[SOLVED] DVDs Do Not Play or Respond to Menu

[Cobber]

I rarely watch DVD's but was given one to watch tonight. It would not play in either Dragon or VLC player. I tried several other DVD's and none would play.

I rebooted into Windows and they worked fine.

In Dragon player, I cannot even access the onscreen menu options for the DVD, even though they are showing. Clicking on them does nothing and highlighting them and pressing Return does nothing either. In VLC, nothing happens at all, it just sits at zero and the sceen is blank (although one did start playing in a "boxed window" with lots of scan lines).

I installed regionset and it is set to region 4, which is correct. I also checked to make sure libdvdcss and libdvdread were installed and up to date. That is the limit of my knowledge of what to do.

Since neither player works, I am assuming I'm missing something that is common to both. Maybe a codec or library, but I don't know where to start.

Has anyone got any suggestions?

[Hoser Rob]

May be an encryption problem, see:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Restr ... layingDVDs

[Cobber]

May be an encryption problem

I had begun Googling my problem after I made this post and came across the same link. I did not realize that commercial DVD's are designed not to play on computers, and that software players need to decyrpt them before they will work. I have just been used to using Cyberlink Power DVD in Windows and never thought about it.

Google is full of people stuck with the same problem as me when using Linux, and there are some complicated workarounds, which I do not fully understand. There is a subscription player called Fluendo which says it has the necessary decyrption facilities.

I will make a backup image of my installation and maybe play around with Kaffeine, but even that player seems to suffer the same restrictions. I guess with an open source OS like Linux, you are limited because the licensed players backed by Microsoft are not available. Off the shelf players like Dragon and VLC simply don't have the "permissions" necessary to play the DVD's.

There does not appear to be a simple solution, and you need a good understanding of Linux coding to use the workarounds.

[jimallyn]

Have you installed libdvdcss and libdvdread?

[Cobber]

Have you installed libdvdcss and libdvdread?

Yes, I mentioned that in my original post, along with regionset.

[jimallyn]

Oops, missed it.

[lgt791]

http://www.noobslab.com/2013/11/umplaye ... linux.html

try this .

[Cobber]

Installed Kaffeine, but it didn't work either.

Did some more searching and found a hint to enable VLC to play DVD's. The trick is to select Open Disc and in the box that pops up, tick the box "No disc menus" directly below the DVD radio button. The DVD's then worked perfectly.

I did try other suggestions, but nothing would fix Dragon Player or Kaffeine. It would seem VLC is the only "Off the shelf" player that can be made to work.

I hope this exercise helps other people who are having the same problem.

[Bayvista170]

I tried this, but no luck. VLC just dies when I click on Media/Disc with No Disc Menus selected. It really is frustrating, particularly as:

1: I created the DVD myself using DeVeDe and 2 AVi files which I checked.
2: It is not a commercial DVD so security should not be an issue.
3. VLC does not give any error message - very poor programming.
4: I also tried 'Videos'.
5: I am using LM 18.1

The DVD plays OK with Windows Media Player.

I have installed libdvdcss and libdvd-pkg and ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Any help most welcome.

[Cobber]

Try SMPlayer, it is the GUI frontend for MPVPlayer. It is in Synaptic.

It plays just about anything.