Hi,

I can't for the life of me figure out how to play DVD movies in mandriva 2006!
I've tried using all the softwares that come with the dist. but they always just open the DVD as a data DVD and not playing the movie from the menu.

thanks for you help.

//S

Unfortunately, Hollywood has put enough laws up in the US that most distros don't support DVD, MP3, or other media out of the box.

If you (like me), just don't care about the laws and respect the copyrights of money grubbing corporations, but want to play your dvd's, there is an easy solution to this.

1. Go to easyurpmi.zarb.org and follow the directions for configuring urpmi with the two plf repositories.
2. In a terminal, run "kaffeine -w". This will launch kaffeine, and give you a popup window showing you what libraries are missing. Exit kaffeine when you are done reading the list.
3. In the terminal window, type "urpmi libdvdcss win32-codecs". This should download two packages (plus any dependant packages) and install them.
4. relaunch "kaffeine -w" to see if everything is there.
5. Insert a dvd. Kaffeine should launch automatically and start playing your dvd. One caviat: kaffeine will die occasionally in the middle of a dvd. If this happens, use urpmi to install xine, and use xine as your dvd player.

Hope this helps.