Oh, and you have to use Windows if that’s a problem for you.

Bingo. Microsoft: Making children sad since 1975. And even if I was forced to use it, why would I buy crap from your company to do the same thing that GPL software already does?

There’s some very typical obsessive geek behaviour here, though 🙂

Duh. ;^) And it wouldn’t be half as much fun if it weren’t illegal. (kidding) You’re right, the law is fucked up, but at least it’s also largely irrelevant and toothless.

Wow, I guess I am buying the wrong DVDs. I couldn’t swear to it (especially since they are now packed for moving), but I don’t think any of the DVDs I own (which, admittedly, is not a huge number) actually have commercials, so it never occurred to me that this is a problem.

Posted by: moopheus | May 31, 2009 7:14 PM

It’s basically an individual DVD (or possibly a studio) thing. As someone mentioned above, there are “prohibited user operations” that the people who master the DVD can set, so you can’t do some stuff like FF, RW or skip to menu. This was more common with older movies, but today most of them if I’m not mistaken (only watching blurays recently) already don’t set PUO’s for commercials, but only for FBI warnings, studio logos, and such kind of crap (which, at 3 or more in a row can get just as annoying, but still).

In both cases though, the easiest way is to go with a laptop and AnyDVD (“HD” version for bluray). It’s the only program with such an incredibly neat feature that it “remasters” your DVD on-the-fly (so no need for ripping), getting rid of region, PUO’s (so you’ll be able to skip) and other such nuisances. You can then use any free software player of your liking without worrying if it can skip stuff or not.

I’m an HTPC geek, and Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD is by far the only program that it’s worth paying for in that realm (the commercial bluray players all suck, especially PowerDVD).

Give it a try, there’s a 21-day free trial at slysoft.com.

There is one caveat though, the super crappy Panasonic a.k.a. “Matshita” drives that have region lock that can’t be hacked. These super cheapo drives come with many laptops unfortunately, but you can easily buy an external one or replace it with a NEC drive.

Oh, and you have to use Windows if that’s a problem for you.

my_prompt$ mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify dvd:// 2>/dev/null | grep ID_DVD_TITLE

ID_DVD_TITLES=3
ID_DVD_TITLE_1_CHAPTERS=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_1_ANGLES=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_CHAPTERS=13
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_ANGLES=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_3_CHAPTERS=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_3_ANGLES=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_1_LENGTH=16.000
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_LENGTH=8100.867
ID_DVD_TITLE_3_LENGTH=105.000

From the length and number of chapters of title 2, it’s obviously the main feature. Let’s suppose we also know that we want to jump right to chapter 6:

my_prompt$ mplayer dvd://2 -chapter 6

As Colin mentioned, you can also use the -ss option to jump to a particular time index inside the title.