Hi,
This is my first proper post here, and I'm not even sure if this is the right place for my question. If it isn't, I apologise.
I have the latest version of Ubuntu on my PC and I've noticed that VLC only plays half the disk; its the same whether its commercial stuff, or items I have burned to disk myself from off-air broadcasts. The menu items are showing but when I click on them, those recorded more than half way into the disk can't be played. Can anyone suggest a work-around, or what I can do?

Many thanks

do other programs play the full videos ?


VLC normaly dose not have an issue with SINGLE layer dvd's ( 4.7 gig )
dual layer ?? maybe if your dvd drive is not set up to use them ,or is old .
That might cause a problem

The only other playback application I have is the "Videos" one and I never managed to get DVDs to work with it. I used VLC but after the PC and OS upgrade, I could not get it to play back more than 50% of a disc.

I presume the commercial DVD releases are dual layers, but the ones I use to make personal recordings are single layer. Neither of them work. I use an external USB DVD drive, which worked fine on the old computer but now, as I say, will only play half the disk. The drive is probably about 4 years old but I have never had a problem with it before now.

You could try running vlc from a terminal and see if any revealing error messages appear when it stops playing. That might help diagnose the problem.
jdk

You could also try using mplayer or something else other than VLC to play the DVDs to rule out a hardware issue.

You could also try opening the DVD's in a file manager, going to the VIDEO_TS directory, and testing whether you can play all the *.VOB files in sequence.