newbie struggling with dvds

[ArielZusya]

Hi friends,

I just installed Debian 3.1 on my old P-III. For the most part it was painless. Sound and graphics seemed to self configure just fine (though my resolution is a bit lower than I'd like), and mp3 and audio-cd and various video (eg: mpg and avi) playback all worked without added configuration. For some reason, however, I can't seem to play DVDs. I've installed libdvdcss2 without any difficulty and I've installed xine which (other than being unable to play dvds) seems to work just fine (since it plays everything else I've thrown at it). I've tried a variety of DVDs and none of them work so it doesn't seem to be the various discs (which work just fine in all the other players in the house). The error messages I get from xine are:

- xine engine error -
There is no input plugin available to handle 'dvd:/'.
Maybe MRL syntax is wrong or file/stream source
doesn't exist.


and


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/dvd)

I also tried pointing xine to /dev/cdrom instead of /dev/dvd but that just changed the error message.

Totem just says:

Failed to play Audio/Video Disc
Please check that a disc is present in the drive.

and if I go to Computer::CD-ROM 1 I get the error:

Unable to mount the volume. There is probably no media in the device. No Medium Found

The DVD-Rom player is a Toshiba SD-M1612. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[antidrugue]

You'll need some multimedia codecs first.

Make sure you have all the needed repositories in your /etc/apt/sources.list file :

#Local Mirror
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free

#Security Updates
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian-security/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian-security/ stable/updates main contrib non-free

# Multimedia
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main
deb-src http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main

Then you can install the required packages :

apt-get install libdvdnav4 \
libdvdplay0 \
libdvdread3 \
libdvdcss2 \
w32codecs \
ffmpeg

Then you should be able to watch DVDs in "totem-xine" -- which will make use of those codecs -- for example. Install it first :

apt-get install totem-xine

[ArielZusya]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately something is still wrong. I checked and I had installed everything you had suggested with exception to two items (w32codecs and ffmpeg). On your suggestion I installed those two and double checked to make sure that all of it was up to date (and it is). Unfortunately I'm still getting the same error messages.

Please forgive this ultra-noob question but does debian even know that my player is a dvd player rather than just a cd player? I ask because the installer set this up as CD-Rom 1... I wouldn't have given it a second thought except xine had /mnt/dvd as the default path to dvd and had /mnt/cd-rom as the default path to cds. Is this something superficial or is there something worth investigating there? Thanks again for the help.

[objuan]

try changing your media player to kaffeine this works fine for me and it uses the xine engine.

[antidrugue]

Yes, as mentionned in my previous post and in objuan one, make sure you are using totem-xine and not totem

So

apt-get remove --purge totem

and

apt-get install totem-xine

[ArielZusya]

Thanks for all your help... turns out that my dvd-rom player was about to die. My software was already setup properly... wasn't till the player drew a number of ugly scratches in a disk that I knew the real source of my trouble! UG! Thanks again!