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On 06/05/17 15:06, Pentiddy wrote: > It is a Pal disc, brand new NOT blu-ray uk region 2 bona-fide disc that > works in a macbook but not on the two versions of Windows or the two > versions of Linux I have tried it on. > I have tried 2 different optical drives but have yet to try the disc in > a more traditional player- as I do not have one. > I will take it to my folks' place and try it there... > Can anyone suggest a way of legally watching films on a Linux system- I > have been looking at things like Netflix and Amazon Prime, but they > don't seem to be compatible with Linux. I am just wanting to watch the > odd film without farting around with DVD issues (I used to use Lovefilm) > or breaching legal stuff. I still don't know if my internet connection > is good enough to stream- but 2Mb/s seems to be what is required and I > should get that! > Kodi seemed to work for a while with various plugins, but these are > becoming less reliable if they work at all... > Bla Bla Bla, > Sorry to dump all my stuff in this thread! > Regards, and thank you those who have suggested things- I appreciate > your time and expertise. > Anthony There are definitely a few different things going on here... as per usual! Something with your setup is not right, and it's probably being aggravated by that specific DVD. I note that Captain Fantastic is a relatively new film (released late 2016?) and as we all know, the copyright cartels, anti-DRM techniques, region-coding and other entirely uneccesary technical hurdles have been interfering with standard playback on optical media for about as long as they have been in existence. Considering that other DVDs you own *do* play back without any issue on the same system and you've got two (?) other Linux laptops to experiment with and still get the same result things are pointing strongly towards a "bad" disk. By "bad", I mean it's been mastered badly or wrongly, the on-disk structure is non-standard (depressingly common) or some idiot has simply messed up the way streams were embedded into the disk. Any of these could be the problem, and what's worse, it was probably *entirely intentional* by the studio that made the disk. Because "piracy", "DRM", "Linux doesn't pay mandatory CSS licensing fees", blah blah. Basically I think the specific DVD may well be defective by design as RMS would call it. If you look at the source code history of media libraries for Linux half of the "fixes" aren't for bugs at all - they're manual work-arounds for exactly this kind of nonsense. Patches to libdvdnav/libdvdread/etc just to work with yet another stupidly tweaked DVD master by some idiot in an American post-production studio. Thanks corporate masters :| My grumbling aside, we know that the DVD *does* work fine in a random Mac - so don't bother cleaning it or anything, we know it's operational. It's interesting that it doesn't work in a Windows machine you've tested it on though, they will usually play back anything (because of course they've got the officially sanctioned and proprietary code bits baked in straight from the people who make this defective trash). The log output from your VLC and mplayer sessions looks badly messed up though, however I look at it. Contrast a grab from my system just below (I managed to find some of these "DVD" things you are using in a forgotten corner of an antiques shop...): ghost@failbot:/export/blackspot$ vlc VLC media player 2.2.1 Terry Pratchett (Weatherwax) (revision 2.2.1~trusty2) [000000000070d118] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface. "sni-qt/13625" WARN 16:50:36.461 void StatusNotifierItemFactory::connectToSnw() Invalid interface to SNW_SERVICE libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 5.0.3 libdvdnav: DVD Title: WALLACE_AND_GROMIT libdvdnav: DVD Serial Number: 342b2674 libdvdnav: DVD Title (Alternative): libdvdnav: DVD disk reports itself with Region mask 0x00f50000. Regions: 2 4 libdvdread: Attempting to retrieve all CSS keys libdvdread: This can take a _long_ time, please be patient libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.VOB at 0x0000024f libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB at 0x00000327 libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB at 0x000003da libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_02_0.VOB at 0x00062c7a libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_02_1.VOB at 0x00062d2d libdvdread: Elapsed time 0 <snip> Note how my system immediately calls libdvdnav and pulls and displays lots of expected metadata from the disk stream - the title, serial number, region, etc. It then immediately starts handling the CSS keys. Your system notably does none of this at all and can't seem to display any metadata at all - it just starts throwing errors immediately. I've spotted something else weird straight away though. Can you figure out easily if your DVD drive (do you only have the external USB unit or do you have an internal drive as well?) is seen by Linux as /dev/sr0 or /dev/sr1 ? They are the first and second DVD devices respectively. Linux will give the first drive it "sees" /dev/sr0 and the second, probably your USB DVD, /dev/sr1. It's not clear which you are using and VLC and mplayer in your logs seem to be trying different devices. It would also help to know more about your laptop as there is another related error that is easy to spot. Make and model please! Your system seems to be defaulting on it's video out mode, how the graphics stream is handled by the hardware. At least mplayer seems to be trying (and failing) to use VDPAU which is hardware accelerated and depends on having specific and supported silicon. This won't work without extra setup. Both fall back to attempting "XV" mode which is the oldest and most primitive form of rendering and prone to stuttering and frame drops. Isn't that what you were initially seeing by the way? Didn't the DVD actually work, just very badly with a lot of stuttering? As per usual, the fault will be traceable and most likely fixable depending on how far down the rabbit hole you're prepared to go. You're up against a tricky "enemy" though - normally you're just looking to fix a bug or a config error. In this case, media playback, you're fighting against stuff that quite frankly has been designed specifically and maliciously to work against you half the time. Media playback on Linux has always been a bit of a nightmare and sadly that's intentional. It is however decidedly doable, and once you've got the hang of it Linux provides by far the best and most flexible media playback going. This'll be cold comfort to you of course, but if I was to stick your Captain Fantastic DVD in my workstation I bet it would play first time with no issues. So, please let us know your main laptop make + model and the output of lspci. Stick a working DVD in and then show us what "dmesg | tail -n 100" gives you. Repeat with the Captain Fantastic DVD so we can compare. If your laptop has an internal DVD, don't bother with the USB one - if nothing else, the bandwidth from it will be terrible. I've also got plenty of recommendations for your other question of how to "do media" on Linux including Kodi and legitimate sources, but one thing at a time. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq