VLC is unable to open the mrl - VLC Player Error in Linux Mint

I got this error when trying to play DVDs in VLC media player.

Never had any problems with this in Windows. Just Ctrl-D to "open disc" and then press <Enter> and the DVD starts to play no problem.

But when trying in Linux Mint I kept getting an error about nothing being found:

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.

So I did some googling and it turns out that /dev/dvd is not where the DVD is mounted. Instead, it was mounted to /dev/sr0. I think the same goes for any other mounted media e.g. /dev/sr1 etc.

So all I needed to do was change /dev/dvd to /dev/sr0 in the field in VLC Media Player appropriate box when doing Ctrl-D and all was fine after that.

You can get around this by creating a symbolic link to remap sr0 to dvd, using the following command:

sudo ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/dvd

I learned this here.

It's been a while since I learned about creating links with "ln". More info here: Q & A: The difference between hard and soft links.