this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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I am trying to liberate my old DVD collection from its optical media prison. I bought a cheapo external DVD drive, but I can't get the DVDs to play or even cooperate for ripping. I can open the disc in the file manager and see the files on it, but I can't play anything. Do some searching, I see a lot of things about installing libdvdcss, libdvdread, and libdvdnav. I did all that and still nothing. VLC gives me an immediate error. I also see a lot of stuff about installing and using regionset to change the region setting on the drive. However, that package seems to no longer be available. Any ideas of what else I could try?

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[–] Bluefruit@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Ive had issues with this as well. Still have had no joy.

What DVD drive are you using? Ive read the hardware is also important, but I'm no expert.

[–] nyan@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

regionset's homepage appears to have disappeared. If your distro no longer packages it, the source can still be obtained from Gentoo source mirrors (pick a server here and go into "distfiles" then "8b").

[–] GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Did you install 'libdvdcss2' ?

[–] agentTeiko@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

And here I thought that was just a T-shirt 😜

[–] LanceUppercut@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I did not know that existed. Thank you. I'll try that when I get home from work.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

Arch wiki has (again) good info on DVD setup.

[–] instantregret@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

On which OS and version are you?

[–] LanceUppercut@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I'm on cachyOS.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What is the error that VLC gives you?

[–] LanceUppercut@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It says:

Playback failure: DVDRead could not read 1/4 blocks at 0x01

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Hmm assuming the disk isn't super scratched up, I'm thinking you need to configure the region correctly.

I think if it was a decryption error, you'd have something different to a read error on what looks like one of the first blocks.

I remember there's a cli utility for setting the region that you should be able to get from your package manager, I can't remember the name off the top of my head

Edit: reread your post, regionset rings a bell actually. If it's not available in your package manager, perhaps try building it from source

[–] thenextguy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I had to change a setting in my app (handbrake) to actually use libdvdcss instead of whatever it defaults to. I also seem to remember having to copy/symlink libdvdcss.so into /usr/local/lib/.