Hi,
I have an external DVD player/burner attached to Edgy Kubuntu. The player is mounted on /media/dvdrecorder. I see the dvd recorder icon on my desktop. The burner is recognized when I open K3b. I can view the files on the DVD. However, when I try to play a DVD on Kaffiene, a dialog box comes up in Kaffiene that says "xine message: the source can't be read. Maybe you do not have enough rights for this, or the source does not have any data. (Error reading from DVD)." I have tried a couple of DVDs. I have also tried to play it on VLC without anything but a short flash from the DVD's light. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Frank

You do not need to mount the disc to play DVD movies. You will need to specify the device node for the drive because programs defaults to /dev/dvd which is a symbolic link that points to the real device. The following is example of how to play a DVD movie of the desire drive.

mplayer -dvd-device /dev/hdd dvd://

In XINE, you will have to do the same.

If the drive is hooked up to USB, the performance will be bad. In XINE, make sure you increase the buffers, so XINE can show the movie fluidly or with out jerking. If the drive hooks up to IEEE-1394, performance will closely resemble an internal drive because IEEE-1394 (aka Firewire or i.Link) uses DMA tasks to handle storage devices.

SCSI CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives comes up as /dev/scd0.../dev/scd255.

For any DVD movie, you will need a library to decrypt the data. You can try do a search for DeCSS or something similar.

Thanks for your help. I've been looking and having a hard time finding those libraries. Anyone have a link? Thanks, Frank

Frank Leone,
This link
http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/
will help you install those things that do not come by default with (k)ubuntu (eg libdvdcss).

HTH

Look for Libdvdcss2. Thats the most common one...

If you want to install it from the repositories, instead of using Easy Ubuntu(and even if you don't, this is a great link to have)...

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Edgy

1.6.23 deals with DVD playback.

EasyUbuntu is easy to use and should work. I use Automatix2, which is similar, but I like it a little better(easy kept freezing up on me)...

IGF

Hi all,
Thanks to everyone who helped. After installing Automatix2, I got everything working perfectly. Frank