On Wed, Nov 22, 2000 at 01:08:47AM +0100, Sean Doran wrote:
> FWIW, I also took your exact advice and just tried my oldest, crustiest IDE
> CD ROM and I get the same results.

I suspect that the problem you are having is nothing to do with protection,
but the fact that VideoCDs typically use sector sizes that are not 2048 bytes
to store the video data - CD sectors can be one of three sizes, especially
for CDROM/XA discs, of which VideoCD is an instance: 2048, 2324 and 2336 bytes.

Unless there is a way of telling the drive to use Mode 2 Form 1 or Mode 2
Form 2 sectors, then you will not be able to read the video data from the CD.
There may be a SCSI command to tell the drive to switch what type of sector
to read, and also a way of querying what type a particular sector on a CD is.
However, you should still be able to mount the CD and access other files from
it. 

I've also seen a similar trick used on normal data CDs, but in the first 16
sectors (which aren't used by ISO9660), presumably as a means of doing copy
protection - a lot of ripping software won't cope with non-2048 byte sectors.

Ian.