My external USB DVD player wont play movies in VLC player on Linux Mint 20. My laptop is an Acer Aspire. I ran some commands and pasted them below. Would appreciate any ideas.

non@anon:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:8000 Intel Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 174c:55aa ASMedia Technology Inc. Name: ASM1051E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1053E SATA 6Gb/s bridge, ASM1153 SATA 3Gb/s bridge, ASM1153E SATA 6Gb/s bridge
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 04f3:0125 Elan Microelectronics Corp. Touchscreen
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 0411:01dc BUFFALO INC. (formerly MelCo., Inc.) Ultra-Slim Portable DVD Writer (DVSM-PC58U2V)
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0489:e04e Foxconn / Hon Hai
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 1bcf:2c17 Sunplus Innovation Technology Inc. HD WebCam
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

anon@anon:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 400M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 300M 0 part
├─sda3 8:3 0 128M 0 part
├─sda4 8:4 0 451.1G 0 part
├─sda5 8:5 0 840M 0 part
└─sda6 8:6 0 13G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 111.8G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 960M 0 part /run/timeshift/backup
├─sdb2 8:18 0 19.1G 0 part /
├─sdb3 8:19 0 76.3G 0 part /home
└─sdb4 8:20 0 1.9G 0 part [SWAP]
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom


anon@anon:~$ dmesg | grep cd | less
468.997459] sr 4:0:0:0: [sr0] scsi3-mmc drive: 8x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
[ 468.997463] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[ 4930.663177] usb 2-5: new high-speed USB device number 7 using xhci_hcd
[ 4930.812447] usb 2-5: New USB device found, idVendor=0411, idProduct=01dc, bcdDevice= 2.00
[ 4931.877394] sr 4:0:0:0: [sr0] scsi3-mmc drive: 8x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray

Hi, dgreene262, and welcome to LQ.

Try something for me. On your pc, there will be a key (F10, or F12 often) that allows you to choose your boot drive. Press it after the reboot, with the usb cdrom inserted, and see if the usb dvd drive comes up. I'll bet it doesn't

Your average dvd player shows there. They use some ATAPI code from ancient history which has been duly adjusted to work on SCSI, IDE & SATA. Your device might be able to emulate that somehow down the serial link. But I notice, lsblk is seeing it as a rom - Read Only Memory. The point is, there's no intelligence in a ROM.

So instead of addressing it like a dvd, or cd (dvd://<somewhere>) I'd want to mount it and address it as a directory, or files. Messy if you have audio discs, but ok on a data cd.