Re: Not smart at all
"Oh dear time to try to get over a fairly basic lesson."
*cough* I wouldn't normally have replied, but your rather condescending tone to the original poster means you have to be correct - pedantically correct.
"Apparently you do not know but the way a DVD player reads a disc is not the same as the way a computer reads the disc. When you load it into a computer it checks specific tracks/sectors to look for various information which it needs to know where everything is and what type of data the disc holds."
.... which is exactly what a DVD player has to do, unless you have one of those rare psychic DVD players that don't actually exist.
"When you try to play a DVD with a movie it can instead launch a run-time version which is intended to stop you ripping the DVD and bypassing all the unskippable anti-piracy sections. Various music CDs have a similar setup."
Errrrr, what? What do you think launches programs? The DVD? The DVD player? Or maybe..... just maybe..... it's Windows and it's misguided autorun system!
As for audio CD's, standard red book CD's don't even contain a filesystem. Any sort of CD with an ISO-6990 filesystem in addition to the normal CDDA section would again require that a consumer player skips the unknown section, whilst a computer recognises the filesystem, mounts it, and autoruns some shite from there.
Again, though, it's the OS that decides to do this. The drive doesn't command the OS what to do!
Basically, your consumer DVD player is a computer. The software on your personal computer can basically behave exactly like a consumer player if it wishes (indeed, many do, as they even allow the running of customised DVD virtual machine bytecode - the software on video DVD's that runs in hardware consumer units is nowt to do with Windows)
If hypothetically, the DVD contains some non-standard encoding requiring a windows program to play it, then it won't play on a consumer player either (and would then be more accurately described as a windows DVD-ROM)
"The problem is that this runtime system is a Windows only process (actually there may be an Apple version on there but I don't have the kit to check) so if you insert the DVD into a linux PC it will not work."
How, then, does my non-windows, non-mac, non-linux, OS plays every Video DVD that's thrown at it?
You seem to be getting confused with DVD data disks (not video disks) containing windows code.
*TL; DR* : The original poster was correct, and you just 'corrected' him with a load of old bollocks!
"Hopefully I did not use too many complicated phrases in there."
*snigger*