Cannot find plugin for MRL [dvd:/] - a solution

I had the above message when I first installed openSuse and tried to play DVDs. I tried googling the above message, thinking that I was missing some software. It turned out that the message simply meant that it couldn’t find the dvd. Messages such as

    Cannot find plugin for MRL [cdda:/]
Cannot find plugin for MRL [dvd:/]

basically mean that SuSE is having problems finding a cd or dvd. This is most likely due to symbolic links for cdrom and/or dvd not being present.

I was having this problem on Kaffeine. Also having problems playing dvds on smplayer and VLC player.

I found the answer to the problem on the following thread (all credit to jdmcdaniel3 for the key initial post), which does a very thorough job of explaining about the 70-persistent-cd.rules file, where to find it, and what you can do with it.

Multimedia Optical Drive Naming (ie /dev/dvd & /dev/cdrom) Howto in opneSUSE - openSUSE Forums

The thread explains how to edit the 70-persistent-cd-rules file or, better, to create a copy called 90-persistent-cd.rules and edit that file to add symbolic link entries for cdrom and/or dvd if they are missing. Doing this it is possible for the cdrom and dvd symbolic links to point to the same physical drive or to different drives, depending on what you wish to do.

Kaffeine seems to expect to find things in cdrom and dvd. It will work once you have set up the symbolic links for these as described in the above post.

If you simply look at the 70-persistent-cd.rules file, you will see the symbolic links allocated to the cd/dvd drive(s) on your system. If you make a note of these symbolic link values you can use them to set the drive information in applications such as smplayer or VLC player :

smplayer - go into /options/preferences/Drives to set the values. This is a one-off task. After that it automatically knows wher to look when you select Open/DVD from Drive or Open/Audio CD

VLC player - go into Media/Open Disc and set the drive accordingly, depending on whether you are playing a cd or dvd. Needs to be done each time you play a cd or dvd.

I think creating the 90-persistent-cd.rules file as mentioned above and adding the entry for cdrom and/or dvd may work for other cd/dvd playing software that expects to find these links, but I haven’t tested running anything other than smplayer, VLC player and Kaffeine. These cover my requirements.

Following the above I am now able to play cds and dvds in my cd and dvd drive respectively.

mpm2046 thanks for your kind words over my thread and the cdrom and dvd device names. You know that right now, the forum is looking as such submissions as mine to make permanent, which will fall only to the most worthy subjects. I would appreciate your vote for this thread. You do this by rating the thread as high as you feel it merits. Please take the time to provide a valid rating for my submission if you think it warrants it.

Thank You,

Happy to oblige with a rating. Yours was a really helpful post and I hope it makes it into the reference section.