I recently bought a new Avatar DVD box set and tried to play it,but the DVD behaved strangely in both of my drives (spinning up but clicking as if it was starting to access) and would not mount.

I then tested it in a commercial DVD player. No problem.

I added the medibuntu repository, installed mplayer and libdcss when the update tool suggested it and checked libdcss and libdvdnav was installed. After 2 or three minutes of spinning from the drive,Totem autostarted and prompted me to download the rest of the restricted codecs when I tried to play a different DVD to test. Then:

This popped up 3 times,then Totem popped up:
Yet when I pick "File -> Play Disc" it plays as normal,menus and all.

Thinking it could be the region,I got a region 2/4 disc,same as the Avatar one. After the same sequence of errors,it played fine as well.

A different DVD from the same box set inserted into the first drive refused to mount in the same manner as the first DVD,eventually spinning down. When I tried it in the second drive,it mounted... sort of. A different message popped up saying that it was not properly mounted.

Totem then kept giving the "Could not open location; you might not have permission" error and would not play it.

When I ejected it and put it back in,it refused to mount at all. Then I ejected and put it back again... and now it plays.

What's going on here? Is it trying to capture the keys?

I've had separate problems with VLC and Mplayer because Ubuntu insists on mounting discs on /media/ and with an unique name,when both expect to find it in /dev/dvdrom or /dev/cdrom. VLC partially succeeds when I change the disc target to point directly at the folder in /media/{name of disc}... then craps out with a segmentation fault when I do "scene select" (I ran it in a terminal). Changing the target to point directly to the block device doesn't work. Can anyone suggest a workaround for this too?

Have you tried VLC and set the device to /dev/sr0?

My version of VLC points to /dev/scd0 but I do not use Xubuntu, just Ubuntu. Play your install disk as a live disk and see if it can play DVDs (I use an old wedding DVD for this as its unencrypted) and see which device it points to.

I had the same problems on Ubuntu 9.04.Now I am useing Kaffine from the KDE project.
That works fine.

I had the same problems on Ubuntu 9.04.Now I am useing Kaffine from the KDE project.
That works fine.

but you shouldn't need to mount a movie DVD, most payers use direct access.
and this message...

mount: block device /dev/sr0 is write-protected, mounting read-only

is normal (dvd aren't re-writable, so they would be read only

maybe check both drives' region. Perhaps a difference between them is causing lower level confusion. Use regionset.

You say you have the Medibuntu repository listed in /etc/apt/sources.list. That's the first thing to do. Instructions can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu

Now, the best way of calling in libdvdcss2 (plus some other stuff, such as codecs, which are non-free) is to install the metapackage ubuntu-reserved-extras. If you do this through your package manager, you will get the metapackages for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu.

Tell us if this solves your problem.

I'm having this same problem using MythBuntu 9.04

Also, when opening DVDs in VLC I get Audio only with all black video. Same with Xine.

The DVD will open if I run it manually from Mythfrontend using Internal as the DVD player, but it just shows the FBI warning and then freezes mythfrontend.