USB DVD RW help needed

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I got my daughter an external usb DVD RW for Christmas. She's running FC1. My fstab recognizes the device as /dev/cdrom2 and I can mount it with no problem. I can insert DVD's and can read the files there with Nautilus.

I can't play the DVD's though. I can open gmplayer and point it to the DVD, but it fails on an error "unable to locate IFO file and quits.

I have NO experience with either usb devices or playing DVD's on Linux. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance to all and happy holidays to everyone.

[pbharris]

humm - much searching revealed very little - this seemed to be a releavant thread if you are using scsi emulation.

http://www.linuxtv.org/mailinglists/.../msg00749.html

[dishawjp]

Thanks for the cite, but it doesn't seem to directly address my issue. I'm sure that the difficulty is a pretty basic failing on my part due to a total lack of experience with DVD drives and usb. It's nothing that I've ever done or wanted to do with my computer.

Do you think that I should edit my fstab to make it /dev/dvd or something similar? Any suggestions would be appreciated, but I do want to take "small steps" since this isn't my computer and I don't want to take a chance of hosing anything. My daughter will be heading back out of state to college in another week or so and I really would like to resolve the issue before she leaves if possible. It probably is only a very minor configuration issue since the device can be mounted and read as a CD drive.

Thanks again,

Jim Dishaw

[pbharris]

well i know that there are issues playing DVDs period using fedora core 1 - you may wich to make a link call dvd in the /dev directory, this would be something like ln -s /dev/sda /dev/dvd - assuming the drive is set up as a SCSI device which it should be because it is a USB drive.

[dishawjp]

Thanks pbharris,

Actually I'm thinking that a good part of the problem may be that fstab is seeing it as /dev/cdrom2. The output of my fstab is as follows:

[dishawjp@eunix dishawjp]$ more /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdd3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /mnt/cdrom1 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hdd2 /rh9 ext3 noauto 1 3
/dev/cdrom2 /mnt/cdrom2 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

Should I set up a symlink like:

ln -s /dev/cdrom2 /dev/dvd

or something similar to that? The error message is really surprising in that it is "Cannot open the IFO file for DVD title 1" yet I can see the IFO file from the command line.

[dishawjp@eunix cdrom2]$ cd VIDEO_TS/
[dishawjp@eunix VIDEO_TS]$ ls
VIDEO_TS.BUP VTS_01_0.BUP VTS_01_0.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB VTS_01_4.VOB
VIDEO_TS.IFO VTS_01_0.IFO VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_3.VOB

I have to be close, and appreciate your help in setting this up.

Jim Dishaw

[pbharris]

i use vlc to view DVDs and i have never mounted them to do it, so i ma not sure, but what ever /dev/cdrom2 is pointing to would be the device.

[Schotty]

Hello

Use mplayer or xine to play the dvd's. You can get the rpms from either site's homepage. You do not mount the disc first. Also remember that you will need the decss codec installed to play most dvds.

The only diff between internal dvd drives and external is that linux sees the device as a scsi drive. Thats it.

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I do appreciate your efforts, but my problem seems to be that fstab is seeing the drive as a CD ROM and not a DVD. Additionally, it is not seeing it as a SCSI drive even though it is USB. The entry in my /etc/fstab referring to the device is:

/dev/cdrom2 /mnt/cdrom2 udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

I really want to get this straightened out within the next couple of days before my daughter returns to college. I am using mplayer (actually gmplayer) to try to play the CD's, and that soes appear to be working since I can play .avi file CD movies with it. Just not DVD's. I am using old DVD's (without encoding) for now to be sure that this is not creating problems.

Thanks for your input and please continue to provide any suggestions.

Jim Dishaw

[Schotty]

A DVD is really a cdrom with another format it can read, so that is not a factor. I just hosed my boot sector by reinstalling XP (bad drivers were conflicting with my new mobo -- now have nforce, had via kt133)

AS for it being scsi or not, run (as root)
cdrecord --scanbus

and see if it sees it. Plus you can also look at what the /dev/cdrom2 link (yes it is a symlink) actually points to. I have an external CDR unit and it literally was easier to run on Red Hat than on windows. I cant see much being different with a DVDRW drive.

My reccomendatio is this -- check that cdrecord sees it (as stated above). If it does then ensure that FC1 has mplayer and all the needed codecs installed. Those are the two key factors. Then once it WORKS, ensure that DMA is enabled and such. hdparm can check that (dunno if you knew that or not).

[dishawjp]

Hi Slave Copy,

Thanks for the info... I'm still trying to get this one hammered out. The cdrecord -scanbus sees the device on scsibus0. I've added the symlink "ln -s /dev/cdrom2 /dev/dvd" and added a mountpoint in /mnt for dvd. I can mount the drive and see files on CD's or DVD's in the drive, but when I put a CD in I still get the error message of "cannot open IFO file for DVD title 1"

This is driving me nuts! It works perfectly under WinXP (my daughter's computer is a dual boot) but I can't get it to work with FC1! I don't use Windows for anything any more, and I hate to have my daughter think that she needs to keep a Windows partition on her computer to use a piece of hardware that I just bought her. For what it's worth, she did just use the drive to edit some pictures with the Gimp this evening. The drive is there, FC1 recognizes it and will lread it, but mplayer, which works perfectly on her IDE DVD drive won't deal with this device.

Any help still very much appreciated.

Jim Dishaw