Of course the DMCA only applied in the US, so those of us not in the US can get away with it, unless the almighty MPAA and RIAA decide to start harassing other countries again.

Not the least bit logical, that is one reason it is so hard to discuss to any degree and certainly to determine what is legal. That was the reason I said I would leave it up to a court of law. But as stated I wasnt talking about ripping only playing and I with simple playback I personally do not see circumvention occuring. Also, I paid for winDVD so I paid for the RIGHT to decrypt and I will consider that my right wether I use WinDVD or other software. Of course I also havent read where the DMCA makes a provision for the "right" to circumvent. I don't see where it says you can pay a fee and get around the law so once again everyone is illegal in this regard. Just because someone sells you a CSS license doesnt somehow excuse you from the DMCA law would it? DMCA is a piece or crap that is twisted into anything and everything that someone with money wants it to be!

I also have never read that a END USER is the one needing the license so once again I dont see how I personally would end up in court for playing my dvd on linux. I still dont see it as circumventing since unencrypting to provide playback is exactly what unencrypting is suppose to accomplish. Who has to pay for the CSS license - only the company/organization creating the software or drive etc... So how about every distro donate 10 bucks to legalfreecss.org (fictional organization whose goal is to get a css license) then they get the license, develop the software and every distro make use of the legal software?

Another question? Why have we accepted DVD if this is the mess we get out of it?

Does VLC have a license for css? Seems to work on everything I throw at it...

Actually it would be a CSS fee. And if Linspire paid for the license that means they still need the software to actually do unencrypting so what did they use? Do they own the software or is it GPL. If it is a GPL piece of software and they paid for a license does that cover anyone using that software? Who did they pay? How much? How do you know?

Again, things are not the way you would think they should be. Here is a quote on the subject from Michael Robertson.

Source: http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules...ticle&artid=14

Here is another example. TMPG products (recommended if you do video work in Windows and can properly interpret your needs from their bewildering array of similar products and brands) have (or had) trial versions where Dolby Digital Audio (2ch AC-3) support is (or was) disabled. It became enabled when you paid for the application. The reason was a licensing issue. Of course, this may change at any time, since the laws are not standing still.

yea, he is good at quick answers isnt he. Ask yourself what mpeg would have to do with CSS descrmabling? Read what he says not what you think he is saying. This is one of my main complaints about linspire is deception. Like those free security updates and other things. What you hear isn't techinically what they are saying. He says NOTHING about a CSS license. He doesnt even say the mpeg license has anything to do with the fact you can CNR dvd player at all. He doesnt say "yes you can legally play encrypted dvds on linspire using the CNR dvd player" He says two sentences that honestly may have nothing to do with each other and never mentions you can legally do this.

Just makes me think even more that their "legal" dvd player is nothing more than legally licensed to play regular plain DVDS and nothing else, if that. To make software that will play a encrypted disk you need to pay the CSS fee, simple as that. I have seen numerous posts in the linspire forums that ask about who linspire paid and never seen any answer. Even if they paid the fee they would also have to develop descrmabling software and I doubt seriously they did this.

Thanks for that link though I will use it wisely!

Well, I can only report what I read.

Regarding the Linspire DVD player, it will play anything as installed straight from the CNR warehouse. Nothing else is needed. Is it possible that Michael Robertson does not know all the licensing details? Well, yes. I think everyone knows he is an entrepreneur who started several businesses before Linspire and at least one since then. Frankly, I think he would be remiss to "micro manage" his company to the extent that he truly knows all the details regarding its operation and all the products it handles.

I have spent some time at the Linspire forum looking around, since my son runs Linspire on his computer (and I do on my triple-boot machine as well) and I want to stay in touch. Unfortunately, they are hardly more up-to-date or accurate than the Linspire sub-forum here. I do not mean that as a criticism. It is merely my opinion that the forum tends to be non-technical and low volume, so chances are they will not address any of the minutia as we do here.

Anyway, as rabid as the MPAA and RIAA have been lately, and since the Linspire DVD player has been distributed for quite some time now, I suspect that all the necessary fees, licenses and bribes have been offered to the appropriate people to make it legal.

I followed the instructions from The Jem Report and it worked like a charm!

Assuming you've installed Libxine, Win32codec, Xine-UI and libdvdcss sometimes the problem is in the configuration parameter. Often instead of source DVD coming from /dev/dvd, /dev/dvdrecorder or whatever try /dev/hdc or whatever your dvd device is connected to.

I didn't have to re-install kaffeine - I just installed the packages mentioned above and after changing /dvd to /dev/hdc it worked fine.

Sometimes the easiest solutions work.

Cheers
-K

It would appear that your link to dvd is missing. Note the following command line to look at my dvd links. In my case I have two DVD drives, a ROM and a RW.

$ cd /dev
$ ls -l|grep dvd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2006-07-03 12:08 dvd -> hdd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2006-07-03 12:08 dvdrw -> hdc

You do not own the copyright however you can do anything you so desire with the content you PURCHASE (see court precedents! You OWN a copy of the content, not LICENSE it), you just cannot make copies except as provided for under fair use (e.g., timeshifting, backups, and more recently, format shifting).

When you buy a DVD, it's like buying a book, you OWN that copy. It is a commodity good purchased off the shelf.

Hi. I am new to Linspire. I do not know much about coding and such (just haven't the time for the learning curve) and am looking for a free dvd player for Linspire 5.0. I don't think we should have to pay to play dvd's. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Linspire is Debian based which means you can install .deb packages. However you are playing with fire if you do. Linspire has tweaked many library packages. To install a package prepared for strait Debian you frequently end up having to replace the Linspire tweaked libraries with the standard ones that everyone else uses. Your new application will work but you may find that Linspire provided applications will fail because of dependency problems. If you run Linspire, stick with the CNR installer or you may cause yourself serious issues that can only be fixed with another clean install of Linspire. You can do quite nicely with Linspire but will be dependant on them for security updates. If you're more adventuresome and like to have the latest and greatest I recommend a switch to Ubuntu 6.06 -- 100% free and compatible with .deb packages that would break Linspire.

Here is an article about just that. Don't have any idea how well it works.

In all essents, couldnt one just run their dvd player through their tv card and record from there?

Yes you can run anything that connects to your TV with a TV card. If I hadn't managed to get things working through my DVD player that was my next choice.