VLC Media Player, Brother HL-2230 Laser Printer, and Mushkin 32GB Flash Drive ALL Not Working In ...

mercury48

I have a Dell Inspiron 580s desktop pc with Linux Mint 16 Cinammon installed as its only OS. I am totally confused and overwhelmed with hardware problems and the days of searching in vain everywhere I could. It has been especially frustrating and disappointing when I have literally copied lines of code again and again that were supposed to work - but failed to every single time!! Being a total newbie to running Linux as my OS hasn't helped either. Maybe I should put my tail between my legs, admit failure and defeat, wipe my entire 500GB SATA hdd clean again and reinstall Windows 7 64-bit again. Well, I will, BUT not before I see if some of you much more experienced members can at least help me solve even one of my problems. So, here goes, in the approximate order of relative urgency. Oh, and I almost forgot. My pc's CPU is an Intel Core i3 chip.

When I load a movie DVD into my CD/DVD +/- RW player, open VLC Media Player, click on "Media," "Open Disc," choose "DVD" and finally "Play," the app immediately crashes and opens up a window with the following error messages:

Playback failure:

DVDRead could not open the disc "/dev/dvd".

Your input can't be opened:

VLC is unable to open the MRL 'dvd:///dev/dvd'. Check the log for details.

First of all, what log is being referred to and how do I get to it? Second, what in the world does "input can't be opened" mean?? If the VLC Media Player is completely "broke" or not working at all, why does it play entire audio CD disks flawlessly? Good grief, I come to a screeching halt right away. So, that's what I'll do. It doesn't make sense to me to continue with the printer and flash drive problems until I hopefully get an answer and solution to this first problem. A sincere Thank You to any and all members who can and offer help. To be continued...