The VideoLAN Forums

I am having problems with more recent movies, I launch VLC from the command line by using "dvdsimple://D:\" and 9 times out of 10 it plays the movie without menus perfectly. However lately with newer movies I get this error with Fools Gold and Speed Racer to name a couple:

Playback failure:
DVDRead could not read -1/4 blocks at 0x7c0.
File reading failed:
VLC could not open the file "vlc:quit".
Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'vlc:quit'. Check the log for details.

And on some other movies sometimes it will play the extras rather than the film itself. I have upgraded to 0.9.2 and am still having the same problems. It is not the movies either as I can play them fine with VLC if I specify title 1, chapter 1, or if I manually start it by choosing to Open Disc and I let the menus come up then click to play. Just wondering what I can do to fix this so all movies will play with bypassing the menu. Thanks!

Edit: After searching through Trac I noticed ticket #1691 appears to be very similar to my issue and was closed for not being reproducable. The NTSC version of those 2 movies I've listed will do it every time. Have rented them multiple times now to test.

don't add vlc:quit but vlc://quit to your playlist.

I have changed that to "vlc://quit" and now it simply launches VLC, starts to try and play the movie and quits with no error log and no playback. If I open the disc from the GUI of VLC and check to play without menus it will not play and pop up with "Playback failure: DVDRead could not read -1/4 blocks at 0x7c0."

Those discs have new copy protection stuff. Only option is to rip them to hard drive using for example DVDfab decrypter or AnyDVD and them play them using VLC.
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?p=132116

Not sure what copy protection would have to do with this. I mean I'm legally purchasing/renting the retail version of the movie and simply trying to play it back on my PC without menus. What exactly does VLC do when you use the dvdsimple command? Would telling the movies to always start at title 1, chapter 1 accomplish the same thing? Something like "dvd://D:\@1:1" instead of "dvdsimple://D:\". Just looking for some alternative that I can use to play back all movies without having to go to the menu and click play.

Thanks for the help so far!

VLC doesn't work like PowerDVD for DVD playback. VLC directly tries to decrypt disc content, but because some new movies have added copyright stuff prevents that, VLC can't open those discs directly.

Would something like "dvd://D:\@1:1" instead of "dvdsimple://D:\" be a way to play all movies despite copyright protection by bypassing the menus?

It depends about the protection mechanism. If you can avoid those DVDRead could not read x/y blocks at z messages, then it will work.