DVD Player

Greetings: Knoppix 6.2.1 HD install, still learning my way around the basics. Can somebody tell me how to play a DVD (for viewing only), please? The device is found. I right-click and mount the device. The name of the movie displays. I have VLC, and GNOME Mplayer, and Mplayer. I direct Mplayer to the Video_TS folder, but nothing happens. The same with all three, a multitude of different errors. What am I doing wrong, I simply want to watch a DVD. I have a Presario Notebook with a Toshiba CD/RW/DVD.

Some commercial DVDs have some protection against illegal duplication. Knoppix does not support such DVDs. You could buy a special DVD player software for Linux which can handle copy protected DVDs. There also exists an opensource solution but in many countries it is illegal to use it.

If your DVD is not copy protected then you could try out VLC with the device name of your DVD drive. Usually the first DVD drive is called /dev/sr0 and the second one /dev/sr1.

If you installed to HD, then you have a chrooted environment, which can produce funny results. Much better to use the install to flash disk function, that keeps Knoppix in the form under which it's designed to work best. It does require a FAT32 space in partition one (which need not be first on the drive), but if you make some space with e.g. GParted, that might work better. I recommend leaving space for a persistent store, so it acts like a normal system that can have software added, etc. - just leave the space, you'll be prompted to create the file. And be sure to specify the hard drive as "sda", not "hda".

Cheers!
Krishna :mrgreen:

Thanks Klaus,that must be the problem. I can get the first VOB to play, and the I try to add the remainder to the playlist. Itreads the first one and plays just fine- right up to the FBI warning. Guess I will go watch it on Windows. Did a dual boot - whilst I am still learning.