A colleague of mine who is currently setting up Mythbuntu (MythTV) as a media center PC contacted me today because he had a problem with DVD playback in MythTV. When selecting DVD-playback, just nothing happend.

I first asked him to make sure the DVD drive is working and the DVD can be mounted and he confirmed it works (you should check as well).

Then I asked him to launch MythTV from the console (e.g. in Gnome Terminal, run “mythfrontend”) and try to play the dvd and see whether an error message is logged in the terminal window. And in fact MythTV complained:

faild to open device at /dev/dvd

I asked him to send me the list of his devices using:

ls /dev

This showed up no device “dvd” (the dvbt-stick created a “dvb”-device, so not get confused with that). The dvd-device in fact had the name “dvd1”. So with this knowledge, the problem is easy to fix:

ln -s /dev/dvd1 /dev/dvd

So this creates a symbolic link so /dev/dvd1 can be accessed using /dev/dvd as well so MythTV is pleased.

Hope this helps some of you.