The user should be presented a GUI to set the region code of his brand new DVD drive when trying to read a CSS crippled DVD (when needed)

*** Bug 16351 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

ihave exactly the same problème with whether kaffeine-xine or totem-xine or VLC.

This bug has been flagged because it is old and possibly inactive. It may or may
not be fixed in the latest release (Breezy Badger 5.10). It is being marked as
"NEEDSINFO". In two weeks time, if the bug is not updated back to "NEW" and
validated against Breezy, it will be closed.

This is needed in order to help manage the current bug list for the kernel. We
would like to fix all bugs, but need users to test and help with debugging.

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Err... I believe the bug is still valid and I don't think it's a kernel bug: if
there's no region set for the dvd player, then the installer should set it.

Yeah, the kernel doesn't handle this. Not sure who or what should (somewhere in
userspace).

there's a program "regionset" that is used to set it and it's in universe

I encountered this problem with a Apple Mac Mini running 7.04 Feisty.

I had never inserted a DVD under OSX, then wiped the entire disk and installed Ubuntu. The region code was never set on the drive, and any attempt to play a dvd caused the application to silently bail out with no errors.

I believe the relevant error from VLC is:

Error cracking CSS key for .....

If you try mounting the disk and issuing "cp -ra" you get errors like:

  cp: reading `/media/cdrom0/video_ts/video_ts.vob': Input/output error

regionset is able to tell that there is no region set, thus I conclude there ought to be a hook that spots this and asks you to set it.

ahem ... any gnome media player would bail out with no errors

running vlc from the command line showed the "Error cracking CSS key ..." error I mention above.

While there should be a better error message from libdvdread and the players should be able to give intelligent error messages, the installer should include 'regionset', check to see if there is a region set on any DVD hardware on install and offer to set the region if it has not been set. I ran into this issue while helping my friend putting Ubuntu 8.04 on his laptop (which originally came with an old SuSE Enterprise). Since he isn't all that technical, he never would have figured this out on his own, and it wasn't very obvious to me either.

Ran into this last night. Both Totem and mplayer gave totally meaningless errors. regionset fixed the problem but it took my friend a while to figure out the problem (after I spent much time failing to determine cause) since the errors reported by totem, mplayer, and those logged to syslog were not very helpful.

The bug exists in intrepid too. I use Kubuntu. A few weeks ago I had to replace the existing DVD drive. I hadn't played a DVD yet, but everything else worked. So I thought the drive was broken again, when it failed to play several DVDs and I did not get any error message. Only when I fired up Windows I learned what the problem was. I was immediately asked to set the region code, when starting to play the DVD. After doing this, it worked with Kubuntu too. So it would be really great, if one would receive an error message or even better, if Kubuntu gave the possibility to set the region code.

this should not happen automatically as most dvd drives have a very limited number of changes. also it is not necessarily that you can guess based on the location information from the user (user might live in one country but have a collection of foreign disks, or may have 2 dvd drives and want them set to different regions).
that means you need to ask the user if they want to set the region.
more questions in the installer is generally a bad thing, especially as some users never will watch DVD films.
so, surely this is a job for the media players to do rather than the installer.

Could you please assign this also KDE-media-players (Kaffeine, Dragon Player) and VLC? I do not know how to do this.

Can't the post-install script of libdvdread check if the dvd readers present have a region set, if that is required for libdvdread to work?

I'm not entirely certain that libdvdread's post-inst is the right place to do this. (What if a dvd player is added to the desktop after installing ubuntu? What if you use a USB dvd player?) But have updated the title so the discussion on this bug can focus on consideration of that specific solution.

Thank you for posting this bug.

Does this occur in Lucid?

I can not test, since the requirement is to have a drive without the region code set which is a rather rare case. I assume that the coders should know if this was implemented in the meantime.

Maybe libdvdread could ship an udev rule that checks if a region is set?

Just encountered this probleme on 12.04 with a clean DVD drive ( direct from the factory ) that has never been region-set.

Since this regionthing is directly linked to commercial crippled DVDs and drives region cannot be set more than 5 times. I guess this should be handled by the DVD player software only when the CSS key cracking fails.
So as already said, this should be handled by the DVD player with a nice GUI where the user can select the zone after have understood that this could be done only X times

I'm then adding Totem as a project affectd by this bug

That is a super bad idea. Read errors can happen for various reasons, including obviously defective disks, purposefully standard-violating disks (unfortunately a lame but common practice to attempt to contain DVD piracy). Advising the user to set region upon read error would a time bomb. It will cause many many users to destroy their drives accidentally.

Besides, your drive is supposed to be zoned when you buy it. I fail to see how the media player is to be blamed.

@rémi : this Gui should not be displayed if the dvd match the region of the drive

A lot of drives don't have a region set, just because they are not manufactured for a specific region (Barebones with keyboard added at the last time like Clevo)

I sell a lot of Clevo that have this problem.

We need to give the user a chance to fix this, maybe this can be triggered by libdvdnav but IMO it's the player GUI that could handle this cleanly.