Playing comercial dvds
 

Hi has anyone managed to play commercial dvds under suse 10.1. I had them fine under 10 but not in 10.1. i installed libdvdcss win32codecs to no avail. then after uninstalling Kaffeine and xine i tried mplayer with all the required extras and still to no good. i am using a packard and Bell easynote laptop and have fetched all the latest patches.
cheers showwaddy

Sounds like you've done the things you should on SuSE. Perhaps if there was some detail as to error messages and your observation we could be helpful. You could try running mplayer from a terminal session. That should give you more detail than you get when a failure occurs after launching an application with the GUI.

DVDs play on my laptop with Suse 10.1. I used the packman packages for mplayer and etc.
Basically the same process I used on my 9.3.

The only i get is no stream with a fatal error message.

Could your DVD drive be set to another region than the DVD?

have you checked that libdvdcss is corectly installed as i belive that packman no longer offer it

You really should try vlc. It is the only player to play all of my dvd's. xine and kafiene wouldn't play one of mine at all. Mplayer would play one title at a time.

The problem was (probably to stop piracy) that the titles were not in order on the dvd, ie episode 1 was title 7 etc.
vlc plays it with no problem, even plays the title screen.

You still need libdvdcss though

Also suse's own kafiene etc won't play dvd's even with libdvdcss installed you have to get them from the apps homepages.

Eureka Thanks all
 

Thanks every one after much head scratching and poking about i have mplayer working fine at last. why suse cant include it and say sod to international moaners i dont know. everyone that has purchased a dvd player has purchased the decoders anyway.

The reason Novell cannot include it is because to open source the encryption methods means people to copy DVDs easier. At least that is what the MPAA is moaning about. Personally I say screw them. If I own the DVD I can do as I please with it. I have SUSE 10.1 and I watch DVDs on it. I work for Novell, and while we officially cannot inform people how to do it, doesn't stop us all from doing it ourselves. DVDs were not supposed to have Regions or encryptions originally, you can blame the MPAA for that nonsense.

Actually even if you purchased the dvd's you don't own the copyright.
The Lawyers get everywhere --innocent people are now getting SUED like crazy because they are selling their used IPODS with MP3's still on them.

I don't actually have too much problem with say a REASONABLE commercial package -- WinDVD for Windows works well enough so why can't we get a commercial DVD player for Linux.

As I use Vmware I tend to boot up a Windows Virtual machine and then run Windvd from that machine --works fine.

I didn't have any probs getting DVD's to play on SUSE 10.0 --I didn't even need to re-install kaffeine. I grabbed Libdvdcss, Libxine and Xine from the Brazilian site together with windwos w32 codecs and it all worked --even Kaffeine plays dvd's.

Now as for SUSE 10.1 I can't say --had too many probs with SUSE 10.1 so went back to 10 until other issues sorted out.

I'm running it on a laptop --works great.

Cheers
-K

In my opinion it is a shame that you have to pay twice for the right to watch a DVD: once when you buy the DVD and a second time when you buy the device that is supposed to play it. This is ridiculous! I see the point about copyrights and that you don't own them. No objections! But that you need another licence to decrypt your completely legal DVD's doesn't get into my mind. And this is not a Linux problem only. Even Windows there doesn't seem to have a built-in DVD decryption capability available. So bottom line is: you have to pay twice if you want to keep it legal. Or did I miss the point?

Legal is for a court to decide and I cannot imagine anyone wants to see this challenged in court. I imagine if I go to court and present a case where I have paid for the dvd as well as the hardware to play the dvd then I dont think it will matter where I get the software from or what software I use.

Well it has gone to court, and the MPAA and others are currently winning the cases. Here is a good legal summary from an "anti-DMCA" source.

http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/unintended_consequences.php

That just boggles my mind how any court could uphold any of those...of course a lot of those are just threats they list. I have yet to see a actual case where someone using linux was taken to court over a legal dvd being played in the dvd drive they bought and using some software to play that DVD. I mean the purpose of any encryption on a dvd is to be unencrypted so how is unencrypting it circumvention? Well if simple playback is illegal then I guess everyone is gulty? Even someone who uses XP, bought a dvd, and a dvd drive and WinDVD?

To me circumvention would be if I wanted to do something that the maker of the product did not want me to do or allow me to do. A compnay that produces DVDs I assume DOES want me to watch it, no? :)

As I said, love to see them take me to court. I paid $20 for the dvd movie, $60 for my dvd drive that came with software to play on windows but I dont use windows so I had to get some "other" software to play it and I am somehow doing so illegally? I can play it on this OS but not this OS, I can watch it on this TV but not that TV?

I admit it. I am guilty. Come and get me...I am not hard to find. :)

The unfortunate thing is that this situation is not totally logical.

Still, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") is a law, as codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act. Although people can test the application of this law in court, most people know that its wording essentially revokes users' "fair use" rights. Although it is true that people can legally make backup copies for their own use, they can only do so legally if the material is not copy protected. In this case, it is not the copyright that is being protected by law, but the encryption system. This somewhat bizarre "loophole" has proven very powerful to the MPAA and RIAA.

Currently, the only immediate solution is to play the material you purchase in devices (hardware or software) that have been approved or licensed. As an example, the DVD player available to Linspire owners through the CNR warehouse is licensed. Linspire pays an MPEG fee to someone and in turn their player has been approved. The same is true with some hardware device like a standalone DVD player or a commercial software package like WinDVD. As long as the providers of the content believe they have been properly compensated, and provisions have been made to prevent piracy, they are willing to let people view and listen to what they purchased.

A longer term solution is to write to your Congressmen and Senators. They wrote the laws and have the capability of changing or revoking them. With enough consistent public pressure, it will happen.