[NBLUG/talk] dvd player?

[mendozae at sonoma.edu]

Hello Chris. Thanks for your willingness to help out.

I have reinstalled Totem. What happens now is that I cannot access the
main menu of the DVD movie, nor the chapter menu, nor do I have any
flexibility in watching the movie. None of the menus work or obey
commands. The only thing I can do is click the pause button to stop the
movie temporarily. Or drag the scroll button of the movie to some
approximate location where I want to continue seeing the movie. I can also
control the volume. And get the 'Fullscreen' mode. Outside of those, I
have no other controls that respond to my clicking on them. Either the
commands on the interfaces are grayed out or when I click on the ones that
seem to be available, they do not respond.

When I open the Totem media player, I can normally click on 'Open' and
easily access and play the movie.

Any ideas?

Thanks again,

Edward
--------------------

Well, I think we're lacking a clear understanding of what the issue is. 
I'd like to help further, but I think some clarification would help
greatly.

To quote:

"but im not happy with the totem software for playing dvd movies that came
with it. cant even access the main menus of the movies or the interfaces
in the application itself."

So, are you having problems using the application itself, even getting to
the point of telling it to play a disc?  Are you receiving an error
message?

When I want to open a DVD, I go to 'Applications' -> 'Sound & Video' ->
'VLC Media Player' -> 'File' -> 'Open Disc' -> Then I click 'Ok' - then my
DVD starts playing and the title menu appears at which point I can use my
mouse to activate various features of the DVD title menu.

Using whatever player of choice, please give us the step at which
behavior diverges from the expected and please carefully describe the
behavior that is not expected.  (eg. I received error msg "x", or "I see
the playback window appear, but it's all black", etc.)

- Chris

mendozae at sonoma.edu wrote:
> I did. And I noticed that there are a lot of other related libraries in
the Synaptic Package Manager, if that's the right place to search and
install these files.
> I went ahead and uninstalled all of the programs and then installed
totem-xine but with no luck. There must be a thing or two that I'm either
> doing wrong or not doing at all.
> thanks again,
> Edward
> On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 9:03 PM,  <mendozae at sonoma.edu> wrote:
>
>> I've tried xine, gxine, kaffeine, codeine, vlc, reinstalling totem, and
one or two others without success. one of these progs even worked one
night but not the following day. why? do i have too many apps
installed?
>> should i try uninstalling all of them? and do a fresh install of only
one?
>> are there any media players for a linux environ for sale?
>>
> Did you install libdvdcss, or anything like that?  Since none of these
programs are strictly for playing DVD's, I'm pretty sure they don't force
you to have the libraries needed to play DVD's when you install them (they
might be "recommended" or "suggested", if they're available in the apt
repository).  It's been a while, though, so I can't tell you exactly what
to look for.
> Too many apps should not be the issue here.