Problems playing/reading "Thor"

[historychick49]

I have a Toshiba Satellite C655D, running Ubuntu 10.10 (and Windows 7, but I almost never boot that). The DVD drive isn't working, so I use a Rosewill external drive for movies. Unfortunately, two Netflixed discs of Thor won't play!

The funny thing is, Ubuntu's definitely reading that the DVD is there, as it shows up on my desktop as usual. VLC's

Comments

[reboot_kid]

Rose has a good idea.
I'd tackle it a different way, by manually invoking vlc to play the DVD from the console.

Then we can see any back-end error messages that are generated. Perhaps the software is looking for things at /dev/dvd, and the external drive is being mapped to /dev/sr1... it's hard to say without seeing the details.

[historychick49]

Do you know what the command should be? I don't usually use the terminal for opening programs.

I kinda don't think it's an issue with VLC, as it's had no problems automatically reading DVDs in the external drive before. Even when I open VLC myself and tell it to play the disc in /dev/sr1, it reads the disc for a moment and then quits.

[lightning_rose]

The command is: vlc

The problem is almost certainly the DRM copy protection on the disc, what we're trying to do is get an error message that may help us find a work around.

[reboot_kid]

hit ctrl-alt-t to bring up a console
then, type
vlc dvd:///dev/dvd (assuming /dev/dvd is your dvd drive. Substitute in the proper value for your drive)

Go ahead and start working in VLC. Any error conditions that show up will pop up in that console window.
Once you've hit the error condition, copy and paste that text here so we can see what's up.

[historychick49]

And here's what that command brings up

[lightning_rose]

See my above comment regarding dvdbackup. VLC also uses libdvdcss.