Watching DVDs
 

Hi again,

My new and exciting question this time is... does anyone know of any good Linux DVD players and decoders? If it helps my current distro is Fedora Core 3.

Thanks

Install libdvdcss, and try MPlayer, Xine or Kaffeine. :)

mplayer does not require libdvdcss btw.

Actually, "Proud" has a point here that any player would do.
I use Totem.
Just install these:
libdvdcss
libdvdread
xvidcore - optional

Isn't it required for encrypted DVDs though?

nope. mplayer includes a heavily hacked version of it in it's own source code, which it called libmpdvdkit

Thanks, didn't know that. The mplayer site even says that using systemwide libdvdcss libraries isn't recommended anymore.

mplayer isn't very good at handling dvd menues...

Xine is very good at this though.

Re: Watching DVDs
 

I think VLC is possibly the best video player for Linux, and it plays DVDs perfectly.

I'd recommend Xine as well. I use it on both my desktop and laptop machines. As long as you don't attempt to rip movies, you probably don't have anything to fear, legally, from using DeCSS (fair use and all),... of course that's not legal advice...

I didn't realise that mplayer doesn't need libdvdcss. I am with the xine crew on this one, as long as you have win32 codecs, xine is a beauty use for DVD, video and audio playback.

Install it where and how?
Silly questions I know.......
I'm using Slackware so I have to compile from sources and am having trouble getting it to work.

Go to http://linuxpackages.net/
download required packages with dependanciesand install them
$su
$installpkg *.tgz

Xine is an excellent DVD player, and has nice menu support. I would recommend it.

I mainly use Video Lan Client for DVD and PVR because I can broadcast to other computers on my network and I do not have to figure out what audio track that has 6 channels when playing DVD movies. I do not suggest using xine because it is a little rough to figure what look for. mplayer is very good if neither VLC, xine, or ogle can not play the movie.

I'm compeletely new to this so sorry for the stupid question but where can i get xine, mplayer, or vlc and once i get them how do i install them onto fc3?

Thanks.

You can install multimedia packages on Fedora Core 3 using apt/synaptic or yum. Freshrpms has a version of apt thats preconfigured for installing add on packages from its site.