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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://debugmo.de/2007/07/read-your-dvds-the-raw-way/

This will be an attempt to document stuff I've done in the past. I'm bad at documenting, so I'll just present what I've done. If you have further questions, always feel free to email me.

This time I wanted to know what's on my DVDs. I mean, not what's normally visible, but what's underneath the data layer. Contrary to CDs, where a lot of work has been done to allow reading every bit of a CD, there is surprisingly less information for DVDs.

[...] CD readers often have special modes to read raw sectors. This is probably related to the fact that you need some of these functions to digitally read out audio data from audio CDs, but they can also be used to explore CD-ROMs. In the DVD-domain, we are not that lucky. Most of the signal processing is done in hardware, and recent drives are single-chip chipsets, with one chip doing all the work, from analog RF to IDE (or SCSI). Sometimes firmware allows you reading 2064 bytes per sector, sometimes you can disable the EDC check or scrambling, but usually, you cannot go further. Sometimes you can query PI/PO stats, but that's all.

[...] If you want to build your own debug DVD reader - well, start with finding the proper DVD-ROM. I'm sure there are a lot of (older) DVD-ROMs which have the right data ports. Take a scope, and watch for digital data. An easy way to tell if this data comes directly from DVD is to slow down the disc a bit (with your finger :) - only a bit, the drive needs to keep in sync! -, and watch if the data rate changes. If it does, chances are big that you found the right data. It should be approx. twice the payload data rate.

Original Submission