Help with watching DVDs on Linux
 

I'm definitely a beginner when it comes to all things Linux and attempting to watch DVD's on Linux is something I'm interested in at the moment in an attempt to get myself more and more immersed into the Linux environment. I was wondering if anyone could either help me out by walking me through or pointing me in the right direction to a guide that might walk me through the process to watch a DVD on Linux.

I'd appreciate it if there were no flaming towards me as I'm a beginner when it comes to Linux like I stated earlier. Thanks for your time. Any help is graciously appreciated.

Maybe this will help?
http://www.plainfaqs.org/linux/dvdplay/

Awesome! Thats a great start. Thanks for the help :).

Ok so now I have the libdvdcss installed like that guide explained. From that guide, I have a few concerns regarding how things turned out.

First off, I never got a "SuSE hardware detection: A video media was inserted" when I put in a DVD. My first thought is does SuSE know I have a DVD drive on my laptop? If it doesn't, how might I go about making sure it does?

Second, after install of libdvdcss, I still couldn't watch a DVD. When I click "Open DVD", I get the error message of: "This version of Xine (used by Kaffeine) has only a reduced set of supported codecs. It is not able to play DVDs. Please read ..." and it goes on to list a link for me to check out which does not help me much.

So what might be a good choice of action now?

Remove xine and kaffeine and install the ones from packman.

Since I'm a relatively new to Linux, could someone explain a little more of what it is I'm doing. As in, what is packman exactly?

I see its just a website of some sort, but I was curious if packman was a multimedia program, or if it was just a sight that offers lots of Linux packages.

EDIT: Nevermind, disregard this message. :)

I don't know much about SuSE, but this link may help you:
http://packman.links2linux.org/index...ion=cat&cat=16

Packman is a site that offers packages for Suse Linux. You can remove xine-libs (libxine) and kaffeine using the software module in yast or using the rpm command (man rpm).

Ok now I'm getting the two errors that the original guide said would pop up. I know for sure libdvdcss2 1.2.9 has been installed on my computer (well, at least, I ran it through YaST2 since it was an rpm).

Now I'm concerned that Linux might not be recognizing my DVD drive or the disc in it. How might I check to make sure that Linux knows I have a DVD drive as well as a DVD inside of it?

I apologize for sounding very new to this by asking simple questions concerning simple things like watching DVDs.

It's entirely possible that SuSE simply does not recognize your DVD drive.
9.0 isn't the most up-to-date version. I believe 9.3 is.

If your only problem were needing libdvdcss, the DVD would play, the FBI warning/copyright warning would show up, then the DVD would stop playing.

Did you install xine libs and kaffeine form the packman site? Also check to ee if libdvdcss is installed by doing
If nothing is printed after running that command then libdvdcss is not installed.

It pops up libdvdcss-1.2.8-1 and libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1 when I typed in that command in a shell.

I downloaded them, ran the programs through YaST and it seemed to work fine. The only thing that concerns me was that when I installed the xinelib, there were two conflicts: speex or something wasn't installed and was needed, and something else that reminded me of win32 (but it wasn't win32 I believe, it had a w in it and some numbers like 32 but I honestly don't remember; I'd have to go through the process again and type it up in here).

I'm using SuSE 9.3 if that information is needed.

Also, should I be concerned about the fact that no hardware detection notice comes up when I put a DVD in my DVD drive?

I wouldn't be bothered about the hardware detection thingy for now. What were the exact errors you got when you tried to install xine and kaffeine they may not function proprly if the error is not rectified. Also remove all the ibdvdcss packages and just install the latest one.

Ok this time. I got no conflicts brought up to resolve which is good. Basically, I uninstalled Xine, Kaffeine, and libdvdcss2 again, reinstalled them all, then tried running Kaffeine again and I still got the same two errors that were mentioned in that guide that someone put in one of the first few messages.

Those being:

"The source can't be read. Maybe you don't have enough rights for this, or source doesn't contain data (e.g: no disc in drive). (/dev/dvd)"

and

"No plugin found to handle this resource (dvd:/)."

Anyone know where to go from here now that all the software installed safely it seems? Do I need to execute Kaffeine from a shell? I've basically been running it from the K Menu even though I've uninstalled it twice now.

EDIT: Also, when I close kaffeine after opening it, it gives me an error of

"The application unknown (kaffeine) crashed and caused the signal 11 (SIGSEGV)."

with a short description following it that still did not help me understand why it occured.