Now if only they made those self destructing DVDs in -R!
Bob.

Yeah . . they're called Matzos! . . g

Not that I know of...but If you can figure out how to do it you'll be a billionaire :)

Randy,
There is no sure-fire way of preventing duplicates, and no way at all to prevent a one-off from being duplicated. Watermarking and trust are your two options, and that's about it. CSS and Macrovision are only available if you use a replication company licensed by those groups. Not to mention the cost of the copyprotection. And even with those protections, any 14 year old with a little bit of time and some free software can crack the encryption. Sad, but true.

Do like they do for screeners. You can run text across the screen periodically or continuously stating that this is a promotional copy and if this copy is suspected of being illegal to call a number. You could also stutter from color to black/white periodically as well just like they do in screeners.

Or you could also run some time code on the screen. Chances of any customer being satisfied with timecode across their screen isnt very good if the company chooses to violate your work. Just my suggestions.

Apologies for cross-posting here but the other thread is sinking and I want to get my head around this while it's hot.

Regardless of whether it can be defeated or not, is it actually PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE to do anything like Macrovision, CSS, CPRM or whatever on a DVD-R? Or should I just forget this until I'm looking at a pressed run of tens of thousands?

I've got my watermark but I'm going by the theory that something other protection is better than nothing and I'd rather someone had to work a bit to copy my DVD (and know they're doing something naughty) than just chuck it in the drive, fire up Nero and click "copy".

There's some authoring software that claims to be able to do macrovision - Ulead's I think (could be mis-remembering); really all you need to do for macrovision is to set a flag saying that it's active, but for an authoring package to do this, they need to license the ability from Macrovision.

As for CSS, not on a DVD-R as far as I know. IIRC part of the issue is that there's some information about the key which must be provided on the DVD, and this is done in an area that you can't burn (only stamp).

The things is that people don't have to "work a bit" to break either of these methods and they don't realize that "they're doing something naughty" if they are just casually copying the material. Just my opinion.

--Scott