Playing DVDs On C7

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Hi all!

I’m trying to finish setting up my newly upgraded C7 system.

It’s on the same hardware I ran C6 on for several years. on C6 I had no trouble playing DVDs (after installing tons of packages and libdvdcss).

Well, on C7, I’ve got totem (videos) and all its plugins I can find via yum, VLC (from nux) all the gstreamer and gstreamer1 packages I
can find, everything with “dvd” in its name, including libdvdcss from nux.

vlc will kinda play movies, i.e., moving garbage appears on the screen, sometimes it’ll resemble something from the movie, but most of the time not so much. I can’t figure out what’s missing here.

Totem played a movie for me this afternoon, flawlessly, but now I can’t get it to do anything. sometimes it starts up as a plain gray box with no borders, no controls, no nothing, and has to be killed. sometimes it draws the player controls but never starts playing.

I’ve got two DVD drives, one of them replaces a broken one, but the other one has been there for 2-3 years.

I’ve been googling for hours, but haven’t turned up anything that I
haven’t already tried.

I’d appreciate suggestions. thanks in advance!

here’s some yum listings of things I have installed:

yum list installed | grep -y dvd dvd+rw-tools.x86_64 7.1-15.el7 @anaconda
libdvdcss.x86_64 1.2.13-1.el7.nux @nux-dextop libdvdnav.x86_64 4.2.0-8.el7 @anaconda
libdvdread.x86_64 4.2.0-6.el7 @anaconda
radvd.x86_64 1.9.2-9.el7 @base

yum list installed | grep -y vlc vlc.x86_64 2.2.1-6.el7.nux @nux-dextop vlc-core.x86_64 2.2.1-6.el7.nux @nux-dextop vlc-extras.x86_64 2.2.1-6.el7.nux @nux-dextop

yum list installed | grep -y totem totem.x86_64 1:3.14.3-5.el7 @cr
totem-nautilus.x86_64 1:3.14.3-5.el7 @cr
totem-pl-parser.x86_64 3.10.5-1.el7 @cr

yum list installed | grep -y gstreamer PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin.x86_64 1.0.7-5.el7.CentOS @cr
gstreamer.x86_64 0.10.36-7.el7 @anaconda
gstreamer-ffmpeg.x86_64 0.10.13-15.el7.nux @nux-dextop gstreamer-plugin-crystalhd.x86_64 3.10.0-11.el7 @epel
gstreamer-plugins-bad.x86_64 0.10.23-5.el7.nux @nux-dextop gstreamer-plugins-bad-free.x86_64 0.10.23-20.el7 @anaconda
gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree.x86_64 0.10.23-2.el7.nux @nux-dextop gstreamer-plugins-base.x86_64 0.10.36-10.el7 @anaconda
gstreamer-plugins-good.x86_64 0.10.31-11.el7 @anaconda
gstreamer-plugins-ugly.x86_64 0.10.19-17.el7.nux @nux-dextop gstreamer-tools.x86_64 0.10.36-7.el7 @anaconda
gstreamer1.x86_64 1.4.5-1.el7 @cr
gstreamer1-libav.x86_64 1.0.6-1.el7.nux @nux-dextop gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free.x86_64 1.4.5-3.el7 @cr
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld.x86_64
gstreamer1-plugins-base.x86_64 1.4.5-2.el7 @cr
gstreamer1-plugins-good.x86_64 1.4.5-2.el7 @cr
gstreamer1-plugins-ugly.x86_64 1.0.6-2.el7.nux @nux-dextop

8 thoughts on - Playing DVDs On C7

  • John, that doesn’t make any difference, actually. It’s just as bad with accelerated rendering as without.

    It also, some of the time, complains about being unable to open the disc, or a complaint for every file. sometimes not. but I can open each file fine in other tools, because the disk is mounted.

    So, I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with the libdvdcss from nux. In the past I’ve always used the one from, er, I don’t remember which repo, but it was an older repo where the only thing still there was libdvdcss.

    I’m just now in the process of building 1.3.99 from videolan.org, so we’ll see.

  • I have found that whether VLC will play a DVD is somewhat dependent on the DVD. I have played DVD’s through VLC successfully on my CentOS 7
    system using the nux package stack, incidentally, but there are several DVD’s in my collection that will not play with the VLC in nux dextop.
    But I also purchased (the very first version a number of years ago) and keep support updated for the Fluendo OnePlay DVD player (fully legal, licensed, DVD playback) and it both works perfectly on CentOS 7 and plays those titles that VLC has trouble with (like the DVD copy included in the Bluray edition of Titanic).

    If you want fully legal and fully supported DVD playback, see http://www.oneplaydirect.com/oneplay/oneplay-dvd-player/ (which features a 30 day free trial so you can test to see if it will work on your hardware). Fluendo also has fully legal codecs for the GStreamer framework, and they’re not terribly expensive, either. I’ve been using their products for several years, now, and am quite satisfied. The DVD
    player does install a licensing daemon package, incidentally, which is a bit of a new experience on Linux (although once was routine on Un*x systems; anyone else remember FlexLM?).

  • I don’t play a LOT of DVDs, but on, e.g., C6 on the same hardware I don’t recall ever having onefail to play with VLC.

    In looking at the source package for libdvdcss, last night, I see there are 3 different ways of cracking the encryption that it supports. The default one is to try to crack each file’s encryption, with the down-side that it may fail entirely. there is also an option to crack the DISC’s key which can then be used to decrypt each file. from the description it sounds as if the disc option might be better even though it isn’t the default.

    If all else fails I will try hacking around with that option.

    I’ll certainly keep that in mind as a fallback position. but I prefer to run free software whenever possible, so I’ll keep on poking at it for a while before giving up.

    thanks for the idea, though!

  • I had problems in CentOS 7 with the nvidia card that did not exist in earlier CentOS versions, with some proprietary codecs.

    Yanking the nvidia card and just using the Intel GPU in the CPU fixed that. And no more kernel taint.

    For GStreamer I do have the fluendo codecs but if anyone wants I also have GStreamer 1.6.2 packages for CentOS 7

    http://awel.domblogger.net/7/media/

    has a lot of the libraries (and ffmpeg)

    http://awel.domblogger.net/7/gstreamer/

    has the gstreamer stuff.

    I have found the fluendo codecs have better performance than the open source for h.264 and related potentially patent encumbered codecs.

  • OK, I haven’t gotten very far, but there is one interesting observation:
    vlc plays my homemade NON-encrypted DVDs just fine (except for the DVD menus, on which for some reason it errors). This kinda hints that VLC is not finding/opening libdvdcss even though I’m using the one from the nux repos, same as the source of the VLC RPM I have.

    One would think that nux’s VLC would work with nux’s libdvdcss, but this evidence makes me wonder…

    If nux is here, or if anyone here uses nux’s vlc and libdvdcss with SUCCESS, I’d appreciate hearing from them.

    Fred

    PS:
    I’m not having any luck compiling libdvdcss from source… using rpmbuild to create a RPM I keep getting errors about “unpackaged files found”, and can’t figure out why or how to solve it (yes I’ve googled for solutions).