Fairmount, VideoLAN Client and the Bagels


by Markus Kwaśnicki

This article gives you a hint about how to get Fairmount to work in these days as it’s not supported anymore.

Introduction

Many Mac users appreciate to use the Fairmount software to bypass the copy protection of a DVD. It’s simple usage is one of the benefits of Fairmount. Avoiding the copy protection of a DVD using Fairmount is as simple as inserting a DVD into your DVD drive. Once inserted, Fairmount mounts the inserted DVD fairly ;-) Anyway to work properly Fairmount needs help from a library provided by the well-known and popular VideoLAN Client media player. This teamwork between Fairmount and VLC worked for years.

An old bagel

Unfortunately Fairmount has been acquired by another software company and has been merged into a new commercial software product. Metakine has stopped maintaining Fairmount, so there will be no new free releases. You are lucky if you download yourself a copy of the latest version of Fairmount 1.1 as long it is available as part of DVDRemaster v6.3.1 through several download services (e.g. CNET).

But there is still a problem: The last version of Fairmount does not work together with the latest version of VLC because the access for the required libdvdcss library by Fairmount now got restricted in VLC to external programs. And Fairmount keeps prompting for the missing VLC library (see article picture).

Solution

Anyway there is a solution which helps you further using Fairmount on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion) because the libdvdcss library is still being maintained as a standalone project:

  • Download the latest version of the libdvdcss library from its public releases.
  • Download the 32-Bit version 1.1.9 of the VideoLAN Client from their public FTP archive (the 64-Bit version won’t work).
  • Copy the downloaded library to the application support folder of Fairmount(create it if it does not exist): ~/Library/Application Support/Fairmount/ — Note that ~ points to your user’s home directory.~~
  • Mount the image and copy the libdvdcss.2.dylib file from VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/lib/ to the application support folder of Fairmount (create it if it does not exist already): ~/Library/Application Support/Fairmount/ — Note that ~ points to your user’s home directory.
  • Rename the library from libdvdcss.2.dylib to libdvdcss.dylib because Fairmount is looking for a file with exact that name.

If all went well, Fairmount should no longer come up with the missing VLC dialogue. — That’s all folks!