Impossible to read some DVD on LMDE

[ptyxs]

I recently installed LMDE, and tried a complete DVD edition of the series The Wire bought on Amazon.fr.
Unfortunately, the DVDs are unreadable on LMDE (I must say that they are also unreadable on my Ubuntu 13.10, and Mageia 3 and also on my linux-based Freebox (distributed by french famous ISP Free), but ARE fully readable on a Windows machine...).
What would you suggest ?

[computerbob]

I've had dvds that would read on one machine and not on another. You'd think that all dvd players were the same, but they're not. It's not the OS.

[eanfrid]

Using most features of retail (encrypted) video DVDs depends on a non-free library. Obviously, it is not either shipped or installed by default on most distributions.

Look for "libdvdcss2"

[ptyxs]

Look for "libdvdcss2"

It is installed on my LMDE.
No better though...

[eanfrid]

I supposed that you also have "libdvdread4" already installed. Am I right ?

[ptyxs]

Yes, libdvdread4 installed, too.

[robertb]

I'm having the same problem.

Doing dmesg|tail doesn't reveal that /dev/sr0 is being read at all.

What happens is that I stick the commercial movie DVD that I want to play into the drive, it cranks back and forth for about a minute, and then ejects itself and pops out the disc.

Regular DVD-ROM and DVD-Rs can be read fine, and it burns and writes discs just fine.

The kernel I'm running is

Code: Select all

linux-image-3.10-2-amd64

and the drive is a

Code: Select all

OPTIARC AD-5680H, version 3AHB

I'd like this solved, too.

[eanfrid]

@robertb: for your part, like computerbob said above, the culprit is the hardware, not the OS.

[robertb]

@robertb: for your part, like computerbob said above, the culprit is the hardware, not the OS.

I was having my doubts, but I think you're right. I rebooted the machine into MacOSX (this is a Mac Mini) and it didn't work there, either! I guess the hardware is working enough to read DVD-ROMs, but not working enough to read commercial quality CSS DVDs. Time for a new computer, I guess...