[PLUG] CD/DVD Drive and Movie Software: Xubuntu-9.04

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Nov 27 02:07:48 UTC 2009


On Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:59:40 -0800 (PST)
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:

>    There's a cd/dvd drive in the Toshiba Satellite. Inserting a movie dvd is
> easy: press the button on the drawer and it opens. After that it gets rather
> screwy.
> 
>    On the Applications->Multimedia menu is something called Movie Player.
> When that is invoked it opens a large window, then displays a message box
> that it's missing all requisite plug-ins (!). Strange. Doesn't tell me
> what's missing nor do I understand why they'd be missing in a clean
> installation.
> 
>    Thinking I could get past this I used the synaptic package manager to get
> and install mplayer. However, when I try to play the disk in the drive I see
> messages that there's something about the disk, or too many buffers are
> loaded, and the mplayer window shows a psycadelic display of colored bars in
> several vertical strips from the bottom of the window up. So I kill that
> process and try to remove the disk by opening the drive door.
> 
>    At this point a serious message box pops up with text that the drive is
> not recogzined by HAL and must have been installed by aliens or something.
> Never have seen any such reaction before. Need to resort to the straightened
> paper clip to open the drive and remove the disk.
> 
>    Does anyone have any ideas why both the software and the hardware are
> acting as they are?

Ubuntu (all flavors) does not install non-free or proprietary software
by default. To play DVDs (and several other media types, e.g., mp3s),
you need to install the libraries and codecs. 

The normal way one does this in Ubuntu-land is to enable the medibuntu
repository. No, "medibuntu" has nothing to do with physicians. It is
short for "media-ubuntu." Don't ask. They should have consulted a
linguist. 

When you attempt to play a DVD in Totem ("Movie Player") it should pop
up a warning that it lacks the correct libraries. And then it should
offer to install the required libraries. 

At this point is where things sometimes go wrong. The problem is that
there are lots of different libraries needed to play DVDs, and Ubuntu
isn't always very clever at getting them all installed.

An alternative is to use VLC, which has its own built-in codecs and
stuff. I like Totem for its simplicity. But I use VLC when viewing a
video with subtitles because Totem sucks at finding the subtitles file. 

At a recent Clinic we had a user with the same problem. We tried
googling on what is required and then installing the necessary
packages. After failing for half an hour I suggested a simpler, albeit
non-professional way to solve the user's problem. You see, I knew that
Totem would play anything on my own laptop. So I fired up Synaptic and
then searched on various keywords. We had the user do the same, then
add anything that I had that he did not. In short order we had his
Totem up and running.

If you would like to do this, holler back and I'll give you a list of
packages that I have installed together with the keywords I used to
find them.




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