Okay, I've got a myth box that has both a CD drive and a DVD drive. If I put a DVD in the DVD drive, nothing happens. The DVD menu doesn't come up, going into Optical Disks and selecting Play DVD doesn't work; the screen goes black for a second or two before returning to the menu.

I thought it might be that the computer was getting confused as to which drive was the USB drive a while back, but it doesn't boot right when I remove the CD drive.

Any thoughts?

Due to legal reason, KnoppMyth doesn't support the playback of encrypted DVDs out the box. Is the DVD encrypted? If so, you much install the library that unencrypts it. Much thanks to Hollywood and the law makers that don't write laws but just sign.

It's unencrypted.

For the encrypted ones, is there anything you can link me to in regard to the libraries I need?

KM uses the symbolic link /dev/dvd to play them, so do an "ls -l /dev/dvd" to see what device it is pointing to. You'll probably find it is incorrect.

To fix it temporarily (to test), you need to know the real device name of your DVD drive, then, as root, remove the existing symlink (rm /dev/dvd) and replace it with the correct one (e.g. ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd), replacing scd0 with whatever the correct device is.

If your DVD now works, you can make the change permanent by modifying the information in the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-cd.rules (as root). I would reboot the system afterwards to make sure this works, rather than trying to figure it out again in a year.

With the encrypted ones, you shouldn't ask us as exchanging some knowledge is as illegal and dangerous in today's world as it was in the 1600s: Google is your friend.

Regards

Mike Williams

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Okay, it's linked to the correct device, decryption isn't a problem any more, and I found an article on the KM wiki about using xine ( http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... neDVDHowTo ). xine is now set up, and it is throwing errors such as: "Can't open /dev/dvd for reading", no matter whether I am using the first or second xine command to play them (from the article)

Thanks for the help so far. Any further suggestions?

Ownership and permissions.

- Follow the link chain to the actual device and make sure it's group ownership is "cdrom" and that there are rw permissions for the group

- Make sure that mythtv is a member of the cdrom group.

Searching here for "cdrom" should also turn up a more detailed troubleshooting walk through.

Searched for cdrom in the Hardware section and found nothing more of much use. Will conduct a wider search of the forums later.

In the meantime, mythtv is a member of group cdrom and the /dev/dvd link and the /dev/hdc device are now both members of the group. I am still receiving the following error, among others:



Some of the other errors relate to a certain library, but I don't think those are quite as relevant.

Well, thanks for the help so far.

On a side note, when the music portion of MythTV is told that the CD-ROM device is /dev/dvd, the CDs placed in the device can be read and played as normal. I guess that would indicate a problem with xine or the libraries, rather than the links, etc. More searching of the forums later.

OK, you DID understand not to blindly use /dev/hdc right? You need to look at the perms/owners of the device that the symlink pointed to and that the logfiles report being associated with the right hardware. That was what that whole business of first listing /dev/dvd to find the links destination was about...

Also, if you've got two optical drives it's entirely possible for that link to be pointing to the wrong one. What does "hdparm -I /dev/hdc" show?

Finally, if you don't report the output from diagnostic commands we can't tell if you interpreted them wrong or right.

I did understand not to blindly use /dev/hdc, /dev/hdc happens to be the correct device. Giving output verbatim is very difficult, as the display is a television and the letters aren't quite clear.

Your output in the previous post was, aside from dates, and hostname, the output I got. Verbatim.

/dev/hdc indicates the secondary master, which is the physical location of the DVD drive.

Next time I have physical access to the box, I will type up any diagnostic data you'd like.

Sorry for making you think you're wasting time on a noob, and thank you for your continued help.

Just trying to be clear, since we were getting minimal feedback.

BTW - ssh is (or should be) your friend for stuff like this. From another Linux box:

From an MS-Windows box use "putty" or the like. From a MacOS box use the "Terminal" utility under "Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities". Once you login and su - to become root, you can cut & paste text to and from that window, just like any other app.

Okay, I'll look into putty. I've got msys installed on the Windows box there already, so I'll see if I can get some ssh going with that or with putty, however. That'll certainly make it easier to deal with. Unfortunately, I won't actually have physical access to the box again until Saturday, most likely.

Thanks for the tip, though. I didn't realize ssh was so easy to get working from a Windows box.

Okay, I got some ssh goodness going (for some reason, I can't ssh into the mythtv user).







Unfortunately, ssh doesn't let me start the myth front end from it (can't connect to X server - it's so whiny! ), so this next bit is typed up. What I get when trying to play a dvd with the myth command-line for playing dvds as xine -pfhq dvd://:



I cut out the name of the specific library there, if you need it, I'll PM it to you, but I think it should be fairly irrelevant, unless I installed it wrong (which I don't think I did).

And this is with command-line xine -pfhq --no-splash --auto-scan dvd:



So, that ought to give you a fairly good idea of where I'm at. Also, I just realized that I've been arbitrarily using the -pfhq without actually understanding what that does, which could possibly be contributing to my problems. I'll look into that.

Thanks for all your help so far.

Where did you install the library? When I compile it from source the default is to install in /usr/local/lib, whereas libdvdread is expecting it in /usr/lib. If this is the case on your system a simple move or copy should take care of it...

I seem to remember that mythtv as a user account was blocked from SSH by default.

A security fix that came along in R5F27.

I can confirm that it was not installed to /usr/local/lib, whereas some files which have a name in common with the library in question were in /usr/lib. So I'm fairly certain that it was, in fact, installed to /usr/lib.

Thank you for the tip.