Thursday, August 13, 2009

Ubuntu in state of DVD denial

One of the things I have had trouble with ever since I installed Ubuntu was playing DVDs. I need to use DVDs as source material for the graphics I do for both work and pleasure, and not being able to play all the DVDs I am sent was becoming increasingly frustrating. Although a large number of DVDs wouldn't even mount in Ubuntu, the DVD player under my telly played them fine.

I tried the normally excellent Ubuntu UK IRC channel to no avail, so I was on my own. Eventually I discovered the mount -l command, and saw the letters UDF. That turned out to be a vital clue.

And today, by a stroke of luck, I found this page. Not only was the problem explained, but a (partial) solution was given. I can now play any DVD, provided I open it from a session of Nautilus running as the root user.

dave@dave-desktop:~ sudo /usr/bin/nautilus

Being careful to save the files on my Desktop, and not root's Desktop, I could take screen shots that frustratingly I couldn't delete or move.

That's because the screen shots I took from Nautilus running as root also had root privilges, so a bit more command line lurve was needed - the "chown" (or change owner) command:

dave@dave-desktop:~/Desktop cd dave Screenshot1.png

Now I'm happy and can do lots of delightfully rainbow coloured Granada "Giro" Gs to accompany Derek Hilton and his band...

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