DVD playing problems

[MorskNorsk]

I'm posting this here because nobody seems to have an answer :( My Desknote 901A (http://desknote.net/a901.html) notebook contains an IDE Matshita DVD-ROM SR-8176 MR38 drive. I used the Rpcmgr program from here (http://www.ilovedvd.co.nz/downloads/unix-linux/rpcmgr11.c) to set the region code to 1 (I don't plan on buying many DVDs thanks to region coding). /dev/dvd is a symlink to /dev/cdrom which is a symlink to /dev/hdc. The permissions on /dev/hdc are set like this:

brw-rw-rw- 1 root disk 22, 0 2001-04-14 17:43 /dev/hdc

The following relevant packages are installed:
ii liba52-0.7.4 0.7.4-1 Library for decoding ATSC A/52 streams.
ii libdvdcss2 1.2.5-0.2 Simple foundation for reading DVDs - runtime
ii libdvdnav1 0.1.3-1.2 The DVD navigation library
ii libdvdplay0 1.0.1-5 a portable abstraction library for DVD menus
ii libdvdread2 0.9.3-2 Simple foundation for reading DVDs.
ii libdvdread3 0.9.4-3 Simple foundation for reading DVDs

I'm able to mount the drive fine and can even open the .vob files and play them but it doesn't play well at all even though my processor is plenty fast. When I try to play the DVD using Xine, Ogle, and others I get error messages like this:

libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.5 for DVD access
libdvdread: Can't seek to block 256
libdvdread: Can't seek to block 256
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.

With MPlayer I get errors like this:

gmplayer dvd://1
.
.
.
Playing dvd://1
Reading disc structure, please wait...
libdvdread: Can't seek to block 256
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.
Can't open VMG info!

I'm out of ideas aside from flashing the firmware on the DVD-ROM but can't imagine that would even accomplish anything. Is there something I'm missing? I'm totally out of ideas. Google has provided some leads, but nothing that has worked. The DVD disc works fine in other players so that isn't the problem. Any suggestions and ideas would be appreciated.

[baldyeti]

Hi, are you using knoppix at all? It is not clear from your post.
If you are (or if you have a cd writer which you want to use),
probably SCSI emulation will/should be on, and you should refer
to /dev/scd0 instead of /dev/hdc.

Also, I remember reading that enabling DMA is a must for
playing DVD's. Try (as root) "hdparm /dev/hdc"
If you need to activate DMA, that's "hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc".

Hope this helps...

[MorskNorsk]

Thanks for the reply. Ja, this is still Knoppix although it's pretty customised and recompiled my own kernel and everything. I'm no longer using SCSI emulation which is the reason you see /dev/hdc. I manually enabled DMA and it still doesn't work. I'd try booting from the Knoppix CD and then playing a DVD but this machine has only one drive and swapping out after booting doesn't seem to work :(

Also how would I get DMA enabled on my drive after rebooting? Would I have to put hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc in one of my initscripts since I have IDE CD support compiled into the kernel and not as a module?

Just tried lsdvd and it comes back with the same problem :cry:
[jebediah@ark]-(~/src/lsdvd-0.9)$ sudo ./lsdvd -x /dev/dvd
libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.5 for DVD access
libdvdread: Can't seek to block 256
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.
Can't open main ifo!

[baldyeti]

Also how would I get DMA enabled on my drive after rebooting?
Would I have to put hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc in one of my initscripts since I have IDE CD
support compiled into the kernel and not as a module?

With my HD-installed knoopix, it's in the "/etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh" script.
Did you try running "xine", from the multimedia tools? For me it seems
to work only when launced from a terminal, not from the menu !-)
Also, did you try several DVD's? There's the odd chance there might actually
be a reading problem with your test one... Just a thought; good luck.

[MorskNorsk]

Thanks for the refresher. Couldn't quite remember the file for putting the boot stuff in since it's been a long time since I touched it.

So it would work if I booted off the Knoppix CD, then ejected it and put the DVD in and ran xine? I tried before and it complained about not being able to find /usr/bin/xine or something like that. I did run it from a terminal too.

I've tried two DVD's and even tried one in my neighbors DVD player. Worked fine there.

I'm beginning to wonder is something is just messed up with the region coding in the drives firmware, but if that were true how come I can get sound from the .vob files?

[fingers99]

One thing to note is that doing

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

on a combo CDRW/CDROM drive can confuse the hell out of cdrecord. May not be the case on your drive, but seems to be on my LG. :?

If that turns out to be the case, you can just switch it off (or on) from the command line.

[baldyeti]

So it would work if I booted off the Knoppix CD, then ejected it and put the DVD in and ran xine?
I don't think so, I actually thought you had installed debian to your hard disk.
I don't see how you could run the OS and play a movie off the same unit
(unless you have 1Gb of ram, and use the very latest knoppix 'toram' option)

[MorskNorsk]

Shouldn't have to worry about cdrecord since the drive is a CD/DVD-ROM with no write capabilities. Thanks for the warning though - I may run into that in the future with the prevelance of the dual drives.

Knoppix is installed on my hard drive. My idea with booting from the CD was to make sure it wasn't a problem with my libs or configuration. Sadly I only have 256 MB of RAM in the machine. Something I should remedy in the future.

[fingers99]

I think one of the admins adressed a similar(ish) issue here: someone needing to pop out the CD in order to write to CDR. A search might find it.

[MorskNorsk]

You remember any more details about the post like what terms were used? I can't seem to come up with anything although the question probably has been asked at sometime or other.

[MorskNorsk]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I stumbled across the Ogle-User mailing list archives (http://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/ogle-user/) and doing looking through every month I found my problem. Seems that there is a bug with IDE CD code in the kernel and certain DVD drives (particularly Matshita in notebooks). The fix is to use ide-scsi. The only problem with that is the 2.4.21 kernel (which I'm using wouldn't you know it) has DMA disabled because it was causing problems. Guess I'll have to wait until the 2.6 series before things work perfectly. At least now I can view DVDs. Thanks again for all the ideas.