Video DVD read as empty

[René L. Reingard]

Hello,

Thanks for listening, cause i do not know how to solve that. This after 2 days of thoroughly research and help from users-email-list.
I did an upgrade from Warty to Hoary some days ago. It went fine. No error at all. BUT after the upgrade Ogle and VLC were not anymore
able to play any DVD. The apps both started and "Play CD/DVD" resulted in plane nothing happening.
So i installed TOTEM-xine as explained under: https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/AddingCodecsToTotemHowTo.
Now, some DVD can be played AND some DVD's get just detected as empty. Nautilus opens and shows me the DVD is empty. In this way also
forcing a DVD app through "Play Disc/DVD" is not a possible solution.
The ones detected as empty DVD's are videos my son has seen a hundred times before using Ogle or VLC in Warty.
NOW, one really strange thing i got to understand, after starting up the machine for 30 times:
I do have a dual boot system (Windows XP and Ubuntu HOARY). The windows partition got always nicely mounted in Warty (icon on the
desktop AND icon in Nautilus). In Hoary the desktop icon AND nautilus icon do NOT appear on every start of the machine. Still, the Windows
partition gets mounted correctly (fstab is okay in that way) as i can browse the Windows XP partition in Nautilus through its mountpoint (/
media/windows).
And now, IF it happens, after a new start of the computer, that the Windows Partition does not get its own ICON, neither in Nautilus NOR on
the Desktop, a DVD is detected as empty.
ONLY in the case when these icons for the Windows partition come up, the DVD is not detected as empty and it can be opened in TOTEM by
choosing "Play CD/DVD" and the film goes well.
Still, at this point, the autodetection (--> detecting DVD and open TOTEM automatically by default setting) does not work for these DVD's. And
the CD-Drive shows himself as CD-ROM1, not displaying the name of the film, as it does it with other DVD's.
this sounds so magic, right? uff!
((and i wonder, why in Nautilus there is also no icon for the network, which i had in Warty.))

What could that be??
Thanks for elaborating on that,
René

[René L. Reingard (reingard)]

Correction:

And now, IF it happens, after a new start of the computer, that the Windows XP partition does not get its own ICON, neither in Nautilus NOR on
the Desktop, some DVD's get detected as empty, where others just autostart to play in Totem at that time.
ONLY in the case when these icons for the Windows partition come up, the DVD is not detected as empty and it can be opened in Totem by
choosing "Play CD/DVD" and then the film goes well. Also interesting to know, the formerly "empty DVD" does not get detected and autostarted in Totem
as set in the media default settings. Also the CD-Drive shows himself as CD-ROM1, not displaying the name of the film, as it does it with other DVD's.
this sounds so magic, right? uff! but believe me, i checked this as many fingers i do have - and i have 10.

[René L. Reingard (reingard)]

Hi,

I had an other try. I installed XINE (xine-gui) and necessary packs. Just the same problem as described above.
It is not at all the Media Player itself !
What can we do?
Is there a setting/option (of the Drive?, Gnome?) wrong?

regards,
René

[René L. Reingard (reingard)]

E-Mail discussion:

> Am Mon, 09 May 2005 17:17:26 +0300 schrieb ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY <email address hidden>:
> Are the DVDs clean and not scratched?

the DVD's are okay, running on the same machine (Dual Boot) and same CD-Drive in Windows XP with WinDVD 6 just fine
and did it three days ago under Warty for the last couple of month.

> Good. This mean there is a problem *specific* with Ubuntu (no hardware failure).
> After inserting the problematic DVDs and waiting about 40 seconds, run the following command and send back the output:
> dmesg | tail

reingard@ubuntu:~ $ dmesg |tail
agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x480-0x48f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0800-0x08ff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean.
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
cdrom: This disc doesn't have any tracks I recognize!
cdrom: This disc doesn't have any tracks I recognize!
reingard@ubuntu:~ $

> If the problem occurs, see also the output of "mount" and "ps ax | grep mount" and send the output back. Also, tell us what
> your "/etc/fstab" have in it.

reingard@ubuntu:~ $ mount
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /media/windows type vfat (rw,umask=000)
/dev on /.dev type unknown (rw,bind)
none on /dev type tmpfs (rw,size=5M,mode=0755)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
reingard@ubuntu:~ $

reingard@ubuntu:~ $ ps ax | grep mount
10125 pts/0 R+ 0:00 grep mount
reingard@ubuntu:~ $

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda1/media/windowsvfatumask=00000
/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0

AND THESE,
are the outputs with a DVD which can be read and played (NOTE: same started up system, NOT newly started):

reingard@ubuntu:~ $ dmesg |tail
agpgart: Found an AGP 2.0 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 4x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V2 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 4x mode
cs: IO port probe 0x0100-0x04ff: excluding 0x480-0x48f 0x4d0-0x4d7
cs: IO port probe 0x0800-0x08ff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0c00-0x0cff: clean.
cs: IO port probe 0x0a00-0x0aff: clean.
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
cdrom: This disc doesn't have any tracks I recognize!
cdrom: This disc doesn't have any tracks I recognize!
reingard@ubuntu:~ $

reingard@ubuntu:~ $ mount
/dev/hda2 on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hda1 on /media/windows type vfat (rw,umask=000)
/dev on /.dev ty...

[René L. Reingard (reingard)]

the SCSI topic (in users-list, regarding my problem) leaded me to a search, and guess what do i have found through Synaptic
on the machine? a pack called "kernel-patch-scsi-idle",
which made me curious. so i deleted that, and now, i looks to me like things are running much better. at least after 3 starts of
the machine, many of
the DVD's which were read as empty are playeable now. eventhough with some the CD-Drive does not label the name of the
DVD, and the
mediaplayer does not start automatically as set by default. anyhow lets see what happens the next few days.
this pack "kernel-patch-scsi-idle" must have been installed, when i tried to change some of the default repositories set by the
Upgrade to Hoary. i guess i must have thought at that time this must be useful; ha!

thanks for all the help.
regards,
René