DVD Playing

DVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc, is an optical disc storage media format used for video and data storage.[1]

Requirements

If you wish to play encrypted DVDs, you must install the libdvd* packages:

• libdvdread
• libdvdcss
• libdvdnav

Additionally, you must install player software. Popular DVD players are MPlayer, xine and VLC.

Tip: Users may need to belong to the optical group to be able to access the DVD drive. To add USERNAME to the optical group, run the following:

# gpasswd -a USERNAME optical

Do not forget to log the user out and back in for the changes to take effect. You can see your user's current groups with groups command.

DVD players

See also: Common Applications#Video

MPlayer

MPlayer is efficient and supports a wide variety of media formats (i.e. almost everything). To play a DVD with MPlayer:

$ mplayer dvd://N

...where N is the desired chapter number. Start at 1 and work up if unsure.

Mplayer checks /dev/dvd by default. Tell it to use /dev/sr0 with the dvd-device option at the command line, or the dvd-device variable in ~/.mplayer/config.

To play a DVD image file:

$ mplayer -dvd-device movie.iso dvd://N

To enable the DVD menu use (NOTE: you use arrow keys to navigate and the Template:Keypress key to choose):

$ mplayer dvdnav://

To enable mouse support in DVD menus use:

$ mplayer -mouse-movements dvdnav://

To find the audio language, start MPlayer with the -v switch to output audio IDs. An audio track is selected with -aid <audio_id>. Set a default audio language by editing ~/.mplayer/config and adding the line alang=en for English.

With MPlayer, the DVD could be set to a low volume. To increase the maximum volume to 400%, use softvol=yes and softvol-max=400. The startup volume defaults to 100% of software volume and the global mixer levels will remain untouched. Using the 9 and 0 keys, volume can be adjusted between 0 and 400 percent.

 alang=en
 softvol=yes
 softvol-max=400

MPlayer home page

VLC

VLC is a portable, capable, open source media player written in Qt (VLC home page).

Default in Gnome

Copy the system desktop file to the local one (local .desktop files supersede the global ones):

cp /usr/share/applications/vlc.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

Define its mime types (known playback file type abilities) by doing:

sed -i 's|^Mimetype.*$|MimeType=video/dv;video/mpeg;video/x-mpeg;video/msvideo;video/quicktime;video/x-anim;video/x-avi;video/x-ms-asf;video/x-ms-wmv;video/x-msvideo;video/x-nsv;video/x-flc;video/x-fli;application/ogg;application/x-ogg;application/x-matroska;audio/x-mp3;audio/x-mpeg;audio/mpeg;audio/x-wav;audio/x-mpegurl;audio/x-scpls;audio/x-m4a;audio/x-ms-asf;audio/x-ms-asx;audio/x-ms-wax;application/vnd.rn-realmedia;audio/x-real-audio;audio/x-pn-realaudio;application/x-flac;audio/x-flac;application/x-shockwave-flash;misc/ultravox;audio/vnd.rn-realaudio;audio/x-pn-aiff;audio/x-pn-au;audio/x-pn-wav;audio/x-pn-windows-acm;image/vnd.rn-realpix;video/vnd.rn-realvideo;audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin;application/x-extension-mp4;audio/mp4;video/mp4;video/mp4v-es;x-content/video-vcd;x-content/video-svcd;x-content/video-dvd;x-content/audio-cdda;x-content/audio-player;|' ~/.local/share/applications/vlc.desktop

Then in System Settings > Details >> Default Applications and on the Video drop-down menu, select Open VLC media player.}}

Error "... could not open the disc /dev/dvd"

If you get the error, "vlc dvdread could not open the disc "/dev/dvd"" it may be because there is no device node /dev/dvd on your system. Udev no longer creates /dev/dvd and instead uses /dev/sr0. To fix this edit the VLC configuration file (~/.config/vlc/vlcrc:

# DVD device (string)                                                           
dvd=/dev/sr0

xine

A lightweight media player supporting DVD menus.

xine home page

Troubleshooting

DVD drive is noisy

If playing DVD videos causes the system to be very loud, it may be because the disk is spinning faster than it needs to. To temporarily change the speed of the drive, as root, run:

# eject -x 12 /dev/dvd

sometimes:

# hdparm -E12 /dev/dvd

Any speed that is supported by the drive can be used, or 0 for the maximum speed.

Setting CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drive speed

Playback does not work with new computer (DVD-Drive)

If playback does not work and you have a new computer (DVD-Drive) the reason might be that the region code is not set. You can set it with regionset^AUR from the Arch User Repository.