Kodi Community Forum

Hi, first time posting.

Hopefully someone here might be able to give me some advice. I recently set up a friend's computer (i686) to dual-boot XP and XBMC (10.0 r35648) running over minimal Ubuntu 10.10. The partitions were set up and Ubuntu & Grub2 installed using a LiveCD. XBMC was installed and set up via SVN. I had a few teething troubles at first but managed to get most of the kinks ironed out by looking on this forum. I also managed to get an MCE remote working.

Early on I found I could add the DVD drive as a source by adding "iso9660://" manually but only when a DVD was actually in the drive. I have never been able to find the "cdrom" folder in the file browser or from the Ubuntu command line. XBMC plays movies just fine from any network folder but refuses to load soft subtitles for movies played from the DVD drive regardless of naming convention. When browsing for subtitles manually it finds the folder and subtitle file but clicking on "OK" has absolutely no effect. This occurs on all external subtitle files irrespective of codec or file type.

A less serious issue concerns auto suspend within XBMC. Suspend works briefly but if left too long the mouse stops working. Subsequent suspends last only a fraction of a second before returning to full brightness. I have tried adding a variety of command line fixes but none of them solved this.

simple log report:

http://pastebin.com/2fn2UgxR

and with debugging enabled:

http://pastebin.com/2fn2UgxR

EDIT:
I followed the instructions here:
http://www.linuxconfig.org/HowTo_mount_cdrom_in_linux
and was able to browse contents of a DVD ROM via the command line. However XBMC still refuses to see subtitles within folders on a DVD.

Added mount instructions to /etc/fstab and then eventually gave up and returned it to its original state.

Just added HAL, XBMC no longer exited to command line. I purged and removed it and now the command line appears again!

Installed pmount, XBMC still refuses to load subtitles from DVD folders and I still can't find the DVD in XBMC without typing "iso9660://"

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, added the following line to /etc/fstab

/dev/sed0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,auto,unhide

and rebooted back into XBMC. It checked all drives for errors then told me it couldn't find the source. I selected the manual option, and on arriving at the command line typed the following:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0

followed by Control-D, which launched XBMC.

I created a new network share through /media/cdrom0 which saw the contents of the DVD correctly. Now I can browse and load up idx/sub subtitles from the folders on the DVD!

Now, how do I persuade XBMC to mount the disc without me having to type code each time I want to use it?

EDIT: spotted another problem. Once mounted, discs cannot be swapped over. Only the disc inserted in the drive at startup can be read this way. Inserting a different disc leads only to a blank directory, reinserting the first disc allows original disc contents to be read again. Also, Ubuntu will not allow the drive to be mounted without a disc present.

So at present I have a messy workaround for watching films with soft subs on DVD with XBMC but I have to change /etc/fstab back if I want to use it normally and reboot every time I want to change the disc in the meantime. I have no such problems with VLC on Windows!

Changed the line in /etc/fstab to read

/dev/sed0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 ro,user,noauto

and now XBMC sees the DVD properly without any extra fiddling around. Problem solved!

With the "noauto" flag I presume I will have to reboot if I want to watch a different disc with subtitles, but the iso9660 source will do if I don't need subtitles.

Now I just have to fix the auto-suspend thing.