White Paper on the Playback of Encrypted DVD Movies with RealMagic Hollywood

There has been a lot of controversy on the MMSYSTEM 275 error that comes up on some systems when trying to play a DVD encrypted movie with a Hollywood board. This paper tries to shed some light on the reason behind the error and some hints that can help fix the problem. This is not a full and guaranteed procedure to fix the problem since all the cards are not in the hands of a single party.

CAUSE OF THE MESSAGE

Encrypted DVD movies are encrypted in the sense that they contain some keys that need to be exchanged with the DVD-ROM drive and the decoding hardware drivers or software players.

When the RealMagic Hollywood driver tries to get these keys from the DVD-ROM drive and for "some reason" the DVD-ROM drive does not pass this information, the RealMagic driver informs the Multimedia System of Win 95 that it cannot read the data from the DVD Disc.

At this point the Multimedia system will display the error message

MMSYSTEM 275: Cannot find the specified file. Make sure the path and filename are correct.

This error explicitly mentions that the application cannot find the specified file but in reality it cannot read the encrypting keys.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM

The key to the solution or fix for the infamous 275 error is the incompatibility behind the "some reason" referred to in the previous section.

The IDE path is the medium through which the information should pass from the DVD Disc to the RealMagic driver. No reports have been received about this problem from SCSI DVD-ROM drives.

The IDE path has parts or connections with the motherboard BIOS, the IDE controller, the IDE drivers, and the DVD-ROM drives.

1 - Install the Panasonic DVD-ROM driver.

This solution has solved around 60% of the cases. This driver intercepts the IDE calls and consequently bypass the problem that faces these systems in their IDE loop.

2 - Uninstall the Intel Bus Master IDE Controller.

Many cases have been solved by installing the Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller. Some other users found that the problem is only with the 82371AB driver but works fine with the Intel 82371SB. They deleted in this process the two files IDEATAPI.MPD and PIIVSD.VXD and left ESDI_506.PDR in the directory WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS.

This does not mean that the Intel driver 82371AB will never work. It is happening only with certain configurations.

Some users uninstalled the Intel driver and installed the drivers available on the Win 95B (OSR2) or Win 98.

Also the Intel 440LX chipset driver will cause the same conflict.

Here below is some text quoted from the README.TXT file of the Intel PIIX Bus Master IDE Driver for Windows 95*, Version 3.00 installation CD that mentions NO support for ATAPI DVD-ROM drives.

QUOTE ============

****************************************************************************

* 8A. IDE DEVICES SUPPORTED BY THE DRIVER *

****************************************************************************

The Intel PIIX Bus Master IDE driver supports only specific ATA/ATAPI device types. The Intel driver should not be installed if the system is equipped with any of the non-supported ATAPI devices.

The Intel PIIX Bus Master IDE driver supports the following devices connected to the PIIX IDE interface:

- ATA fixed disk
- ATAPI CD-ROM devices

The Intel driver does not support the following types of device in the system:

- ATAPI Tape Drives
- ATAPI CD-ROM Changer Drives
- ATAPI DVD-ROM Drives
- ATAPI Writeable CD Drives
- ATA/ATAPI ZIP*, LS-120*, Cartridge, Optical, Removable Media Drives
- IDE Fixed Disk Drives larger than 8.4Gbbytes

UNQUOTE ============

3 - Graphic Display Adapters from Matrox

When the graphics utility of Matrox is installed some systems exhibited this problem. The solution was system dependent and the incompatibility was solved in three different levels.

- The first level was to check off the box "Run diagnostics at boot".
- The second level was to uninstall the Power Desk.
- The third level was to revert back from Release 3.8 to 3.7

4 - SCSI adapters

If installing a SCSI adapter, the new driver for the SCSI board might cause this error. This error can be solved by the installation of ASPICHK.EXE from the Adaptec web site.

5 - Upgrading the RealMagic drivers

Users installing a new set of drivers on a system that has already an old release will suffer from the same problem. They need to un-install, delete the INF file for the Hollywood board and remove it from the Device Manager before installing the new set.

6 - Hollywood Memory Range

In some case changing the memory range of the Hollywood card will fix the MMSYSTEM 275 error.

INDIVIDUAL CASES OUTSIDE THE ABOVE GENERAL HINTS

1 - Users had release 1.1 (59) and got the problem when upgrading to release 1.8 (69). When reverting back to 1.1 the error disappeared. The same happened to people upgrading from 1.7 (68) to 1.8 (69).

2 - Some users could play everything except encrypted movies. When installing the ATAPI driver they could not play Video CD's and Audio CD's.

3 - One user used the Diamond Sound Card Monster and said the driver release 1.05.16 is not compatible with Hollywood 1. The driver 1.00.009 was tried and is working fine.

4 - One user using a TYAN motherboard installed the TX patch for a PCI bridge conflict that also solved the MMSYSTEM 275 error.

5 - Another case, everything was working fine until the user reformatted the hard disk and after that he could not have the USB and Hollywood installed together. This has no relation however with the 275 error.

6 - A system with an AMI BIOS (Cyrix 686 200 MX, motherboard TX chipset) had this problem and was solved by upgrading the bIOS from 11/16/97 to 12/27/97