Hello! I am trying to play a DVD in vlc on Debian Bullseye. I followed the 2 answers here, but neither of them worked for me.

I added

http://ftp.debian.org/debian stable main contrib

to my /etc/apt/sources.list

then did,
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libdvd-pkg

but this didn’t work to play a DVD even after libdvd-pkg installation. I am not sure why.

I also tried the first answer but couldn’t get the developer’s key imported because “apt-key is deprecated.”

I tried to import the key into apt following the advice here like this:
$ wget -O- http://download.videolan.org/pub/deb...deolan-apt.asc |\gpg --dearmor |\sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/videolan-apt.asc >
but that command gave me this error:
bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'

Again, I am not sure why this did not work.
How do I get DVDs to play in Debian Bullseye?

You need to manually run

after installation. I'm not sure why, probably to do with the free / non free thing. Even with it though I've found the occasional disk that won't open properly in vlc and such. Works most of the time though.

1 members found this post helpful.

You are referring to answers for Debian Jessie which were given 7 years ago.
The Linux kernal and Debian OS are are constantly upgrading so those answers may no longer apply.
Especially as you are using Debian Bullseye and not Jessie.

What is the make and model of your DVD player?
More importantly - how old is it?
My dvd player died way before my desktop pc died.

Does VLC give an error message?

1 members found this post helpful.

Running
got vlc to play DVDs without any errors. It works now!
Thank you both for the help. I appreciate it.