Ubuntu Multimedia :: DVD's Won't Play / What To Do?
Apr 9, 2010
I got a new laptop, had an older one running ubuntu 9.10. The newer laptop is working great except I can't play DVD's. I am not able to figure out if the DVD drive is bad, need more codecs/drivers, or it had to do with the graphics card.
Somebody told me to type lspci to see what you system is running. So I did that and will copy and paste it here for people to look at. I have read that some ATI cards are still having issues, and the drivers aren't correct or can be correctly configured. Watching videos from my hard drive works, and ..... and things like that. So for the life of me I can't figure out why dvd's won't work. I have VLC players, and GNOME player, and nothing works. The standard player that comes with ubuntu needs plugins it can't find, and says my URI header is wrong? code...
After many days of trying to tweak Ubuntu 9.10 desktop i386. This subject will focus on my dvd drive. ...Here is what I have done, but I'm not sure what I did or still need to do, or to do different. ...
Basically the problem is, I can't play store bought DVDs, but I can play my copies of them.
When using MDPlayer that I added to Ubuntu, I can play the copies of my store bought DVDs, but not the originals. However, when using Ubuntu 9.10's movie player, it wont do anything and I'll have to do a force quit to close it.
I learned that this may because there is a repository of packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution, as I'm sure you already knew. ...Yet, Most people have worked around these issues.
I came across the Medibuntu site: [url]
Running the Terminal, I added the bash command that adds Medibuntu's repositiry to Ubuntu. It also adds Medibuntu's GPG key to the keyring. (The sudo wget - etc etc etc --quiet update)
Then I jumped down to the... "This command should be run in the Terminal, after adding the repository:" ...And did that. (sudo sed -e 's/ etc etc etc /medibuntu.list)
i just installed 10.10 on my girls laptop (Acer Aspire 5735z) hoping it would fix the old problem i had with playing real dvd's. it didnt. it keeps saying "Could not read from Resource". when i try with VLC is say "Could not read from file". but if i put in a burned movie, it plays fine. i checked and it has libdvdcss2, libdvdnav4, and libdvdread4 installed. i get the same problems with my laptop (toshiba portege m400 tablet) which runs fedora 13.
Anyone else struggling to play iplayer video? I've got the proprietary Flash plugin, which means it's probably not this "SWF Authentication" thing that there's been so much talk about.
I've rebooted, tried all sorts of tinkering, it loads the applet (I can see that Flash is loading OK because other things work, and right clicking on the applet gives the Flash menu)
I need to play or preferably convert (i.e. to MP3) old SNG files, which contain voice records. From what I could find, it's basically a MIDI created by synthetiser. I think it was recorded by some ancient VLC player. I failed so far to play it on anything I could download.
Whenever I plug my Zune in, Rhythmbox recognizes all the songs on it but when I doubleclick on a song to play it, the song doesn't play and Rhythmbox quits. Any suggestions on how to fix it? I'm running a Dell XPS 410 with 4GB RAM and a 1.75 GHz processor.Also, I imported a CD and it plays fine.
I downloaded the xvid codec from: PackMan:: Informationen zum Paket xvidcore, and the install was successful.I'm trying to play an xvid file, and Kaffeine is saying it cannot play all file formats, would I like to install additional support. When I click yes, it asks me for additional repositories.
Normally I find everything I need either in the documentation or forum, but it's been months, and this time I'm stumped. I'm posting the results of my latest tests, so I'm really sorry about the length of this post.
I can't play DVDs unless they've been burned by myself or a friend. I had no problems until around the beginning of April. I was running 11.2 on both my laptop and desktop. I think an update changed something. This was before 11.2 was officially retired a week or so later. I wanted to upgrade to 11.4 anyway, so I began with my laptop. During installation I wiped everything from my hard disk by creating new partitions and formatting them. After installation I installed the multimedia packages using one-click (opensuse-guide.org, not opensuse-community.org, although I did read what they said). I know one-click is not ideal, but I was curious. The result was that I still couldn't play DVDs.
