Um, no, they always had protection. They had region locks as well as CSS (content scrambling system) that was supposed to scramble movies in a way that only licensed players could decode.

But both protection systems were so amateurish that they were easily broken. See here.

Did i say it prevent it ? no.

it's a drm, no matter you are able or not to make a copy of DVD protected.

in my country there's even a law for regulating the copy (which is stupid anyway) called DADVSI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DADVSI

If it doesn't prevent the creation of copies and the subsequent use of copies, then it's clearly not DRM. By your reasoning, formatting floppies for Mac would be DRM as they wouldn't work with PCs even though there's nothing to stop you from making new copies and using them wherever you like, so long as it was a supported OS.

Wrong; CSS was and still is there to prevent you from making copies of DVDs. You have no way to copy a protected DVD unless you use some ripper that will remove said protection.

You can argue that it's "copy protection" and not "DRM", but using this definition then Blu Ray would also be "DRM-free" because AACS is also there to prevent you from making copies and there is no actual "online check" in place. The only time there is "real" DRMs on Blu Ray (i.e. with online check) is when you want to use the "Managed copy" feature.

The iso image isn't encrypted. You can burn it to disc as it is and pop the disc into a player and it will work.

Only the content is encrypted but it will be automatically decrypted by your player while you play it. You only need tools to decrypt it if you want to use the content outside of licensed players. It's just the same as with DVDs.

They didn't always have those, they added that later. I had forgotten about the region locks. The early DVDs didn't even have those.

Although, the region locking is definitely closer to DRM than anything else on the discs. Calling it DRM is a bit much seeing as it just requires an appropriate drive and you can change the drive's region if you really need to.
Oh, that's complete bullshit. I know for a fact that it's possible to rip a DVD without having to crack anything and still be able to use the disc in any licensed player. I know people that have done it.

Just because you choose not to acknowledge that fact doesn't make it any less true. I'm sure people here in the US do that all the time with Netflix discs.
Precisely. Although, I believe you also need to crack it if you want to reauthor or change the contents.

You can argue as long as want ;).

I'm pretty much aware of what's a DRM regardless DVD & Blu-Ray

because as i mentioned we got a law which regulate the copy of those. and this law (in my country) is against the consumer.

well you're right , it's the content , the movie , so it's still DRM'ed.

regardless the DVD, i understand some people are confused about the DRM , because the drm used , is now pointless and free players like VLC can playback those.

I'm out of here, I've got better things to do with my time than argue with people that are so poorly informed on the matter and actively looking for ways of ignoring reality.

Again it's totally wrong; you cannot copy the content of a DVD Video disk unless : it's unprotected (as CSS is not mandatory), you have some tool that either remove the protection on the on the fly or while ripping it.

You know instead of having friend of a friend who has a friend who told him that a friend of his neighbor did it, you could simply pop a DVD into your PC DVD drive and try to copy its content. In case you don't have a DVD-rom drive here is what will happen :

No, you are mistaken there. CSS does not prevent making an exact copy of the disc. Back then there were no DVD writer so nobody thought about the possibility of making an exact copy of the disc.

CSS only scrambles the movie in a way that (theoretically) only licensed players should have been able to decode. Thus nobody should have been able to get a decoded movie stream from the DVD to re-compress it to .avi, VCD, SVCD or whatever.

But when you make an exact copy of the disc you do not need a decoded movie stream at all. After all the target disc has to be CSS encoded just like the original or it would not work. After all, CSS is mandatory on DVD, AFAIK. Only when you use the content (e.g. play it in an unlicensed player, compress it down to a single layer DVD or lower, etc.) do you need to unscramble it.

If you manage somehow to copy, byte per byte, the protected VOB it would be totally useless as you wouldn't have the "Disk keys" present on the disk, without the key disk no legit player will ever be able to decode the video stream.

And those keys are not accessible by "normal" means, you cannot "copy" them, unless you have some custom hacked hardware. (The key exchange and decryption is done at an "hardware level", you cannot simply copy and paste them from the OS).

But anyways let's say that you somehow manage to copy the disk keys, you would need a way to "burn" them to a new DVD-R before you can have a legit player play your disk, And that's not something you can do with a normal DVD-Writer and not something you can do with normal media, for that you need a glass master and a DVD replication chain. (let's say that it would cost you several 1000$ to copy a single disk that way)

There was some rumors that it would be possible, with an hacked DVD writing software, an hacked DVD-Rom firmware and DVD+R media to write to the area where Disk keys are normally stored, but I am not aware of anybody actually successfully doing it.

3- you are saying that digital files are worse because only blurays are supported by companies.. and that's exactly my point. Those optical media are mostly kept alive by them.
In your example, if some file format weren't supported, you'd just need to dowload some update, instead of changing all the hardware. MKV and H264, then, are quite famous.

4- i was thinking more at the compressed size. Anyway, do you know that currently exist 4-6 Tb drives with the size of a big book? They seem way better than that wallet. Also, would you collect physical discs and then remove them from the original case?? O_o

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About that angry Hedward.. first LOL for the reaction; then, i think that optical media is usually copy-protected, unless you use illegal software to overcome it..