DVDs will not play

[cogmax73]

I am not entirely new to linux, but I do need some help with things from
time to time. Recently, I got a new hard drive and installed it.
Before doing that, I made backups and thought it would be a good time to
upgrade to a new distro. A friend has been using debian and told me of
advantages it has, so I thought I would try it. But my friend dual
boots to <another OS> to play DVD movies and I don't want to dual boot.
But I have not been able to play DVDs since I switched to debian, even
though I could on my old distro. I have read some things on this forum
and have tried them, but I still get the same errors. I plead for your
help.

My system has an Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz, with 1.5gig RAM and
an nvidia geforce4 video card with DDR 128MB (AOpen MX4000). I
installed debian-40r2-i386 and then edited manually the
/etc/apt/sources.list to include the line:

deb Debian Multimedia Packages::Home etch main

Then I downloaded the nvidia drivers and nvidia-glx and got OpenGL
working. In the course of trying to get DVDs to play, I have downloaded
at least the following debian packages:

libdvdread3 libdvdcss2 kaffeine kaffeine-mozilla kmplayer kmplayer-plugin
debian-multimedia-keyring w32codecs flashplayer-mozilla libxine1
libxinerama1 xine-ui totem libdvdnav4 vlc libdvdplay0 libdvd0

I have not listed the dependencies that were also installed in order to
install these (in order to install vlc, for example, there were 16 files
in all !).

With a disk (that I am sure played on my old system) in the drive, I get
the following errors when I try to run the respective programs (and try
to play the DVD):

Kaffine:
In the first error window:
The source can't be read.
Maybe you don't have enough rights for this, or source doesn't contain data
(e.g: no disc in drive). (///dev/hda)

In the second error window for kaffine:
No plugin found to handle this resource (dvd:///dev/hda)

kmplayer:
At the bottom of the window, it says:
Player xine Not Running

totem:
An error window appears which says:
Totem was not able to play this disc.
Failed to mount /dev/hda

xine-ui:
Two error windows come up with one in front of the other.
The one in front says:
- xine engine error -
There is no input plugin available to handle 'dvd:/'.
Maybe MRL syntax is wrong or file/stream source doesn't exist.

The error window behind it says:
The source can't be read.
Maybe you don't have enough rights for this, or source doesn't
contain data (e.g: not disc in drive). (/dev/hda)

VLC media player:
No error message, but it just does not do anything. I selected from the
file menu "Open Disc" and then on the Disc tab the "DVD" radio button
and then clicked the OK button. Nothing happened. But on the bottom line
of the window it says:
Audio CD - Track 1

Yet it is a movie DVD in the drive.

I have tried playing audio CDs and they seem to play fine with Kaffeine.
I have tried four DVDs. All are movies purchased within the last three
years except one that is over six years old. They all played on my old
OS on the same hardware and also play fine on the (Sony) stand-alone DVD
player.

When I execute the following command line to get a list of the /dev
directory into text file named devlist.temp:

ls -al /dev > devlist.temp

I find the following lines that might be relevant:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-03-26 23:36 cdrom -> hda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-03-26 23:36 cdrw -> hda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-03-26 23:36 dvd -> hda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2008-03-26 23:36 dvdrw -> hda
brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 3, 0 2008-03-26 23:36 hda

The line of my /etc/fstab file that I think is relevant:

/dev/hda /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

That's about all that I can think of that might be related to this
problem. Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me identify what is
the root cause or help cure it.

[cogmax73]

The line I added to my /etc/apt/sources.list file looked like a link when it was
posted, so I am going to try to make it look like what I put in the file:

deb Debian Multimedia Packages::Home etch main

I hope that clarifies what I did,
Thanks

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, cogmax73!

When you post links, wrap them with CODE tags (rather than QUOTE tags) if you don't want them to be converted like what happened in both your posts.

You'll need to install libdvdcss if it's not already installed to play DVD movies. You'll probably want to install codecs, too.

[devils casper]

I would suggest you to install VLC Player. It supports most of Media formats and install necessary codecs.

su
apt-get update
apt-get install vlc

[cogmax73]

Thank you, ozar, for letting me know about the CODE tags. The line
I added to the /etc/apt/sources.list would then be:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

You will see in my original post that two of the debian packages I have
installed are

libdvdcss2

and

w32codecs

Are these sufficient, or are there more packages than the ones I have
mentioned that need to be installed?

[devils casper]

Those packages are sufficient to play DVDs.

[cogmax73]

I would suggest you to install VLC Player. It supports most of Media formats and install necessary codecs.

su
apt-get update
apt-get install vlc

Thank you, devilscasper, for your reply. I mentioned in three places in my
original post that I have installed VLC. First, in my list of packages that I said
that I had installed, I listed vlc. Second, as an example of unlisted
dependencies, I mentioned that there were 16 files that were installed
to get vlc. Perhaps I should have said there were 16 *packages* rather
than "files". Anyway, when I used synaptic to install vlc, there were alot
of dependencies that I also had to install along with it. Third, when I was
listing the players that I have tried and the error messages that resulted, I
specifially mentioned VLC and the fact that VLC thought I had an audio disc
in the drive rather than a DVD.

In summary, I have VLC installed and VLC will not play the DVDs.

Thanks for your suggestion, anyway.

[lucky9]

I have "users" in my fstab. Also "exec" in there.
I also have "ro" in the line.
Have you tried any of these?

[cogmax73]

I have "users" in my fstab. Also "exec" in there.
I also have "ro" in the line.
Have you tried any of these?

Thank you, lucky9, for your suggestion. I have not tried any changes at all
to my fstab. I have some questions about the "users", "exec", and "ro" you mentioned. It is just a guess, but I would guess that "ro" means read-only.
Is that right? If I used that, would it make it impossible to write data DVD
and data CD disks? I do write data to CD and DVD for archiving, so I would
want to preserve those functions. What does "exec" do? What does "users"
do? I presume I put them somewhere on the line that refers to the
media/cdrom0 drive, but where? Should I try them one at a time? Should I
try all 7 remaining combinations and reboot 7 times? If I make a mistake,
is there a chance my system will fail to boot? Should I backup my hard drive
first?

I would be interested,
Thanks.

[lucky9]

First, always make a back up of any file that you are going to edit. Easiest way is to add a '.bak' extension (w/o quotes) to the end of the file name.

Here are instructions that may be of direct help for you The Perfect Desktop - Debian Etch (Debian 4.0) - Page 5 | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
It uses Automatix2 to install the needed files.

Or manually here http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/DV...-HOWTO/#debian

Have you installed these? Please note there are almost certainly others that may need to be installed on your system. Please do a search using Debian, Linux, play dvd on google.
libmad0 libavifile-0.7c2 lame lame-extras w32codecs libdvdcss2 libdvdnav4
libdvdplay0 libdvdread3 dvdrtools dvdbackup dvdauthor transcode vamps k9copy
(Please note that libdvdcss2 is illegal in some jurisdictions)

Check here for help with understanding the fstab: How to edit and understand /etc/fstab

The users is probably what you need to change. It is a permission thing. Can't hurt anything that I'm aware of.

exec just means that you can execute binaries in that partition. Not really needed to change the behavior you write about.

The ro doesn't make a difference on my system. I can write to either one of my optical disks. Both have that designation. I assume that K3b changes that when it's called. (I run a Debian variant that just happens to do things that way. I personally wouldn't recommend doing this until all other changes had not worked.)

As to backing up....if you don't have your data backed up do so now. Your data is the only irreplaceable thing on your hard disk! I use both optical media and hard disks. Your data needs to be portable or it WILL be lost at some point.