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.
- 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.
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.
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.
ubuntu-restricted-extras
package along withlibdvdcss2
? As per these instructions