I have Opensuse 11.1 (Gnome interface) installed on an HP laptop. My problem is that I am unable to get some DVDs to play using either Totem or VLC. However most DVD’s do play OK - its just a minority that don’t. Is this expected behaviour or can I do something about it ? Just a bit frustrating to sit down to watch a DVD and be unable to watch it. I did think this might be a DVD Region problem, but having checked the DVDs that play and don’t play, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Commercial DVDs tend to be encrypted, and set for specific regions. In Linux it is possible to decrypt most encrypted DVDs using the package libdvdcss. However I have read that does not work for all of the very latest DVDs which may utilize a different encryption method.
Thus I suspect the problem you face is either:
region coding problem, or
decryption problem
Besides attempting with vlc and totem, did you attempt with smplayer (packaged by packman) or kaffeine ? (packaged by packman, with packman packaged libxine1 to provide its video/sound engin) ?
I assume you checked to see if the DVDs that are gi ving you problems are good quality DVDs ?
I haven’t tried smplayer or kaffeine - so I will try. The DVDs are good quality. In the most recent case, I have two DVDs published by the BBC of a comedy program called “Early Doors”. Series 1 plays in Totem no problem; Series 2 won’t play at all. Just to be sure I checked in a DVD player via the TV - both play no problems.
Hmm - thats interesting. I’ve just tried playing DVDs with xine and mplayer/smplayer. They all error with Codec problems. They appear to have been installed - but obviously are missing some critical bits. Anyone know what the critical components / libraries that I need to make sure are downloaded ? And should I uninstall xine, mplayer/smplayer first and start again ?
Unfortunately after I’ve run the online update, things seem to be no better. I would be particularly interested in getting Xine and Mplayer working as options to try, but I get the following error messages when trying to play DVD’s
Xine - “Xine Engine error. No input plugin available to handle dvd:/”
family@linux-9osw:~> su
Password:
linux-9osw:/home/family # zypper up
System management is locked by the application with pid 6663 (/usr/sbin/packagekitd).
Close this application before trying again.
linux-9osw:/home/family #
Apologies if this is relatively easy to overcome, but I don’t know how …
As I previously said and people ignore my advice, if those discs use ARccOS protection, installing libdvdcss will do little as it won’t be able to handle them properly. Try with mplayer dvdnav://
Also, if mplayer can’t fine the dvd stream, maybe you need to specify on which device to look for? this is done with the -dvd-device option, eg mplayer dvdnav:// -dvd-device /dev/dvd
Hi
Can’t see an update applet in the system tray. Rebooted and still can’t “zypper up” - same output as before.
Tried microchip8’s tip, and here’s the output:
family@linux-9osw:~> mplayer dvdnav:// -dvd-device /dev/dvd
MPlayer dev-SVN-r29116-4.3-openSUSE Linux 11.1 (i686)-Packman (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer TeamCan’t open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can’t init input joystick
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.
Playing dvdnav://.
libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 4.1.3
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.10 for DVD access
libdvdread: Can’t stat /dev/dvd
No such file or directory
libdvdnav: vm: failed to open/read the DVD
Couldn’t open DVD device: /dev/dvd (No such file or directory)
No stream found to handle url dvdnav://
Reboot and at the boot screen, pause the boot by moving the down arrow button, then move back up and clear any text in the boot arguments by holding backspace. Then just type the number: 3
At the login
Login with your username and password
Now switch to super user with su
and root password
Not having much luck here. If I press the down arrow on the GRUB boot screen, then it just selects a “Suse failsafe” boot option.
There is an option to edit the boot sequence by selecting “e”. The boot command is very long, and difficult to tell which arguments I can remove.
Typing the number 3 at the GRUB boot screen doesn’t have any effect.