How To Play DVD In Ubuntu 14.04 And 16.04

Ubuntu won’t play DVD? Even after you installed all codecs from Ubuntu Restricted Extra package? Welcome to the club. You are not alone who cannot play DVD in Ubuntu Ubuntu 14.04. In this quick tip, I’ll show you how to fix the issues with playing DVD or even encrypted DVD in Ubuntu 14.04.

This issue was raised by an It’s FOSS reader Etienne Batori on things to do after installing Ubuntu 13.10. Here we shall see, in a more organized way, what we did to fix this issue of Ubuntu not reading DVDs.

Play DVDs in Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04:

We need to install few codecs required specifically to play DVDs comfortably. These are:

• libdvdcss2: to recognize DVD
• libdvdread4: to read DVD
• libdvdnav4: to navigate DVD

Step 1:

First step (actually optional) is to get VLC media player. You can install VLC from Ubuntu Software Center or using the following command in terminal:

sudo apt-get install vlc

Once you have it installed, install libdvdcss2. It used to come by default with Medibuntu repository. But since Medibuntu is no longer available, you will have to install this library from the VLC repository. Use the links bellow to install libdvdcss2:

• 32 bit libdvdcss2
• 64 bit libdvdcss2

Double click on the downloaded deb files to install it via Ubuntu Software Center. Alternatively, you can use GDebi to install .deb files more easily.

Step 2:

Once we have it, lets install libdvdread4 and libdvdnav4. Use the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 libdvdnav4

If the DVD play back does not work, try to set your region code. You can follow the instructions given here to set the region code. It worked for me without it.

That would be it. I hope that after completing all these steps, you would be able to play DVD in Ubuntu 14.04 (as well as in Linux Mint 17). Let me know if it worked for you or if you still can’t read DVD in Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 14.04.