Hello.
My brother's got an oldish HP CD-RW drive that's acting up. He can read CDs fine, but the burner refuses to burn large files - the burning software (Nero, CloneCD, etc) hangs. After removing the drive and making sure it was all installed properly (no reason why it shouldn't have been, it worked previously), I came to the conclusion that it was just faulty. Reading MardiM2's thread in this forum, I came across mention of a copy protection scheme called C-Dilla, which apparently can interfere with the burning process. Can anyone give me any more info on this? My brother reckons that C-Dilla came with 3dsmax 5, which he installed recently, and that he'd heard that it refuses to work without it. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Rob.

C-dilla is part of Macrovision's copy protection scheme and it can prevent protected titles form being copied. It can build a database of the protected titles on a machine, it can prevent burning software from operating and there are several other things it can do, all depending on what options the software developer turns on in a particular product (including check over the internet for updates/license requirements).

Basically if the developer goes wild and turns on everything then burning is a thing of the past on that particular machine, until these extra files are removed. One of the parts of the protection that is standard and on by default for all versions/levels is that the product will not work without c-dilla present and running. That is the only one that needs to be enabled, in my opinion, the rest is spitefulness. There is no reason that game A needs to know that game B (by another developer) is on your system.

Overall, I would say that c-dilla exhibits some very trojan like behavior, but it is considered "legitemate" software, because it is a digital rights management scheme. Reading through the Macrovision literature is a nightmare of PR dept speak and legalese, with a good dose of skewed statistics thrown in for good measure, but one of the basic themes that emerges is that using their (Macrovision) products gives the software publisher control over what the end-users can do with their computers.

You can try manually disabling the various processes connected to c-dilla and checking to see if Nero will now work.

What OS is he running?

Spybot does pick on Cdilla so you could remove it to archive and then reinstall it only when you want to play the game that requires it. Just make sure Spybot is set up to save rather than delete.

Budfred