I am trying to get DVD's and/or VCD's to play via Xine. I am running Mandrake 9.2. I installed libdvdread and libdvdcss. I also changed my dvd device in the Xine gui to mnt/cdrom2 which is my dvd player. (I also made a symlink for dev/dvd with the same results.) When I hit the DVD button it will play part of the warning screen on the DVD then I get a Xine error popup. "source can't be read." "...maybe you don't have rights for this.." "no disc in drive... can't read Nav packet". What am I missing? Is there something else I need to install?

My only guess is to make sure you have permissions to read from the DVD-Rom for the current logged in user.

You have to have the right device selected for Xine to play. By default it looks for /dev/dvd. What you should do is "ls -l /dev/dvd" and see what you get. Probably you will get that this is a symbolic link to the actual drive, usually either /dev/hdd or /dev/hdc (or /dev/sr0, /dev/scd0 if it is a SCSI drive). If it is to /dev/hdd (probably) make sure that /dev/hdd has read and write permissions for everyone (ie rwx-rw-rw). If not, as root, do "chmod a+rw /dev/hdd". If /dev/dvd is not linked to the proper device, do "rm /dev/dvd" which deletes the linkage and then relink it to the proper device "ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/dvd".

Good Luck
Alan

Well thank you. It turns out I didn't get my symlink correct (I am sorta new to all of this and am still learning). I removed it and am now trying to set it up correctly. How exactly am I supposed to know which one is my dvd rom? I know it mounts as /mnt/cdrom2. I also have a hdc, hdc2 and hdd in my /dev. I tried to symlink all 3 (one at a time of course to /dev/dvd but it always tells me "no such file or directory" It didn't tell me that the first time I linked them (to the incorrect destination), only after I removed the assumed incorrect link.
I still get the farthest when I change the input setting in Xine from /dev/dvd to /mnt/cdrom2. It at least plays about 2s of the disc before giving me the previous error.

Thanks again for the help.

Look at "dmesg". There should be some lines about "hdc: blah blah Sony CDRW" "hdd: blah Teac DVD". How many drives do you have and are they all ATAPI or are any SCSI?

Alan

If I run dmesg, I get nothing but errors.
command error: error=0x50
end_request: I/O error, cmd 0 dev 16:40 (hdd), sector 8400552
hdd: command error: status 0x51 ( DriveReady SeekComplete Error)
I get that over and over again about 20 times. No mention of CDs or DVDs in that mess. Did I run the right command?

run dmesg|grep dvd or dmesg|grep DVD

if dmesg doesn't give you full output, pay close attention to your linux bootup and find the line that says hdc:Samsung DVD or whatever

whatever the device is (such as hda, hdb, hdz, etc.), do ln -s /dev/hdx /dev/dvd where hdx is your dvd device

also, do not mount your dvd, you don't need to do so

then do chmod 777 /dev/dvd and chmod 777 /dev/hdx

all this should be done as root (su - in a terminal or konsole)

then make sure xine is set to read /dev/dvd not /mnt/whatever

Its a Toshiba DVD on hdd. Finally found it listed in HardDrake. Got the correct simlink working and changed it back in Xine. Did the chmod's now it loads Sweet. Now I just need to figure out how to get my sound working again.. It worked fine before I ran alsaconf so I probably just screwed something up there.

Thanks for the help I appreciate it. I even took notes