DVD playback freezes on dvdnav demux: This can take a _long_ time, please be patient

Ask Fedora
1

I’ve installed a fresh Fedora 41 system because it failed to upgrade (I’ve kept my user home directory from the previous installation, since Fedora 35). I’ve installed libdvdcss and when I want to play a DVD (with VLC) it freezes on:

[00007f286c001500] dvdnav demux: Attempting to retrieve all CSS keys
[00007f286c001500] dvdnav demux: This can take a _long_ time, please be patient

It’s been more than an hour, it should take a few minutes to decode the DVD (or even faster on a modern computer). The disk is not damaged because I was able to create an iso file with mkisofs.

I’ve tried to install multimedia group, but everything was already installed.

I didn’t find any information about configuration of CSS. Did I miss something?

2

Testing with a new user could reveal if it’s a user config issue (given that you’ve kept the old home directory) or not.

If still not working, you could take a look at RPM Fusion’s Multimedia HowTo.

3

Quite likely something that has carried over from one of the earlier versions of an app is causing the problem. There are many different hidden files and directories under your user home directory that contain config info for the apps and as apps are updated sometimes the configs already in place may not work.

On my system I find both ~/.local/vlc and ~/.config/vlc
I would guess that if you remove both those directories and their content that the next time vlc is started it will work again. The app creates those for you.

4

I just noticed that dmesg shows this errors:

[257496.449642] I/O error, dev sr1, sector 11990464 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 2
[257496.449647] Buffer I/O error on dev sr1, logical block 2997616, async page read

It’s pretty shame because the Disk is brand new, I only taken it out from the box once to watch the movie. I’m now download the movie from torrents.

5

This seems it may be an error in the physical DVD or the reader and not actually related to vlc.

Does the disk play in a dvd player?

Many businesses will replace a defective disk that will not play properly, but may not do so if the error only appears on a computer reading the disk.

6

I don’t have a physical DVD player, but I’ve tested with external blue ray drive and I got the same error. So it’s most likely a damaged disk.