I have the latest Ubuntu LTS and today’s extras.

My DVD writer does show up in the drives folder.
So it hasn’t quite vanished. I can play a music CD. I can load a CD ROM game through Dosbox and play it. I can browse the files on a music or software CD.

But when I put a movie DVD in the tray the directory is blank.
I can’t see the structure through the drives folder, and VLC cannot display it either.

It’s a like I am missing the most important Codec.

Can you tell me what Linux’s basic DVD configuration setting should look like?

I’m not interested in using the burner, but I do want to play movies that I own.

Possibly requires - https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

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Thanks Mac. I went through that already but perhaps it didn’t install correctly.

After my initial set up I changed several things on this machine including switching to a wireless mouse and keyboard and wireless network dongle. I also changed the HDMI monitor and added 2 more SSDs. Also, since I installed from a USB stick I’ve never set the BIOS to boot up from CD.

I might just try to reinstall the entire distro since I haven’t done that much configuration work on the system software. Basically I ran all the updates, extras & restricted code.

But so far this seems like the only insurmountable fault, so I’m going to try a little more debugging before I reinstall.

Did you install libdvdread8?

sudo apt install libdvdread8

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The system reports that I have the newest version installed already but I ran it again just because.

What happens when you insert the DVD, start VLC and then from the menu click media -> Open Disc
Select DVD, The disk device should be /dev/sr0 assuming you only have one optical drive installed in your system.
Click play.

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Essentially nothing. I can eject the disc from VLC. Otherwise it does not seem to do anything though it lists sr0.
I ran the updates again and it tells me everything is up-to-date, so I’m gonna reboot the machine again and see if anything changes.

I have one optical drive three SSDs and a floppy disk.
They are all listed in the disks folder.
But no mater what DVD I put in, the system reports “no media”.

After reboot:

Mount options in /etc/fstab reports

nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show

I have no idea what that means

Mount point is shown as /mnt/sr0
Device /dev/sr0

Look at output of the dmesg command to see if there are any drive errors i.e

sudo dmesg | grep sr0

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When browsing from VLC my device sr0 cannot be found.

Look at the output of the groups command.
Is your user part of the cdrom group?

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yes
groups reports
ulu adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin lxd sambashare

blockdev /dev/sr0 -getbsz

reports
blockdev: cannot open /dev/sr0: No medium found

"it's in there"

After reading through the logs and the manual info on VLC media player, I can guarantee I don't understand every entry.

But it does appear the the CDROM mounts ok and the DVD does not.

VLC always reports:

VLC is unable to open the MRL 'dvd:///dev/sr0'. Check the log for details.

E D I T . . .

The log also reports:
GLib-GObject: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

I went another round with the codecs and updates again to no avail.

Finally, I gave up and replaced the SATA Speedwriter DVD with a 16x ATAPI DVDROM.

I still get the report "blockdev: cannot open /dev/sr0: No medium found"

Phoooo!