In a previous post I said how impressed I was with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex except for one thing- I couldn’t seem to play DVD movies. Well- I just fixed that.
Testing with the DVD movie “Spirit” because it was handy… When I started I would put the disk in and Ubuntu wanted to open Totem or Movie Player by default. I tried installing codecs and even VLC, a media player that doesn’t use codecs. I had also installed MPlayer from the Ubuntu “Add/Remove” repos and nothing worked… except this:
From https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu I used their instructions to install the stuff to play videos and audio media that can’t be distributed with Ubuntu because of legal reasons. This is the same reason that xmms will not play mp3s out of the box.
First: sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list from the terminal.
Second: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update (again from terminal…)
Third: sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 (even though I had already done this before I needed to do it again after installing the medibuntu stuff)
It’s important to note as well that I also did sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras to install the restricted DVD zones. I can’t say for certain if this helps or not, but I did it anyway.
After doing this I was able to get MPlayer which I had installed earlier to play the DVD.
Please feel free to leave comments and if you’re stuck I will attempt to point you in the right direction.
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I’m new to this.I get you use the sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list from the terminal. but where do you put.Add & Remove plus Addmin 2 programs just ignore it.I’ve read the help it is no help to me
Thanks keith
Keith,
The fist thing you need to do is to install MPlayer. Without MPlayer all my other instructions will fail. You need to go to System, Add/Remove. This is where you can download and install new apps from the repos (repositories). Search for MPlayer. It should be the first result. Check the box and click Apply Changes. MPlayer will now be downloaded and installed. After it’s installed follow my directions.
I should note that this doesn’t work on all DVDs. While I was able to test and get most DVDs to play (Spirit, Hell Boy II, Star Wars) there were some I tested that wouldn’t play without opening the DVD and clicking on the chapters. The one specifically I had trouble with was not a professionally produced DVD but rather one that someone had rendered and packaged on a PC and copied for distribution. It was an instructional DVD on Goat Tying for my daughter who does rodeos, if you must know…
Hopefully this will get you setup!
da best. Keep it going! Thank you
Hi,
I installed MPlayer and followed your instructions and still get an error “seek failed”. I am new to Linux so any help you could provide would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Jeff