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I have struggled for days to make my machine read some movie DVDs (tried with a few). Weird, it mounts an Ubuntu-installation DVD, but doesn't mount movie DVDs.

It used to work fine (with the same set of DVDs) when one day it suddenly stopped playing only movie dvds and reinstalling Ubuntu 14.04.3, as well as freshly installing Ubuntu 15.10 didn't help.

EDIT: fresh install of 16.04 had the same issue.

I have installed ubuntu-restricted-extras, libdvdcss2, libdvdread4, libdvdnav4, a couple of gtreamer-plugins, etc, etc., also regionset - all in vain.

When I try the dvd with vlc I get

~$ vlc /dev/sr0
VLC media player 2.2.1 Terry Pratchett (Weatherwax) (revision 2.2.1-0-ga425c42)
[0000000000ebe088] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface.  Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.
libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 5.0.1
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/sr0 with libdvdcss. 
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/sr0 for reading
libdvdnav: vm: failed to open/read the DVD
[00007f5b38000e98] filesystem access error: read error: Input/output error
[00007f5b380011d8] core stream error: cannot pre fill buffer

I am concluding I have some sort of hardware issue, but is it possible to affect only media DVDs? Does anyone have any suggestions?

UPDATE: I tried with VLC directly 

$vlc /dev/sr0

after mounting dvd in fstab manually. It worked for only one DVD play, that went very unsmoothly, despite my NVidia graphics card. The next DVD I tried - I got the same error as above.

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  • Movie dvds typically have copyright protection, hence I doubt you will be able to mount those.
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Dec 22, 2015 at 0:03
  • But I used to play the same DVDs. (I have 50 DVDs of "the X files" and somewhere in the middle of fourth season my player refused to continue playing. So unfair!)
    – Mateva
    Dec 22, 2015 at 6:25
  • Just a side comment, cleaning CD didn't help. This is really discouraging.
    – Mateva
    Dec 22, 2015 at 19:48
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    So as far as I understand , your ultimate goal is to play DVDs. I don't recall ever mounting those - the VLC or any other player should be playing them just like that , no mounting necessary. Currently I don't have DVD player in my laptop ( I've removed it to make space for second hard drive ). I will replace it back again today and will see what I can do.
    – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
    Dec 22, 2015 at 20:37
  • @Serg , thanks a lot! I tried with VLC directly after mounting dvd in fstab manually (I will add this as an update). It worked for only one DVD play, that went very unsmoothly, despite my NVidia graphics card. The next DVD I tried - I got the same error.
    – Mateva
    Dec 23, 2015 at 11:57

1 Answer 1

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I succeeded to resolve this issue, but just temporarily. Indeed, setting regionset was what was needed.

First, in order to set it you need to insert any DVD that is read by your player. Essentially, it can be a simple data DVD. And this is very misleading, since when you set the region code, you set it for the device, not the inserted DVD.

Important: you have limited numbers of trials to set region code on your drive.

Then, you do

sudo regionset /dev/sr0

(my dvd is mounted on sr0) and select on of the following values E.g. USA is 1, Europe is 2, China is 6 and so forth.

Also, if you wonder how to choose this value - on the DVDs you have, you probably have a small label with a planet picture and a number - this is the actual region code you need to play this DVD.

Fun fact: all my DVDs are region code 2, but some used to play and others - not before I set region code.

Still, the issue remains open to me for some stable permanent solution.

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