Anybody know what causes "movie player" to return "ERR"?

[Roland Smith]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 04:24:35PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> 
> I don't think this is OS-specific, but this morning I *wasted* a few
> hours trying to watch a DVD of "Dr. Strangelove."  I tried to dd the
> iso into /usr/tmp, but that errored out too. 

Try "mplayer dvd://1 -v -dumpstream -dumpfile title.mpg" from the command
line, and replace the "1" by the number of the longest track. This should give
you a better indication of the error.

> No, I have 0.0 intent
> of wasting the diskspace on movies, but just wonder if why /dev/dvd
> and /media fail.  Ubuntu. 

You are sure that your DVD player isn't broken?

Some CDs and DVDs are made in such a way that they do not comlpy with the
relevant standard, but play in most hardware-based players. Sometimes you can
figure this out by looking at the box. E.g. on the DVD of the latest Star Trek
movie the index was subtly broken on purpose. It is usually labeled as copy
protection. But in my experience, FreeBSD and Linux usually don't have
problems with those.

Try another player application like vlc.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914  B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20101022/7ad27bc5/attachment.pgp