Encrypted DVDs won't play.

[deft]

I'm having identical problems under SUSE 9.3 on a Gateway Solo 9500 with it's stock CDRW/DVD drive.

Kaffeine came with SUSE, I gave up on it quick because it's error message seemed to say the version wasn't made to play DVDs.

I followed the advice here to get Xine to work;
http://www.thenetworkadministrator.com/linuxdvd.htm

Which did, after using

xine -V XShm -A oss

did get Xine to play the DVD - but only through the FBI warning, up to the title menu. Trying to go past that, play the acutal movie, caused it to stop playing with the error message:

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). (Error reading from DVD.)

Xine opens with libdvdread:

Encrypted DVD support unavailable

.. so I'm pretty sure it's an encrypted-codec issue, right? I do have libdvdcss installed.

Looking at the messages I see a lot of

unknown buffer type

and

throwing away image with pts 0000...

That was on a commercial DVD. On a less commercial DVD (dollar store copy of Street Fighter), playback is fine... except no audio but I'm not too worried about that.


::Moderator Note:: - This thread was broken off from another thread here. Please start your own threads, regardless of how similar the question may be.

[fingal]

Hi - Something worth trying (and it might not sort out all your dvd problems but it can help) is to figure out what your cd/dvd drive is called on your system. For example you might try:

cat /etc/fstab

and find the following line:

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

So now you know that your system (well okay ... my system in this case ) calls your drive hdc. Fine, so now you need to know where your system is mounting the dvd. On my box it's /mnt/cdrom .

Ok, so now I would create a symbolic link between /dev/hdc and /mnt/cdrom. To do this I would go cd /dev and type
ln -s /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom (you need to be root to do this).

That little trick can sometimes work, and it won't do any harm to your system. You just need to figure out how yours is set up.

[KenJackson]

I haven't tried Xine in a while, but currently I can play all DVDs (that I've tried) with mplayer. I'm presently using v1.0-1pre7 from the Mandriva distribution, though I previously got it directly from mplayerhq.hu.

There is an 'mplayer-gui' package that gives you a pretty GUI control center if you need it, but I prefer to run it directly from the command line.