Trying to play DVD video problems

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 11 April 2010 15:45:04 Jim wrote:
> [mickey at acer64 ~]$ mplayer dvd://
> MPlayer SVN-r29800-4.4.2 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
[snip]
> Playing dvd://.
> libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.10 for DVD access
> libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
> libdvdread: Can't open /dev/dvd for reading
> Couldn't open DVD device: /dev/dvd (No medium found)
> No stream found to handle url dvd://

So you did put the DVD in the drive, right? Does the /dev/dvd symlink point to 
any hardware? Do you even have it (ls -l /dev/dvd)?

> [mickey at acer64 ~]$ mplayer dvd://
> MPlayer SVN-r29800-4.4.2 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
[snip]
> Playing dvd://.

Ok, now it appears to detect the media.

> libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.10 for DVD access
> There are 22 titles on this DVD.

22 titles. You can play each individually as

mplayer dvd://1
mplayer dvd://2

and so on. Feel free to experiment, if you wish. :-)

[snip]
> MPEG-PS file format detected.
> VIDEO:  MPEG1  720x480  (aspect 3)  29.970 fps  9800.0 kbps (1225.0
> kbyte/s) [vdpau] Could not open dynamic library libvdpau.so.1
> ==========================================================================
> Opening video decoder: [mpegpes] MPEG 1/2 Video passthrough
> Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
> Opening video filter: [scale]
> The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.
> Try appending the scale filter to your filter list,
> e.g. -vf spp,scale instead of -vf spp.
> VDecoder init failed :(

What video hardware do you have and what drivers do you use? Try this

mplayer -vo x11 -vf scale dvd://

to do everything in software (this might be slooow, but should work almost 
always).

[snip]
> Starting playback...
> a52: error at resampling
> [mpeg1video @ 0xad7840]sequence header damaged
[snip]
> [mpeg1video @ 0xad7840]Missing picture start code

Ok, this is not good. Both audio and video codecs have problems decoding the 
data. Is the media in proper shape? Can you play it on other hardware/OS (say, 
on windows)?

If there is nothing weird with your hardware setup, I would say that the DVD 
you are trying to play is badly encoded (ie. broken). Do try it on another 
computer to check. Also try the x11 video output (the above command) and see 
if that works (if the media is ok, it should, albeit it may complain that your 
computer is too slow). Other than that, I'm not sure.

HTH, :-)
Marko