Hi all,
I recently installed teh ASUS E616P DVD-Reader and Debian installed it instantly. It mounts, everythings fine. But how can I watch DVD movies in debian? Which libs? Which players? And is there a version of Gordian Knot for Linux to encode in Xvid(down with closed source DivX)?

Thanks in advance

To watch DVDs, you've got a range of options. You can grab MPlayer from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/index.html, but you'll need to compile it from source (the only precompiled versions are RPM). That'll play just about anything.

Alternatively, if you want to keep things within the package management system, install the ogle and ogle_gui packages. This'll install the Ogle DVD player. Unfortunately, the version supplied in the official Debian repositories can't play encrypted DVDs OOTB (which means very few will work). If you start ogle from a command line, and try to play a problem disk, you should see some instructions on how to install the necessary software. I'm stuck on a Windows box at the moment so I can't remember exact details, but I think it's a matter of running a single shell script.

What ? Compile from source ?
Why would you bother with that ?
Just add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list :

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main

and you'll get mplayer. You'll need also the w32codecs, lidvdcss lidvdplay, lidvdnav (if you want)
Everything is in .deb packages on this nice Frenchman's site. And it works !

cheers

Edit : don't forget to run apt-get update after adding the line ..

Cool, I didn't know about that. I'll get that in my own sources.list when I get home.

He, he, glad to kill two birds with one stone. The site was down for a few hours yesterday, but it's
fine today. Enjoy !

cheers

And what about xvid encoding?

Thanks for saying 'thank you' for the first part of your question.
Perhaps someone else will be happy to answer the second one.
Or you could just

cheers