has squat (although all the stuff that sounded close was tried anyway).

Quick specs: everything's great. Using an nVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 and the new PureVideo decoder. All up to date. DVD drive is set to region 1. Hunky dorey. Sage runs like a champ. Best 80 bucks I ever spent.

There is no monitor attached to the PC in question. Everything is done from the television (analog ntsc with composite-in, nothing fancy). Anything dualview-related is absent.

So when I try to play a DVD, I get good audio but a black screen. But wait! This is ONLY for mainstream retail discs. My bargain-bin copy of "War of the Monsters" and an old Korean bootleg of "The Phantom Menace" both play fine.

(and just so you know, I did buy a legit copy of TPM as soon as it was released. not that it'll play on the sage anyway).

Media Player 10 won't play any of it. Funky homebrew or otherwise. VLC doesn't seem to care and will try no matter what; sometimes playing the unplayable, and sometimes barfing noisy madness on the screen until it crashes.

Is this at all familiar to anyone?

[stanger89]

Sounds like a macrovision problem. IIRC some nVidia cards didn't have MV encoders on their TV outs and would (after some driver version) disable it for MV protected discs.