I typically archive my DVDs to MPEG files prior to playing them back in XBMC, so that they are displayed in my library. And for some reason, I would use the DVD player on my surround receiver to playback DVD rentals, as opposed to using XBMC. Last night I finally decided to use XBMC to play a rental, when to my surprise, it wouldn’t play the disc!
For background, I installed XBMC over a minimal Ubuntu install, done with the server edition. As such, I don’t think that some of the multimedia related files were installed. A quick review of the XBMC log file (~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log) showed errors relating to a UDF library. UDF is the disc format used for DVDs. To resolve the issue, I installed two packages:
sudo apt-get install udftools libudf0
Note, I believe that udftools would have been sufficient to resolve the problem. From then on, XBMC automatically starts playing a DVD upon insertion.