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I have followed every instruction imaginable but still cannot get "certain" (disney is one culprit) dvd's to play on my mint/ubuntu setup - they play perfectly on a windows 7 laptop I have tried vlc with menus off, copied the full dvd with dd etc etc its not even worth going through what didn't help

Handbrake sometimes works but often copies the wrong title vlc sometimes works without menus but then jumbles up the titles as well

This is embarrassing, I wouldn't mind paying a small amount to get the decryption on ubuntu, it is clearly been setup to stop copying - I just want to play the dvd that I rented from the rental shop

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  • Is it Mint or Ubuntu?
    – Rinzwind
    Mar 21, 2014 at 11:28
  • I am on mint at the moment but had the same problem with ubuntu Mar 21, 2014 at 11:30
  • Have you installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras package along with libdvdcss2? As per these instructions
    – Hugo Buff
    Mar 21, 2014 at 12:28
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    If somebody feels this question has been answered already please share the link with us? To down vote for no reason is just stupid Mar 22, 2014 at 11:32
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    Thanks Daniel, OrbWeaver answer was spot on, its really about the DVD menu's I havent had an issue playing (even disney movies) since I used menus - but thanks for looking into it for me Jul 14, 2014 at 11:53

2 Answers 2

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You are probably encountering a type of "copy protection" whereby the DVD is filled with up to 98 "fake" titles that contain the movie scenes in the wrong order, with only a single title that is actually the one you want to play. This has nothing to do with encryption or CSS so installing updated libraries or switching distributions probably won't help.

It is also my experience that Disney are notorious for doing this with their recent DVD releases (including almost anything from Pixar).

There are a couple of techniques that usually work for me.

  1. Try playing dvdnav:// rather than dvd:// in mplayer. This will show the DVD menus, which you can often navigate to the correct title. If you pass the -quiet option to mplayer it sometimes prints out which titles it it is switching to, which will reveal the correct title once the main feature starts playing.
  2. Use xine to play the DVD, and navigate the menus to the main feature as above. Once the movie is playing, dragging the playbar backwards and forwards causes the title number to be briefly shown in the status display. You can then use this title number as the argument to mplayer dvd://<titlenum>, or in VLC or your application of choice.

  3. If all else fails, I reboot into Windows and use Media Player Classic to play the DVD. This has not failed so far, and shows the correct title number in its status display. Much as I hate having to use Windows software to work around a problem in Linux, I have had to resort to this with a couple of particularly stubborn disks.

It may be possible to use other software that I haven't tried; the important point is that you must navigate through the DVD menus because only the menus "know" which of the DVD titles contains the actual movie.

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  • Thats a great answer thanks, to add to it one can also load an iso copy using this command "mplayer dvdnav:// -dvd-device ~/my_movie.iso" Mar 22, 2014 at 9:10
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I unchecked "No Disc Menus" in VLC. - when you select 'Open Disc' a popup window opens. Therein that menu is "No Disc Menus" pre-selected, unselect it.

Worked with a Netflix DVD.

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