Enforcing Parental Management Levels

Enforcing Parental Management Levels

This component is available for use in the Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. It may be altered or unavailable in subsequent versions.

Any title or portion of a title on a DVD-Video disc can be assigned a generic parental management level (PML) from 1 through 8. Eight is the most restrictive level and one is the least restrictive. The idea is to provide a mechanism to prevent children from watching adult content without parental consent, but the specific meaning of each level varies from country/region to country/region. In the United States and Canada, the levels map to the rating system of the Motion Picture Association of America (G, PG, PG-13, NC-17), but this is not the case in other countries or regions. A DVD application intended for an international market should not hard code any particular rating system into its parental management logic.

The MSWebDVD object by default ignores PMLs on the disc. For an application to be notified of PML markers on the disc, it must call NotifyParentalLevels(true). MSWebDVD will then inform your application when it encounters PML information on the disc. To enforce PMLs, your application must implement some form of password control logic that associates users with levels, and respond to EC_DVD_PARENTAL_LEVEL_CHANGE events to allow or disallow access as appropriate.