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Strange UDF DVD

Tuesday, 22 July 2008  |  oever

My sister-in-law got married and the wedding photographer made a DVD with 412 pictures. Unfortunately, my parents-in-law could not read the DVD, either with Linux (which is their main OS) nor with Windows XP. So they gave the DVD to me and I had a look.

The DVD is a DVD-R and my Linux version (Hardy Heron) tried to open it: it showed the dialog asking if it should mount the DVD. A failure message opened asking me to have a look at dmesg. Hmm.

So I did and it said: [ 2981.006899] UDF-fs: No partition found (1) [ 2981.125072] ISOFS: Unable to identify CD-ROM format.

So I tried to install some kernel patches for udf.ko, but this did not help. The disc was still not recognized. In the end I decided to call upon the trusted program hexdump. Hexdump should be compulsory at kindergarten!

Browsing through the data with hexdump, I quickly recognized JPEG headers, so I wrote a small program (70 lines) to extract all JPEGs from a binary blob. You can download it.

The first megabyte of the DVD is here.

00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00008000 00 42 45 41 30 31 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.BEA01..........| 00008010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00008800 00 4e 53 52 30 33 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.NSR03..........| 00008810 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00009000 00 54 45 41 30 31 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.TEA01..........| 00009010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 0000a000 01 00 03 00 48 00 00 97 21 87 f0 01 14 00 00 00 |....H...!.......| 0000a010 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 55 44 46 20 56 6f 6c |.........UDF Vol| 0000a020 75 6d 65 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |ume.............| 0000a030 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0b 01 00 01 00 02 00 02 00 |................| 0000a040 01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 08 31 33 33 41 33 31 32 |.........133A312| 0000a050 43 20 55 44 46 20 56 6f 6c 75 6d 65 20 53 65 74 |C UDF Volume Set| 0000a060 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|