I recently had a problem with Apple’s DVD Player. Every time I put a disc in, I’d get a blank screen with the words “Supported Disc Not Available”
VLC worked, as you’d expect.
So what was this? Some sort of DRM issue? Were these new DVDs somehow being prevented from working on my player?
I went to look for an answer and found myself over on the Mac OS X Hints forum with the usual suggestion:
“Have you repaired permissions?”
Sigh.
“Repair Permissions” is often invoked as the suggested solution for well, anything and everything.
But it doesn’t really hurt. So I decided to try it, and watch what was “repaired” to see if it actually repaired anything remotely related. setregion looked like a likely suspect.
Here’s what the permissions looked like after the repair was complete:
$ ls -l /usr/bin/setregion
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 53132 Apr 25 01:49 /usr/bin/setregion*
Note the “s” which makes the program run as root (see more about setuid). I presume this has something to do with DVD regions, which are a kind of DRM, but I wonder why it has to run every time the DVD player runs. Unless I’m changing the DVD region, why does this need to run? I believe this may have been the first time I ran DVD player since reinstalling 10.4.
In any event, I’m trying to remember the last time “Repair Permissions” was the 100% absolute proper answer.
