Ever since I started using MythTV there have always been those few DVDs that just don't want to play no matter what I do but for the most part I haven't had major issues, until recently. For example my son has watched Monsters Inc. probably 100 times, yet today, even after a shutdown and restart, it refuses to play.

Older DVDs that used to always play with zero issues are no longer working. They start to load, in some cases even start to play but then crash back to the frontend. It would seem that I have a problem with my DVD drive yet other (sometimes newer discs) play with no issues.

The Wife and Kid approval factor has reached the point I may have to hook up the DVD player again, and I really don't want to have to do that...

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also let me know if there any additional info I can provide. I know this point is light on details, I won't to avoid issues of the tropical fruit variety...

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

Since you were able to play DVD's prior to this it sounds like a hardware problem. I would suggest a DVD cleaning disk and see if that won't correct the problem. Or swap it out if you have another reader.

From memory, my copy of that DVD has the "deliberately introduced bad block" problem, which is to prevent people who buy the disc from using it on a computer. If you recently switched from mplayer to Internal as your default player, you may have just started experiencing this "gotcha". Not saying this is the case, but please try mplayer from an xterm like this: "mplayer -vo xv dvd://". I found that mplayer was better at playing deliberately broken DVDs than other s/w (e.g. xine and Internal). Mplayer's default behaviour is to imitate the response of a DVD player and simply ignore bad blocks (whereas a computer will attempt to read to re-read the incorrect information forever).

If it doesn't work, any debug messages would be appreciated.

Mike

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Australian Dragon
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Thanks for the replies. I've never used mplayer but I suppose I should give it a shot. It nothing else that would rule out a hardware issue.

It just seems that since I upgraded 6.03 several DVDs that used to play fine now struggle or don't play at all yet others play fine.

I think the issue is definitely related to bad blocks and other forms of "copy protection" on some of these discs. It just seems that the internal player is having a harder time coping with these issues than previous versions.

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

I'm warming up to the idea that this may be a hardware failure (actually that would be a good thing as it's an easy & cheap fix).

I'm going to swap over the drive from my desktop tonight and see it that clears up the issues.

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

Finally got around to swapping the drives tonight (spent the last few days resurrecting a laptop).

Unfortunately swapping the drives made absolutely no difference. I think I can now safely rule out a problem with the drive.

I tried doing a pacman -Syu update on the off chance that something got fixed but pacman failed. It looked like it was trying to pull in a bunch of stuff that was already there? Anyway probably a topic for another thread.

I'm afraid my DVD player is going to be coming out of the closest soon (that sounded bad didn't it...)

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

try ubuntu live cd so that you can guarantee hardware isn't the issue. UBUNTU, why did I say Ubuntu you are an experienced Linux user you know what a live CD is. Ive been explaining Linux to normals for too long.

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My System

Can't help noticing you still haven't mentioned what happened when you tried mplayer.

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Australian Dragon
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I (finally) tried mplayer tonight and my problem movies play just fine so it is clearly something in the internal player.

I suppose I could just "punt" and set up mplayer just I just know that isn't going to go over well with the Mrs. Of course movies not playing isn't going over very well either.

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

You could set it to only play DVDs with mplayer. It was the default until one or two versions ago, so it should be perfect. If the keys are mapped differently on the remote, simply re-map them. Mplayer is very configurable. The only thing I miss with it is the OSD you get with Internal. Mplayer-resumer.pl is what you should use, and vdpau as the -vo if you have a capable nvidia graphics card.

Mike

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Australian Dragon
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I'm sure I can put together an mplayer keymap that mimics the internal close enough. I know the loss of the OSD is going to catch some negative feedback but certainly less than it not working.

Does anyone have a good mplayer command string they can recommend as a starting point?

Thanks so much for all the help! I love this community.

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

Do you have a backup database from a while ago? A year or two is probably when it changed. Bob from mythic came up with the command line, and it worked very well. If you don't have an old backup of your DB just ask him.

Something like this will do the trick (assuming it's .bz2: If .gz, change bzcat to zcat)



Substitute mplayer for mplayer-resumer.pl to keep the bookmark working and if you can get it, gmplayer gives an excellent gui, which may improve the WAF.

Mike

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Australian Dragon
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I did a backup after the 6.03 update. Don't have any others. I'm sure I can figure it out, just didn't want to "re-invent the wheel" if there was a preferred command string out there.

Thanks for the tips on mplayer-resumer.pl and gmplayer. I need to figure out why pacman -Syu is failing on me then I'm going to work on DVD playback again. Probably not until this weekend though.

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

I'll dig one out for you. Being a sys admin means having multiple copies of ancient files in various places

Will make a note to check tonight.

Mike

EDIT: Extracted from a 2007 sql dump 'DVDPlayerCommand','mplayer dvd:// -dvd-device %d -fs -zoom -vc mpeg12,ffmpeg12 -vo xv -vf pp=lb'

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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