playing dvd's on xp guest system

techno-mole · Post by **techno-mole** » 11. Jul 2008, 11:40

hello.
i have a small problem, i have setp up an xp virtual machine on a linux host (kubuntu 8.04) the reason being that my better half has just switched to linux (only taken 2 years to convince her) she is currently studying a geology course with the open university.
the course has some software that needs to be installed, which ive done (all went well with that) some of the course consists of short films, which she needs to watch, so ive installed media player, and the required codecs etc, but when she trys to play any of the films media player opens but nothing actually plays.

it is very important that she can watch the films.
im not sure what the problem might be, maybe something to do with the dvd drive not mounted properly ? the guest system sees the drive and an disc that is in it, but it doesnt seem to want to play the films.
the other thing i wondered about is increasing the graphics memory, at the moment its on 8mb, is there away to increase, not by much, just up to 16mb or maybe 32mb ?
any help will be appreciated, i really want to be able to get this sorted as it will mean that i have finally convinced her that linux is as good, if not better than windows, now all i need to do is convince the kids to use linux on their system.

Post by **stefan.becker** » 11. Jul 2008, 19:57

The only solution could be to use passthrough in the guest settings for dvd.

Post by **Sasquatch** » 11. Jul 2008, 21:25

You can try Media Player Classic (can be found at http://codecs.com/download/Media_Player_Classic.htm) or VLC (for your Host too, probably in repo, found on http://www.videolan.org/vlc/). Both of these players do not need any additional software installed to play DVDs.

Post by **TerryE** » 11. Jul 2008, 22:47

Unlike Audio CD-ROM, DVDs are structured around an ISO format so VBox can happily read them, and applications such as MPlayer classic work fine in VBox, as do some other DVD player apps. I do wonder why you don't just use a Native Linux DVD player. There are a couple of good ones available.

Post by **stefan.becker** » 12. Jul 2008, 15:39

Let him test.

I read only Videos, i read nothing from a Video DVD.

PS: There are some Video DVDs in the Market not working in PCs. This is because of copy protection and crappy file system (IFO-Files with 0 Byte etc.).