Why is it so hard to play dvd's in linux?

[happybunny]

Well?

I understand that some distro's don't ship with the libdvdcss de-cryptor for moral reasons (debian doesn't consider mp3s/dvd's to be "free" enough) and some for legal reasons, like no mp3's in Redhat as someone owns the mp3 format.

I can play dvd's in Windows via PowerDVD or WinDVD or even Media player or VLC. What legal hurdle's did those people over come that isn't availible for linux?

Media Player & VLC are free, yet they can play dvd's. The other commercial DVD players don't seem to have missing de-cryptors. Did they pay for permission to play them? and who did they pay?

I have been fighting the new suse desktop for hours trying to play dvd's which is what spawned this question.

thanks

[paj12]

You've probably already come across it, but I just wanted to post a link to this article (http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/254/42/). It's a pretty good guide to setting up multimedia support on SuSE.

If you add the Packman repository (http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories#Packman) to YaST, enabling support for Video DVDs is pretty staight forward. You can grab the latest libdvdcss RPM from videolan.org (http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/), then re-install libxine1 and kaffeine from the Packman packages, and you should be good to go.

[dkeav]

technically vlc is breaking the same legalities that mplayer ect ect does, it just ships with dvdread access anyways

powerdvd ect ect, is a commecial application since you pay for it, and they pay for licensing thats where the legalities are taken care of powerdvd is just the middle man

[bwkaz]

And Media Player is free because Microsoft just sucks up the cost of paying for the CSS license. (That's what being a multi-billion-dollar convicted monopolist can get you...)

The issue with the open-source players isn't really that they're free, though. The two issues are that they're open-source, and that there's no central entity to pay the license fee for the program. (Though this might be fixable if the developers paid the fee, I'm not sure.)

When you pay for a CSS license, you get a decryption key for your intended region, and you are (probably) also forced to sign an NDA agreeing not to give that decryption key out to anyone else. So your DVD playing program cannot be open-source, because if it was, anyone would be able to get the decryption key from the source code of the program.

Or, you could just use the DeCSS code that was posted all over the place for a while (or libdvdcss, which may use the same code, I'm not sure). That's not legal, but it is compatible with open-source licenses.

[StarKnight83]

DeCSS is still posted all over and now its basically illegal in the US because of the DMCA (the part about it breaking an encryption w/o the consent to its creator or some B.S. like that) honestly it didnt stop me from downloading DeCSS and using it and Ill be more then happy to tell the MPAA that but thats just b/c I own all of my dvds and just want to watch them (yes i know that the DMCA supersides fair use laws)

[janet loves bill]

I would just copy the .vob files to a partition and open them with........xine.........tada you dont even need a dvd-rom

D'oh

[bwkaz]

StarKnight83:

A lot of people have made some kind of "art" work out of the DeCSS code, on the grounds that if someone tried to get them to stop displaying that, it'd be a violation of their First Amendment free speech rights. (Because the work as a whole is more than just the DeCSS code, it's the format that it's in, or something like that. The work just happens to have the DeCSS code as a (sometimes small) part of it.)

The theory is to create a conflict between the First Amendment and the DMCA, and hopefully get the DMCA thrown out in court because of that conflict. I am not sure if anyone has ever succeeded, though. I don't think it's ever gone to court yet.

janet loves bill:

You still need a DVD-ROM to get the .vob files off the DVD. Plus, I believe that a CSS'ed DVD has "encrypted" .vob files -- the files will come off the DVD, but xine still needs some kind of DeCSS-like code to "decrypt" the files before it can play them.

[SunnyDaze]

I have played with Suse Linux more than once. I even scored a free Enterprise Edition in Salt Lake City during Novell's last Brainshare. I'll take Mandriva Powerpack over Suse Enterprise any day. Suse's multimedia support is the worst I have seen in any distribution.

Playing DVD's in Linux is not hard. Playing any multimedia in Suse Linux is difficult. From my experience Mandriva Linux is the most user-friendly when it comes to playing DVD's.

All you have to do is download and compile libdvdcss. I would post the link, but I don't want to make things a difficult for JustLinux. ( hint: search freshmeat.net for libdvdcss )

You compile it like this: (after you extract it of course)

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
su
make install

Once libdvdcss is installed, Kaffeine, Xine, Totem and Mplayer will all play encrypted DVD's in Mandriva with no further problems.

If you want it to work in Suse, compile from scratch. I did that once, and it worked. Imagine that! :eek:

I don't want you to think I am trying to sell Mandriva. I could care less what distribution you are using. In the end Linux is Linux, and if you really know your Linux, it doesn't matter what distribution you are using.