This is how to enable DVD playback uing yum

1. Login as root
2. Open Terminal as enter the following:
3. Open Gedit or any other text editor
4. Open /etc/yum.conf
5. Add the following at the bottom and save:

[livna]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
gpgcheck=1

6. At the terminal, enter these 3 commands:
7. Now you can use either Xine or Totem to play your DVD. Enjoy

Please let me know of any mistakes; will be happy to add, cut or modify anything

You should add:

enabled=0

to the yum configuration for the repository, and install with:

yum --enablerepo=livna install xine totem-xine libdvdcss

The reason is that livna is not 100% compatible with Fedora Extras. Pulling selected packages, as you are doing is OK; you just wouln't want to do a "yum update" with livna enabled.

Hi, I'm new here, this is my first post, thanks in advance for any help

I am just switching to Linux, I am a longtime Win user, hell I predate Windows, I remember Dos 3.1 with various shell progs... anyway

I tried the instructions above, I understand at least at a basic level how to use yum but when I try the first two commands, I get error messages at the end of the yum process, what follows is the output

Does this mean that I must manually install all of those dependent files? I am not sure how a linux system is exactly laid. Should I be adding whereever those files are to my path statements?

I have FC4 for AMD64

ok, quick update here.

I tried uninstalling and then reinstalling totem. Still no luck

I get this error message
This is the same as before I began trying to get DVD playability.

The repositories for FC4 x86_64 (AMD64) are not yet populated. Once they are, the above commands should "just work".

There's another change that's needed in the livna repo definition in the first post... the release and architecture should not be listed explictly, or folks using x86_64 or ppc which are supported FC4 platforms will reference the wrong files. The livna repo should be defined as:

[livna]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0

you'e right, that is the defualt way to set it up. I had just changed it since the FC4 directory for Livna is different from 1-3, so I explicitly put in i386 instead. I'll change that, thanks for the input

As noted further down, I forgot that I had it set up only for i386. It's fixed so it will now fetch the rpm's from the x86_64 directory for your system.

Welcome to the world of Linux

We can have so-called "dependency hell", but modern package managers such as yum and apt-get take care of any such dependencies. For instance, when I enter it knows to also install xine-lib and such.

From what I can tell xine and libdvdcss are in the x86_64 directory

Make sure you enter and not By default, Fedora installs Totem which uses Gstreamer and not Xine-lib. You can check which one you have by going to Help->About. As long as you have Totem-Xine and libdvdcss you should be able to play dvd's......

Can you play dvd's using Xine?

Thanks, once I changed the livna.repo file to reflect those changes it worked. I can play DVDs with Xine, though not with totem yet. When I try totem seems to open the DVD like its exploring the disc. No play options. Maybe on reboot...

Are you using File->Open or File->Play Disc? I always use the latter. I can't remember off-hand, but in prefs you might have to set which CD Drive for Totem to use. I had to change it from my CD-RW to my DVD-ROM before it worked. And once again, make sure under Help->About it says "Using xine-lib 1.x" and not "Uinsg gstreamer 0.8.x"

Well, more bad news.

I have since reinstalled FC4 because I thought I had really screwed things up... Well this did not solve that problem.

Now not even Xine will play DVDs, this is really bloody frustrating as evey set of instructions of this DVD issue seems not to work for me. Now Totem (yes I checked to see that it is using Xine) just opens a browser window onto the DVd and Xine tells me that their is no plugin for DVD:/

If I can just get my media files to work here and get dualhead display configured I can work all the time in Linux....

I was getting the same exact error messages from Totem when I was trying to play DVD's. I read this thread. I was trying to do the yum install commands and was getting the same error messages about missing dependencies as thtadthtshldntbe was. So then I read that I had the wrong /etc/yum.conf format. So I changed that to be:

################################
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d

[livna]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
##################################################

Now when I do the 'yum install libdvdread libdvdcss xine totem-xine' command I get these error messages:
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
No Match for argument: libdvdread
No Match for argument: libdvdcss
No Match for argument: xine
No Match for argument: totem-xine
Nothing to do

This is so frustrating. I am using FC4 on AMD64. I'm so frustrated right now because there are several things I can not get to work on this system. This is just one of them. And no one has answers. I can't download the right plugins for Mozilla/Firefox, I can't install Image::Magick for perl....ARGH!!!

I'm almost tempted to just start using Windows...but I don't want to. Someone please help!!

Because of the enabled = 0 in the config lines, when you use yum and you want to use the livna repository use a command like this

yum --enablerepo=livna install xine

whatever is in the brackets for that repo setup goes after the = sign.