How to Play DVD in Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04 and 16.04

11 Jan 2023 3 min read

Ubuntu won’t play DVD? Even after you installed all the codecs from Ubuntu Restricted Extra package? Welcome to the club. You are not alone who cannot play DVD in Ubuntu. In this quick tip, I’ll show you how to fix the issues with playing DVD or even encrypted DVD in Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04 and 16.04.

Play DVDs in Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04

Though I am focusing on Ubuntu here, these methods should also work on Linux Mint and other Ubuntu based distributions. What we need to do here is to install the libdvd package that downloads and installs the required dependencies.

This libdvd-pkg is available in the multiverse repository of Ubuntu. Please make sure to enable it using this command:

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse

Open a terminal and run the following command:

sudo apt install libdvd-pkg

It will notify that you need to configure the package using dpkg so that it installs the required dependencies.

Don’t worry, it’s a simple step. Once the libdvd-package installation finishes, use the command below to configure libdvd-package:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg

This will download the libdvdcss2 library from VLC repository.

In the process, you’ll be asked whether you want automatic updates for libdvdcss2. You can go with the yes option here.

Once the process completes, reboot your system and plugin your DVD and you should find DVD playing in your Ubuntu system.

Troubleshoot: “libdvdread not available” error in Ubuntu 20.04

Ubuntu 20.04 has libdvdread package available as libdvdread7. Install it using this command:

sudo apt install libdvdread7

For Ubuntu 22.04, use this package:

sudo apt install libdvdread8

Alternate Method: Play DVD in Ubuntu (only use if you are using Ubuntu 14.04)

This part of the article was written a few years ago when libdvd-pkg didn’t exist. Basically, it does almost the same thing as the previous section, manually. If the previous steps didn’t work for you, use the steps mentioned here.

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:

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 as well as in Linux Mint. Let me know if it worked for you or if you still can’t read DVD in Ubuntu.