I did a fresh installation, just to be on the safe side. This time I installed the packages according to Multi-media and Restricted Format Installation Guide by caf4926. But I still couldn't play DVDs, so I went through the thread Check your multimedia problem in ten steps. Then I ran mmcheck (v2.35). I tried a few times, experimented, and in the end did another fresh install.
In the meantime, on my desktop, which still has 11.2 on it, I found the file which had been changed and changed it back, so I could play DVDs on it again. It was in /etc/udev/rules.d/, 70-persistent-cd.rules. This does not appear to be the problem in 11.4 on my laptop.
I have again installed the packages according to the multimedia installation guide, and done the ten-step check and run mmcheck and these are the results as they stand:
I couldn't find a package called mplayerplug-in. I used zypper to look for it.
I tried installing the totem packages in a previous installation, but they didn't make a difference, so I left them out this time.
I deinstalled my jdk, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference, except that I get an error notification everytime I want to use LibreOffice. And I need it, so I'm putting it back soon.
So, these are my packages:
And this is what happens when I try to play a DVD using Kaffeine (since I don't an error message except from Kaffeine, and I've forgotten where my logs are):
And then comes Read error from: Error reading from DVD over the GUI.
And nothing else happens... I get no feedback from smplayer whatsoever. It opens, trys to read the DVD, and sits there. Even on the console.
I have problems paying dvd movies ... when using movie player it either crashes as soon as I try to play the movie or I get an error saying can not read from resource
I installed VLC media player but that dont work either
what am I suppose to do ?
The dvd mounts, I can go into the dvd and see the files but cant play it
Am on karmic and am trying to play a VCD, but I get various error messages across players.
VLC Media Player says: File reading failed: VLC could not read the file.(It flashes the message 7 times to make sure I get the point, apparently) mplayer says: Seek Failed
The VCD plays in Win XP. I have medibuntu and other plugins installed and can play other VCDs most of the time...
So far, have tried to change VLC's video output to Open GL and X11, after looking at other suggestions on this and other forums.
Have also tried to open the avseq01.dat type of files directly, i.e., instead of doubleclicking the videocd icon on the desktop)
I have installed Kubuntu 10.10 on an EEETop Asus, which runs quite smoothly. The problem is that I can't make it play DVDs: inserting a DVD-Video (I've tried with a Bourne DVD), Dragon Player can't read and the window screen remains black; VLC opens the first window of the DVD, but when I select the language "English or Italian", it stops and nothing.
I can't get any DVDs to play. I've tried MPlayer, VLC, Totem, KMPlayer. The player puts out an error dialogue box or just tries to play the DVD forever. It's a "hollywood" DVD purchased from Best Buy. I booted into Windows and played the DVD fine with Windows Media Player. No issues whatsoever. What the heck is wrong with Ubuntu?
I'm inserting a commercial dvd, the dvd icon pops up for just a second in the side menu and then disappears. VLC will play it but I can't get it to "mount" (if that's the correct term). Running Lucid 10.04 in Thinkpad T61 if that helps.
I am having trouble running audio cd's in my second ubuntu 9.10 machine. However normal cd's run in the drive and I have tested the cd's on my first machine.
I followed instructions on the medibuntu site for installing the codecs to play .wma files. I checked to make sure the repositories where properly added and they are. I even tried usin VLC player.
I have installed ubunto on an old PC with minimal hardware resources. I cannot play or even see a music cd. I go to places-computer- and see the floppy drive, files system hard drive, and the cd drive. When I insert the music cd the cd drive disappears. It sees a data cd just fine.
family member's PC, and ever since the upgrade to 9.10, no video files play.
All formats (AVI, MPG, MP4) do not work. When attempting to use MPlayer, VLC, Kaffine and KMPlayer. The file opens, then the program immediately closes.
Another issue is that online video's are very jerky. Before the upgrade, all of these issues did not exist.
Any thoughts or idea's on where to look? I have already tried re-installing the codec's via the restricted extra's package, and by re-installing VLC.
neither Mplayer, VLC or SMPlayer can play an .avi i have. and they won't download the codecs needed.look> should i manually download codecs from somewhere?or shift to a new player maybe?