Playing DVDs in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

A blogger by the name of John Bradbury posted three excellent videos (1, 2, 3) showing his first experiences with Ubuntu. It was really wonderful to watch; lots of ‘WOW’s and pleasant surprises :) The only real problem he had was watching a DVD. When you pop it into the drive in Ubuntu, Totem (the default media player) gives a rather unhelpful error message:

An error occurred
Could not read from resource.

This is unfortunate enough. What’s worse though is that even if you have the decss library (which Ubuntu does not carry in its official repositories due to legal concerns in places like the US because of the hated DMCA…) that would normally allow Ubuntu to play DVDs through Totem (the default video player in Ubuntu), it does not seem to work properly in Gutsy (grr! bad bug!)

OK, so how do we fix this?

First run System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager (supply your password when asked)

[Update: under Settings -> Repositories -> Ubuntu Software, if “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)” isn’t checked, be sure to do so]

and (if you haven’t already) add the free section of the Medibuntu repository by going Settings -> Repositories -> Third-Party Software (tab) and click the “Add” button and add this source:

deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ gutsy free

Update: Whoops! Forgot to mention that you have to add their key or else you’ll get a security warning when you install from their site. You can still proceed without adding their key, but its annoying to get that message and besides, its a good practice to get into :) So! Install the package:

gui-apt-key

then close Synaptic and in the Gnome panel menu you’ll find an entry under Applications -> System Tools -> APT Key Manager so run that and add the Key ID:

0C5A2783

which will show up as “Medibuntu Packaging Team”. You can close the APT Key Manger now. Now restart Synaptic, press the reload button and install these two packages:

libdvdcss2
vlc

It will automatically install all of the required dependencies as well. When its done you can close Synaptic and then go System -> Preferences -> Removable Drives and Media -> Multimedia (tab) and replace the “Video DVD Discs” command (totem %m) with:

vlc --vout-filter deinterlace --deinterlace-mode blend --volume 512 %m

[Update 12/17: added “–volume 512” so that it starts playing with an volume of “100” in VLC… this is rather counterintuitive and not exactly what it says in the manual, but it works. Update Jan. 2: Please note the double dashes in the above command; WordPress was converting them to a single long dash character that doesn’t work if you just copy and paste]

Now, whenever you pop in a DVD it should start playing :) Should you desire a desktop shortcut to play DVDs (e.g. if you want to disable disks playing automatically when inserted), right-click on the Desktop, click “Create Launcher…” give it a Name like “DVD Player” and a Command of:

vlc --vout-filter deinterlace --deinterlace-mode blend --volume 512 dvd:///cdrom

Enjoy your movies! ^_^