Cannot play Home Produced DVDs

[pmgant]

The DVD playing in Mint works fine on commercial DVDs, menus, everything. If I insert a DVD in the drive which has been produced and finalized on my DVD recorder a message comes up saying that I do not have permission to read the disk. This happens on DVD+R and DVD-R disks.

These home produced disks play fine on a DVD player but I haven't tried them with a Windows machine as I'm Linux only The home produced disks are not region coded because a friend of mine in Australia can view them.

Any idea what's going on?

P M Gant

[pmgant]

I have an update on the above problem. As it seemed to be a permissions issue I created the root account and then logged on. As root I can play DVD's created by my DVD recorder, as an 'ordinary' user I cannot do this even though I am a member of the admin group.

Any clues? Anyone?

P M Gant

[BlahBlah_X]

What DVD player are you using (software-wise)?

You might want to install ogle and the gtk frontend and try using that.

[Badut]

I have an update on the above problem. As it seemed to be a permissions issue I created the root account and then logged on. As root I can play DVD's created by my DVD recorder, as an 'ordinary' user I cannot do this even though I am a member of the admin group.

Any clues? Anyone?

P M Gant

I had a similar problem but with a DVD camera, not DVD recorder.
The problem was that the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD did not have correct permissions for anyone except root.
The work around I use is to take an iso image of the DVD, and work with the data in the iso image. Either by manually extracting the VOB files or using something like isomaster to create another DVD with the correct permissions.

Here is the link to the thread where I asked for help:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=9781

The workaround is near the bottom.

Edit: Actually I'm not sure what permissions are required of the VIDEO_TS folder. But if you check a Commercial DVD that works, just copy the permissions from that.

[pmgant]

OK, more research.

1) It doesn't matter which DVD player application I use as they all generate the same error, no permission to open the disk.

2) Even when logging on as root I can't see file permissions and owners through the GUI, a root terminal window does work and I get the following output:

Home made DVD

root@Athena:/media/cdrom0# ls -al
total 8
d--x--x--- 3 4294967295 4294967295 88 2008-02-17 13:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-05 15:15 ..
dr-xr-xr-x 2 4294967295 4294967295 716 2008-02-17 13:15 VIDEO_TS


Commercial DVD

root@Athena:/media/cdrom0# ls -al
total 12
dr-xr-xr-x 4 4294967295 4294967295 200 2004-11-08 13:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-05 15:15 ..
dr-xr-xr-x 2 4294967295 4294967295 40 2004-11-08 12:45 AUDIO_TS
dr-xr-xr-x 2 4294967295 4294967295 1600 2004-11-08 12:45 VIDEO_TS
-r--r--r-- 1 4294967295 4294967295 71 2004-10-28 12:27 Weblink.html

Unless I'm missing something here the access permissions on the VIDEO_TS directory look the same.

P M Gant

[Badut]

OK, more research.

1) It doesn't matter which DVD player application I use as they all generate the same error, no permission to open the disk.

2) Even when logging on as root I can't see file permissions and owners through the GUI, a root terminal window does work and I get the following output:

Home made DVD

root@Athena:/media/cdrom0# ls -al
total 8
d--x--x--- 3 4294967295 4294967295 88 2008-02-17 13:15 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-05 15:15 ..
dr-xr-xr-x 2 4294967295 4294967295 716 2008-02-17 13:15 VIDEO_TS


Commercial DVD

root@Athena:/media/cdrom0# ls -al
total 12
dr-xr-xr-x 4 4294967295 4294967295 200 2004-11-08 13:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-05 15:15 ..
dr-xr-xr-x 2 4294967295 4294967295 40 2004-11-08 12:45 AUDIO_TS
dr-xr-xr-x 2 4294967295 4294967295 1600 2004-11-08 12:45 VIDEO_TS
-r--r--r-- 1 4294967295 4294967295 71 2004-10-28 12:27 Weblink.html

Unless I'm missing something here the access permissions on the VIDEO_TS directory look the same.

P M Gant

Rereading one of the posts from the linked thread, it's not the permission of the VIDEO_TS directory but the mount point of the DVD drive.
So in your case:

Home made DVD

root@Athena:/media/cdrom0# ls -al
total 8
d--x--x--- 3 4294967295 4294967295 88 2008-02-17 13:15 .

Commercial DVD

root@Athena:/media/cdrom0# ls -al
total 12
dr-xr-xr-x 4 4294967295 4294967295 200 2004-11-08 13:28 .

Does the workaround I suggested work for you?

[pmgant]

Sorry for the delay in replying, I just spent two days in bed with flu and computers were the last thing on my mind.

'sudo totem' plays the disks burned on my DVD but after thirty seconds there are hundreds of messages on the terminal screen saying

'*** libdvdread: CHECK_VALUE failed in nav_read.c:356 ***
*** for dsi->dsi_gi.zero1 == 0 ***

After three hours on Google I still have no idea how to create an ISO of the DVD but this seems like an awful lot of messing around just to play Mythbusters. Is there any way of mounting a DVD using the permissions I want rather than the permissions on the disk.

P M Gant

[pmgant]

After talking with a friend last night (who knows a lot more about Linux than me) I have a temporary solution. Create a bash script containing the following lines:

#! /bin/bash
# script to launch the dvd player
echo "yourpasswordgoeshere" | sudo totem

Set the script to be executable and it will launch totem as root each time you click on the icon, you can then read any DVDs by opening them through the program.

Me, I blame Samsung and the plonkers who wrote the DVD recorder software.

P M Gant