I remember several years ago when I wanted to watch a Star Wars DVD on a computer.
This was in the UK with the DVDs purchased in the UK and with a DVD reader also purchased in the UK, as that’s where I live.
Windows Media Player told me that the region of the Disc was wrong and that if I wanted to watch it, it could instruct the firmware on the DVD player to update its allowed region, but that I could only do this (I think) five times and no more.
Rather than dealing with this pompous bullshit I watched it with VLC player which just worked without doing any of that legal nonsense.
I had a tangentially related situation many (~20?) years ago when I bought a music album released under Sony, I had a sweet PC based Hi-Fi setup, and the DRM ring they'd added to the disc meant it wouldn't play back at anything above MP3 128.
I noticed a ~1.5cm ring around the outside of the disc was visibly a different colour/texture to the standard audio part; I tried blanking it out with Sharpie which some people online suggested might work, but eventually gave up and contacted Sony to tell them how pissed off I was that they were preventing PC-based music listeners from listening to what they'd bought. They sent back an apology and a new copy of the disk without the DRM/MP3 crap.
I bet LibreDrive might have worked by letting me just read the disc raw and grab the bits I need.
“Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files invisible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.”
I had a similar issue, of moving from the US to Germany in 2000 and my spouse bringing her favorite DVDs with us. However, once we got there, she was unable to watch any of them, as all the DVD players were for the EU region, while her DVDs were for the US.
She is not a technical person, but she is now very acutely aware of B.S. restrictions like this (and later DRM on mp3s) and how to get around them.
Steve Jobs famously called Blu-ray's licensing (presumably mandating annoying DRM requirements at the OS, driver, and device level) a "bag of hurt" - but it probably didn't hurt that Apple already had a competing "iTunes" movie download store, whose annoying DRM requirements Apple happily implemented at the OS, driver, and device level.
In any case, rip/mix/burn never really made it to iDVD or iMovie (or QuickTime Player), and Apple never shipped Blu-ray movie player software for Macs.
This was in the UK with the DVDs purchased in the UK and with a DVD reader also purchased in the UK, as that’s where I live.
Windows Media Player told me that the region of the Disc was wrong and that if I wanted to watch it, it could instruct the firmware on the DVD player to update its allowed region, but that I could only do this (I think) five times and no more.
Rather than dealing with this pompous bullshit I watched it with VLC player which just worked without doing any of that legal nonsense.
I’ve remained a big advocate of VLC ever since.