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

[lightning_rose]

Please put one of the DVDs in the drive and run the command "dvdbackup -I" (that's a capitol 'i') and post the results. You can use this http://www.lightning-rose.com/projects/txt2html.htm to preserve the text formatting.

You may have to install dvdbackup - sudo apt-get install dvdbackup

[historychick49]

Here it is:

jessica@jessica-Satellite-C655D:~$ dvdbackup -I
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.12 for DVD access
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/dvd for reading
Cannot open specified device /dev/dvd - check your DVD device

Looks like it's trying to read from the internal drive rather than the external.

[lightning_rose]

The command you need is "$ dvdbackup -I -i DEVICE", where DEVICE is the name of the external DVD drive (ie /dev/sr0)

I don't know the name of the device, but you should be able to figure it out with VLC.

[historychick49]

Oh, okay! Here it is:

jessica@jessica-Satellite-C655D:~$ dvdbackup -I -i /dev/sr1
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.12 for DVD access
Please send bug report - no VTS_TMAPT ??
Segmentation fault

[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.

[digitalangel]

I hate to say it but had a similar problem with Thor from Lovefilm UK. It may well be their encoding. (I can't play any Eddie Izzard DVDs in PC at all either)

[historychick49]

That's what it looks like, yeah... I just booted into Win 7 (for something unrelated, actually) and tried to play the DVD. VLC and Windows Media Player did the exact same thing - opened, started to read the disc, and then quit.

[lightning_rose]

This behaviour helps confirm my above hypothesis that either the disc or the drive is bad.

If you can successfully play any other DVD under both Win-7 and Linux, then it's probably the disc. It happens, I've seen it with NetFlix discs that appear to be undamaged. Report it as unplayable and they'll send another copy pretty quickly.

[historychick49]

Bleh, this is actually the second Thor disc - the other one had the same problems. I'm reluctant to keep reporting unplayable discs one after the other, especially as that's what I did before I twigged to my internal drive dying.

I'll probably return this one and wait a while before re-adding it to my queue. Thanks for your help!

[reboot_kid]

Okay.. seriously mods.. why is every reply I make that has a URL or file path statement getting marked as spam?

[historychick49]

I just unspammed it. I know that URL-containing comments are treated as suspicious in some comms; I think the comm owner/maintainer has to go in and change the setting to prevent this from happening.