Arch Linux

Could you add some links on the post on the forum you are refering too, please ?
This may help for people who want to have an history of the problem.

Thank you very much !

Here's a couple that I didn't start.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=38436
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=48085

Thank you very much.
Unfortunatly I cannot reproduce the bug with mplayer or vlc : I can read an encrypted DVD with such players.

Lets summarize here the situation, it will be easier for the developers to help.

1- You were able at one time to read an encrypted DVD with mplayer under Archlinux, right ?
2- Since a moment (how long ?) you are not able to read THE SAME encrypted DVD with mplayer, right ?
3- You are able to read a DVD which was NOT encrypted, right ?
4- You also tried with Totem-xine and VLC and it did not work either, right ?

Additional questions :

a- do you have the latest version of libdvdcss and VLC installed ?
b- Insert an encrypted DVD into your drive and give the output from the command "vlc /dev/dvd", please.

For information mine is :

[19:55 chicha ~]$ vlc /dev/dvd
VLC media player 0.8.6f Janus
libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 0.1.10 from http://dvd.sf.net
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.9 for DVD access
libdvdnav: DVD Title: MASTER_AND_COMMANDER_DISC_1
libdvdnav: DVD Serial Number: 307e0407
libdvdnav: DVD Title (Alternative):
libdvdnav: Unable to find map file '/home/chicha/.dvdnav/MASTER_AND_COMMANDER_DISC_1.map'
libdvdnav: DVD disk reports itself with Region mask 0x00fd0000. Regions: 2

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 0x0000013d
libdvdread: Elapsed time 0
libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.VOB at 0x00001124
libdvdread: Elapsed time 0
libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB at 0x0002a5a4
...

Thank you very much !

1) I was in the past able to read encrypted DVD with MPlayer, VLC, and Xine. This is was within the last month or so.
2) Unfortunately I don't have the last DVD I could read, so there's no good test here.
3) Unencrypted DVD work normally in all three players.

a) yes. I even tried to rebuild it on this box to see if that helped to no avail.
b) [skottish@iasE vlc]$ vlc /dev/dvd
VLC media player 0.8.6f Janus
libdvdnav: Using dvdnav version 0.1.10 from http://dvd.sf.net
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.9 for DVD access
libdvdread: Could not open /dev/dvd with libdvdcss.
libdvdread: Can't open /dev/dvd for reading
libdvdnav: vm: faild to open/read the DVD

Xine produces identical errors and MPlayer only says this:

Playing /dev/dvd.
File not found: '/dev/dvd'
Failed to open /dev/dvd.

Oh yes, /dev/dvd does exists in the file system.

Sorry I am asking a lot of questions and did not provide the solution yet, but I am curious, what does the command "ls -l /dev/dvd" returns ?

Thanks for looking into this. It's certainly no bother to provide information.

[skottish@iasE ~]$ ls -l /dev/dvd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2008-05-05 12:17 /dev/dvd -> /dev/cd/dvd-sr0

What permissions does /dev/cd/dvd-sr0 have, and is your user member of a group that is allowed to have raw read access to that device?

[skottish@iasE ~]$ ls -l /dev/cd/dvd-sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 2008-05-05 12:17 /dev/cd/dvd-sr0 -> ../sr0
[skottish@iasE ~]$ groups
ftp video audio optical storage skottish

And when you traverse the symlinks until you have a real block device?

[skottish@iasE ~]$ ls -l /dev/sr0
brw-rw---- 1 root optical 11, 0 2008-05-05 12:17 /dev/sr0

Did you try as root (I am pretty sure it does not work either) ?

I have looked around with google and there are many (old) forum/mail thread with the same error.
Some are due to trivial configuration issue (rigth access to the drive, wrong symlink etc ...), and unfortunatly some are due to mother/board or drive hardware issues.

What mother board and DVD drive do you have ? I will see If I can found something about them on the web.
Did you try with another distro (even using VMWare, Virtualbox or Qemu) ?
Did you try on Windows if you have it installed ?
Have you got an other DVD drive that you can use temporarly to see if it works with another hardware ?

You might also consider opening a bug report to videolan (libdvdcss and vlc project owner) with a link to this bug report, for the bug history, they might help more than us !

I should have prepared a little better for all of this. The thought didn't even occur to me to test on my laptop to see if I get the same results. I didn't. The encrypted DVD work just fine there. Both boxes have basically the same software, and are up to date. My laptop is 32 bit, my workstation is 64.

As far as all of the questions above go:

I did try as root to no avail.
My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-M55PLUS-S3G.
I only have Arch on both of my computers (just cuz it's so freakin' cool).
I did try on a separate DVD drive and that didn't work.

I do want to reiterate one more time that every unencrypted DVD plays in the 64 bit box every time I try. And every encrypted disc fails every time. If it's a hardware problem, it is an extremely (un)lucky one.

Thanks again to everyone for helping here. I do appreciate your efforts.

Thank you Skottish for those very usefull information.
I doubt it is a 32 bits vs 64 bits problem.
I have to say that your problem is hard to investigate ;-)

Looking around on the net I found something that we did not try, here :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4666778&postcount=6

Remove your ~/.dvdcss directory to make sure you run in a clean environment.

Then run the following command in a terminal (with an encrypted DVD in the drive) :
export DVDCSS_METHOD=title && mplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device /dev/dvd

The forum post give an explaination about this trick, from libdvdcss README.
At the point we are, even Ubuntu can help ;-)

No luck with those either. Since the problem that I'm having isn't getting a lot of traction with the "me too" crowd, I'm thinking that there's just something weird lurking in the shadows (bad config somewhere). I'm going to request to close this bug as "not a bug" for now.