Playing DVDs on Ubuntu 11.04

Having downloaded Ubuntu 11.04 last night and installed my laptop from scratch with it to have a look at the changes; I thought I would revisit my earlier post of how to get Ubuntu to play commercial DVDs and update it for the latest version of the operating system.

Again, I am going to install VLC for my video player, but you could stick with the default Totem player if you like; just skip step 3 if you do want to install VLC.

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Type “sudo -s” and enter your password when prompted
  3. Type “apt-get install vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc videolan-doc” and accept the new packages to be downloaded
  4. Type “apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse”, when prompted type y to install the packages
  5. Now we need to install the libdvdcsspackage to allow you to play encrypted DVDs. This can not be distributed by Ubuntu due to legal reasons but you can use the following script to install it manually.
    1. In your terminal type the following “/usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh”
  6. You will now be able to play DVD videos in either Totem or VLC Video players.

16 thoughts on “Playing DVDs on Ubuntu 11.04

  1. I tried the above but received no such user directory when i tried the /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh command in terminal…. still not reading dvd with mplayer

    1. @ Daverrr – Are you running Ubuntu 11.04? When you installed Ubuntu, did you choose to install the restricted plugins for MP3 playback?

    1. Are you getting any errors? This is working fine for a number of people, so it will be tricky to trouble shoot your issue with that little information! 😉

  2. No luck with this either 🙁

    I get a:

    DVDRead could not read -1/4 blocks at 0x100b.

    Error in VLC and:

    Could not read DVD. This may be because the DVD is encrypted and a DVD decryption library is not installed.

    in totem.

    I have installed everything suggested in numerous guides now 🙁

    Running 32bit ubuntu 11.04 through oracle VM virtual box.

    1. Did you follow step 5?

      “Now we need to install the libdvdcsspackage to allow you to play encrypted DVDs. This can not be distributed by Ubuntu due to legal reasons but you can use the following script to install it manually.

      In your terminal type the following “/usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh””

  3. Cheers, and even better, all I needed (following this the built-in Movie Player did the job) was the single terminal line “sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh”.

  4. A simpler option is to install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package. This includes Flash, Java, MS fonts and MP3 decoding.

    You’ll still have to do step 5 above to install DVD decryption.

  5. It didn’t work at all. I tried hundreds of ways believe me but what is annoying about Ubuntuu is you can not see movies on your computer, I guess they just want you to be a geek. They are a holes!

  6. same problem as Dan Christian, and also Running 32bit ubuntu 11.04.

    I installed the libdvdcss package, as well as libdvdcss-dev, libav-codec-extra-52, libudf0, MPlayer Movie encoder, Non-free codecs, win32 binary codecs, and I stil can’t play many dvds, even when I skip the menu.

    For some dvds, the menu page opens, but when I click on “Film”, it just stops, whether I play them on VLC or MPlayer (“An error occurred. Could not play DVD”.)

    Any help would be much appreciated.

    1. I found the answer on another forum.

      A region had been set on the drive.

      To install another regionset: sudo apt-get install regionset
      And with a dvd in the drive run in terminal: regionset

      Look on line 4, if it says None then answer y and set to your region

      If there was no region set than after doing again delete .dvdcss folder and try again.

      In case you need to set region:

      1 = North America (USA and Canada)
      2 = Europe, Middle East, South Africa and Japan
      3 = Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Korea
      4 = Latin America, Australia, New Zealand
      5 = Former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, etc.), rest of Africa, India
      6 = China

  7. Wow! Thank you! I always needed to write on my blog something like that. Can I implement a part of your post to my site?

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