Is there a step by step way to add the necessary files to Kubuntu version 9.04 in order to view commercial DVD's? If so, please explain the steps needed to be able to view the encrypted DVD's.

Then play your DVD's using VLC mediaplayer.

VLC won't play my Fellowship of the Ring Limited Edition DVD, which has both theatrical and extended editions of the movie on one disc. It also doesn't seem to offer a dynamic volume normalization feature, which I'm constantly using. I didn't explicitly install the w32codecs, but I don't see any reason to. I've played plenty of movies without them (every unencrypted file I can download or stream). I don't think they work with an AMD64 release. I'm pretty sure there is now a better, native codec for every w32codec. That package was created around 10 years ago, when playing videos on Linux was just starting to take off. There weren't very many codecs. Very few codecs had specs available, and there wasn't the talent and manpower to reverse engineer them. I would be shocked to find them of any use.

To play encrypted DVD's, which includes anything commercial, you'll need libdvdcss, libdvdcss2 or whichever version they're on by now. However, it's nowhere in the default repositories. You'll have to open a terminal (konsole) and run the commands below, which I distilled from http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-mp...1#comment-8700 . I'm pretty sure the first apt-get update is unnecessary, as it just gives you an error, and I think you can run "sudo bash" or "sudo su -" instead of typing sudo in front of every command. I recommend installing Kaffeine as well. I've hardly used dragon, but it doesn't look as mature and complete. Kaffeine was the best with streaming protocols when I was using Gentoo.

Here's the commands:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

to jbo5112: If you'd looked at the code I posted, it includes everything you have, except all in one command, AND for any ubuntu distribution. Let's see how the OP gets on?

Make sure you have libdvdcss installed and any media player should be able to use it to play the DVD. Even without rpc1 firmware you should be able to watch even DVD outside your region (usually there is a restriction of 1x read speed set by the firmware for such disks, in which case flashing rpc1 may be a good idea so the drive doesn't destroy itself).