Hi! I just bought a new LG BE14NU40 External Blu-ray Writer. My internal dvd drive is history. I'm having trouble getting my Lenovo ThinkPad T400 with Xubuntu installed to recognize the new drive. I have SMPlayer and VLC installed and neither are able to play from the new drive. Supposedly, this LG external drive will play with ANY format. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

I should add that I have tried playing both commercial dvd's as well as ones that were self recorded. Neither plays.

What does it say in dmesg?

I'll get that to you. I'm not at my desk at the moment.

Okay, I was away and not able to respond. Where do I find the dmesg? Is this something that has to be run through a terminal? I've not used an external drive before.

Open terminal & run
or if that does't work Also in Settings Menu do you have automount for externaledia, you may have to actually select from File Manager under /media if no icon is on desktop or in your dock.

Thanks for your attention. There is a very LONNNNNNNNNNNG scroll after running that terminal. How much of it or what do you need so I don't have to include a huge window with too much information?

Try lsusb to figure out what device you're using & go from there.

Hmmm. Does this tell you anything? This is the response I received from lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 08ff:2810 AuthenTec, Inc. AES2810
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 0a5c:2145 Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate II
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 067b:2771 Prolific Technology, Inc.

Is this a usb dvd? because it doesn't even appear connected, you'll have to go thru dmesg to find it. If you plug it in last it should be the last entry in dmesg.

Is this enough? I took this from the last sequence of the scroll. It shows the dvd I have installed.

20.407375] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready
[ 20.796353] vboxdrv: Found 2 processor cores.
[ 20.796681] vboxdrv: fAsync=0 offMin=0x18f offMax=0x759
[ 20.796734] vboxdrv: TSC mode is 'synchronous', kernel timer mode is 'normal'.
[ 20.796736] vboxdrv: Successfully loaded version 4.1.12_Ubuntu (interface 0x00190000).
[ 20.806340] vboxpci: IOMMU not found (not registered)
[ 26.312505] IBM TrackPoint firmware: 0x0e, buttons: 3/3
[ 26.534457] input: TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/input/input11
[ 28.030792] wlan0: authenticate with 74:44:01:18:94:08 (try 1)
[ 28.033139] wlan0: authenticated
[ 28.037878] wlan0: associate with 74:44:01:18:94:08 (try 1)
[ 28.043449] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 74:44:01:18:94:08 (capab=0x431 status=0 aid=4)
[ 28.043453] wlan0: associated
[ 28.047334] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready
[ 97.727572] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Tx aggregation enabled on ra = 74:44:01:18:94:08 tid = 0
[ 538.579748] UDF-fs: Partition marked readonly; forcing readonly mount
[ 538.620840] UDF-fs: INFO Mounting volume 'WU DANG SHEN DIAN QI GONG', timestamp 2005/09/13 21:54 (1ed4)

Okay, here is an update. I can play a regular dvd on the drive--it seems to work fine on both VLC and SMPlayer. It's just the Blu-ray capacity that is lacking. I can also play an audio cd, except that the disc I was playing kept have buffering problems...the tracks would "skip" fairly frequently. So this an improvement--what I'm still looking at is playing Blu-ray dvd's and cutting the buffering on audio cd's. Thanks in advance!

You'll most likely need the codecs for blu-ray
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Okay, but which Codecs? I know nothing about this. How do you determine what is the right one to play Blu-ray?

Check this out
http://linuxfreak003.blogspot.com/20...-1210.html?m=1