DVD Player with Liberty Phone

Hardware Librem 5
1

As you can see from the photo, the Liberty Phone detects all my peripherals. It also detects my DVD player, the Philips & Lite-ON Digital Solutions Corporation DVD Writer Slimtype eUAU108.

When I insert a DVD, I hear it spinning, and the DVD mechanism starts up. But then nothing happens. I don’t see the DVD appear in the menu. If I start VLC and ask it to play the DVD, this is what it tells me

Playback failed:
DVDRead was unable to open the disk “/dev/sr0”.
Your input media cannot be opened:
VLC cannot open “dvd:///dev/sr0”. Check the log messages for details.

Do you think there’s any way the Liberty can play a DVD?

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Capture d’écran de 2025-07-31 22-26-35
Capture d’écran de 2025-07-31 22-26-351920×1080 127 KB

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By doing a diff of the output from ls -l /dev before and after plugging in the DVD reader, does any device appear?

Have you looked at the system log to see whether any messages are being logged when you plug in the DVD reader?

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sudo apt-get install libdvd-pkg

If the issue still persists, let is breakdown

lsblk

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I tried and he answer me :
Impossible to find libdvd-pkg

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libdvdread4

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I tried before and after, but the answers are very long and I don’t know what kind of difference I must see… :confused:

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He said :
Impossible to find libdvdread4

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Are they?

ls -l /dev >before.txt
(plug in new device)
ls -l /dev >after.txt
diff before.txt after.txt

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You can see the screen shot :slight_smile:

Screenshot
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Very hard to read but doesn’t look promising. In this case ls -1 may work better than ls -l

Probably your next stop is the system log to see whether any messages got logged as a result of plugging in the DVD reader.

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What do I do now?

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Now I see :
Before I see only « root » and « tty »
After I see « disk ».

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The only relevant piece of information is the device name (and those are not device names).

It may help to rotate your phone into landscape mode.

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I write here everything I see after that I did not se before :

  • brw-rw sdc (and sdc 1)
  • brw-rw sdb (and sbd 1 and 2 and 3)
  • drwxr-xr-x (input and disk and char and bsg and block)
  • crw-rw video fb 1
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What’s the format of the DVD itself? Commercial movie DVD? A data DVD that you have created? Something else?

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Just a quick check because it wasn’t mentioned, but does the drive work with other operating systems? I ask because they do go bad and stop working - I’ve had drives that end up just starting to spin but never are able to read anything anymore due to laser or motor failing.

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The DVD player work very well with my Librem 14 right now :slight_smile:

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Commercial DVD. But when I tried ls -l , there was no DVD in the DVD player I think.

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Verify there is a DVD in it.

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Hi Marts,

You have a DVD burner, to write DVDs. But i think you would like to whatch one. This is kind of complex. DVD have a protection and to encryption it you will use libdvdcss. In German it was legal to use it cause it just use known keys in a row to encrypt dvd because that is in german no useful law protected encryption, because it was trivial. If you have another region coded dvd i am not sure about the support. You may read about development here: libdvdcss - VideoLAN
You should got it done by install this, xine (outdated but premium in the past - Link is:https://xine-project.org ) or by VLC.

The sources are on git as libdvdcss, hope you can clone it.

Good luck!

Christal

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