I can't get new dvds from redbox to play on my laptop. Other movies work fine (i've installed libdvdread4 and libdvdcss2), but some won't play at all. I've tried using mplayer and vlc and also tried handbrak hoping it would maybe work around the problem but it didn't. Is there a new css that hasn't been craked?? I've searched on the web, but don't seem to get any straight answers. Anyone have any ideas whats going on here??

If you could post the titles and the studio that would help .
also who manufactured the dvd's .

are they single or dual layer dvd's ?
can your laptop play dual layer dvd's ?

by chance are they "blue-ray" disks ?

Hi there,

in fact, the DVD industry keeps inventing new techniques to protect their DVDs from being copied; some of them so aggressive that they won't even play on some players, though this is rare. It's the same as it was with audio CDs 10..20 years ago when the content industry began to introduce different copy protection methods for their audio CDs. Since the specification was/is very strict and clear, most of this trickery was a willful violation of the specs, hoping that Hifi players would be able to deal with that, and CD ROMs would not.
One CD I'd bought in that time showed me how absurd that was: It wouldn't play on my Hifi player, nor in my car stereo, let alone on my computer's CD drive. However, I had no trouble copying it, just leaving away a suspicious-looking data track that didn't belong there in my opinion. And -tadaa!- my copy played fine on all drives I tested.

Back to today's DVDs: My experience is that recent DVDs from Sony Pictures are particularly troublesome, but until now I haven't had any that VLC (aka Videolan Player) wouldn't play. After all, that program has a reputation of playing virtually everything that smells of video or audio.
Just to make sure: We're talking about just playing the DVD, not copying, right? There are a few (very few) DVDs where VLC doesn't recognize the menu structure correctly and just plays all VOBs in linear sequence. That's not fine, but still acceptable with most DVDs, even though playback appears garbled with some movies because the VOBs aren't necessarily stored in chronological (playback) order on the disc.

My guess is that your installation of VLC isn't quite okay. Maybe you want to try and update or reinstall it?

[X] Doc CPU

you rented these , but from a box someplace
-- one reason i hate "redbox" , no real person to complain to
just someone that owns the box and has NO idea about how dvd's and css work, nor what a single / dual layer is

but there should be contact info on the box
tell them you want your cash back . Because the thing will NOT play

For "store bought" movies i use VLC
the QT4 frontend to Mplayer " SMplayer" will play dvd's but after a few years it is still " experimental "
i use smplayer for all other videos ( with the ALL-2011 codec package installed )

Do they play in your regular DVD player (I assume you have one)? I thought I had run into some new super copy protection scheme when I could not play a rented movie - "Red Tails" to be exact - on my Linux box. I researched all over for what new thing from the studios could be screwing up playback. Finally, I gave up and tried playing it on my regular DVD player. Wouldn't play there either, even after washing the disk. Bad disk. Returned disk (with a note attached) and rented a second copy. The second copy payed fine on my Linux box.

Moral of this story - Don't assume the worst until after you have eliminated the simple.

Yes, they have been adding new schemes. You may have that or some issue.

Some of the windows applications to copy dvd's might have newer technology and work in wine.

The movie is "Jack Reacher" and its from Paramount. I don't have any other dvd players to test it. It's definitely a dual layer dvd. Right now I'm running Bodhi linux, but I think I'm gonna jump back to Ubuntu and see if that helps at all. Also I've had great luck with VLC playing everything too, I feel like I'm missing something, probably something stupid, but can't seem to figure it out. And really I'm not sure if it's worth spending hours trying to figure it out, I probably shouldn't even be wasting my time watching these stupid things anyways.
Thanks for the quick responses. If I figure something out I'll be sure to post a solution here.

O, also, I am just trying to play the movie, not copy it.

The same things affect both. You have to be able to read it to play it. You have to be able to read it to copy it.

Paramount tends to use copy protection that scrambles the directory structure of the DVD. To check, mount the DVD and then do a "du -s" on its mountpoint. Chances are, the result will show the DVD to be bigger than what a 9Gb dual-sided DVD can hold, which is of course impossible. That's the directory scrambling at work.

BTW, "CSS" was the original DVD copy protection. Most all DVD's still use CSS, even though it has bee bypassable for a long time. However, they have added new things on top of CSS. Like Paramounts directory scrambling.

I have not personally had any issues using VLC to play Paramount-scrambled DVD's. But if you have an older version of VLC, who knows? I know in the case of mplayer, in the old days, it only came complied for "dvd" and not "dvdnav" by default. To play some of the newer DVD's you have to have dvdnav (in the old days you would just recompile mplayer, setting the dvdnav flag). I do not know if internally VLC uses dvd/dvdnav, but if so, and you have an older version of VLC without dvdnav support, that could be a problem. Before going to all the trouble of installing Ubuntu to see if that fixes your problem, take the DVD over to a neighbors and try to play it on their stand-alone DVD player since you don't have one of your own. It may just be a bad disk.

If you do change distros, you might also look into LinuxMint. It is based on Ubuntu, uses the same repos, but comes with the multimedia stuff already installed (you have to manually install things like that in Ubuntu - e.g., libdvdcss, libdvdread, etc.)

Is it in the same region code as the player ?

Hi there,

what, CSS? No, these are two separate issues.

CSS is a technique that encodes the video data with a certain key. If you manage to play a CSS-protected disc without decoding it (most players refuse to do so, but some will do it), you'll see a random, moving pattern of scan lines, but can't make out shapes or images.

Region coding is an additional layer of protection that ensures each player will only play DVDs having its own region code - that is, a European player (RC2) will only play European discs, a North American player (RC1) will only play US and Canada discs (Wikipedia).

[X] Doc CPU

Well, my player did decode out of region disks, but it was forced to do so at 1x speed, which caused problems in playback.