Controlling an optical-disc reader using surface marks

An optical-disc player having a reader and a controller. The reader derives out-of-band information from surface marks of an optical disc, where the controller controls operations of the reader based on the derived information. The controlled operations may involve the reading and rendering of embedded data of the optical disc. For example, a person writes the words Spanish and widescreen on the surface of a DVD with a marker and inserts the DVD in a DVD player. The DVD player scans the surface of the DVD and sends the resulting image data to an optical character recognition (OCR) module. The OCR module outputs a text file containing the words Spanish and widescreen to a controller (e.g., Microsoft HDi runtime). In response, the controller sets the playback language to Spanish and the screen format to widescreen.