vlc problems

[Bradley M Alexander]

Hi all,

I have recently purchased a DVD-ROM drive for my machine. I have as yet
been unable to make the drive play dvds under Linux. I have tried all of
the major dvd players, vlc, omi/livid, xine and ogle. Thus far, none have
been able to play properly.

My machine is a 1GHz Athlon-C, 384MB of RAM, MSI GeForce2 Pro/64 video
card, Sony G500 21" monitor, Matshuta DVD-ROM SR-8586, LG CD-RW CED-8120B.
Kernel version is 2.4.4 on a Debian/unstable machine, running devfs.

Since I have a CD-RW, I have both the CD and the DVD are using SCSI
emulation. I have a link from /dev/sr0 to /dev/dvd, and I chmodded both sr0
and dvd to 777 to test it. For the moment, I only have two dvds. The 
Princess Bride and The Muppet Movie.  

My first attempt was with vlc-snapshot-20010420-00. It dumped out pages and
pages of error messages to the terminal window, but did little more. The
second attempt was with the vlc-0.2.80 debs (vlc, vlc-gtk and vlc-qt). It
gave me several errors, most of which indicated it was unable to break the
encryption. I also noticed that unlike the 0420 snapshot, which gave me a
screen in addition to the control panel, 0.2.80 just gave me the panel. The
0420 snapshot gives me the following output:

VideoLAN Client - version snapshot-20010420-00 Ourumov - (C)1996-2001
VideoLAN

intf: interface initialized
vout: YUV acceleration activated
vout: video display initialized (720x576, 16/16 bpp)
input: opening dvd:/dev/dvd
input: closing dvd:/dev/dvd
input: opening dvd:/dev/dvd
input: closing dvd:/dev/dvd
input: opening dvd:/dev/dvd
input: closing dvd:/dev/dvd
etc.

However, 0.2.80 simply says:

VideoLAN Client - version 0.2.80 Ourumov - (C)1996-2001 VideoLAN

I have installed libdvdcss, and it is still failing to give me a screen.
Clicking buttons on the controller (particularly play) do not give me any
indication. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get this going?

Regards,
-- 
--Brad
============================================================================
Bradley M. Alexander, CISSP              |   Co-Chairman,
Beowulf System Admin/Security Specialist |    NoVALUG/DCLUG Security SIG
Debian/GNU Linux Developer		 |   storm at debian.org
                                         |   storm at tux.org
============================================================================
You don't have to agree with me, but its quicker.