libdvdread: can't seek to block...
 

I'm trying to play DVDs on Debian sarge, kernel 2.4, and the movie is ending prematurely, like in the last couple of chapters. This problem occurs for both mplayer and xine. If I run them in terminal, I get an error message

libdvdread: Can't seek to block ... (followed by a large block number)

A bit of background. I recently upgraded from the woody dist, and mplayer used to play these exact same dvds fine. My DVD drive is a Samsung CDRW/DVD-ROM combo drive.

Someone else posted something similar to this, but it was never resolved, in fact no-one seemed to have any advice. Even if you don't *know* the solution, throw me any bone you can think of...

Does it play under a different DVD drive/player? Does it work under windows? Is the DVD scratched or dirty? Does this happen with all DVDs or just one in particular?

4 different dvds, all work in windows XP, all used to work on this exact same box before I moved up to Debian sarge. Exact same thing was happening with all dvds.

I should say that looking at the first post, I could have been clearer (was rushin out the door on the way to work).

The movie starts up fine, and plays fine until near the end. And then, the movie will stop in the exact same spot each time (for each particular movie). For each movie, its the second last chapter of the DVD.

Had a look around the net. Lot of people with seek problems for blocks at the start of dvd playback, but this is usually to do with libdvdcss, and people not having write access to the /dev/dvd device. With mine, it has started, and it works fine for most of the film. Had a few crazy thoughts about why, but I wanted to see some documentation on libdvdread and libdvdcss. I haven't been able to find anything yet, if somebody could please direct me, that would be fantastic.

... and this may be red herring, but some similar problems were for people with 2.6 kernels, who had no problems running on 2.4 kernels with ide-scsi modules... I'll have to get home to see if this module is included in my kernel, although I thought that module was to allow cd burning for ide drives, so as a newbie its unclear what this has to do with dvd playback... however...