Das Werkstatt

[PROBLEM]
An official, national archiving institution had to ingest their DVD collection as ISO image.
The best tool for reading optical media job is "dvdisaster".
Dvdisaster is designed to read optical media in a special way (that's what it's designed and good for), but that's the reason why dvdisaster doesn't use libdvdread. So it can't handle encrypted DVDs, for example.

[SOLUTION]
A video player (like VLC for example), uses libdvdread to descramble the files.
So, if you open an encrypted DVD in VLC, seek to some random position and hit play, then stop again - Dvdisaster is then able to read the scrambled disk, too.


Another example showing how copy protection can cause cultural heritage to become lost - if we aren't able to circumvent it...

In case a broken (or scrambled) sector is found by dvdisaster, it writes the following string into the extracted disk image (e.g. ".iso") file:

dvdisaster dead sector marker
This sector could not be read from the image.
Its contents have been substituted by the dvdisaster read routine.