I have mythbuntu 9.10 set up on my friends computer which I built a few years back and now we have it set up to be a mediacenter. He has an enormous stack of DVD's which we want to rip so they don't take up so much space. I started with mythbuntu from version 9.04. Here where the problems with that.


The DVD would mount and you could browse through it with the file manager.

I had libdvdcss2, ffmpeg, and w64 codecs installed.
A very few select dvds where able to rip, maybe like 3/20 dvds. The rest just mounted but where not able to play, and when I went to rip them through mythtv, all I got was No Jobs.

Now that I installed Mythbuntu 9.10 I figured some of these things may be straightened out, but it got worse. As usual I updated, and installed all the proprietary codecs. This time in mythbuntu 9.10 the DVD's will not even mount. I checked through the directory /cdrom and found nothing. I am thinking this may be an issue with the drive? I have tried so many things I read online and I am completely stuck on this one.

Can someone point me into a direction where to start to solve this one?

Unfortunately I've never found a great solution for ripping dvds on linux and I don't know enough about the protection on DVD's to attack the issue straight on. What I've found is one of the few things that works for ripping was using DVD shrink under wine to break the encryption and get the DVD as an iso, then using just about anything to rip the video from the iso. It looks as though there is a ubuntu package gddrescue that may be able to do that for you. But if you can't even get the DVD's to mount I'm not sure that even this will work. Generally after installing libdvdcss the drive will at least mount for me.

I know you've tried a lot of thing online, but this guy seems to have a walkthough specifically spelled out for your situation, getting DVDs to mount on *buntu

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=466248

The only thing I'd mention is that since Mythbuntu 9.10 is based on Karmic Koala just use the following where the walkthrough separates for different ubuntu versions

sudo wget http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

hth