what do I need to be able to play movies
 

I Have a Lonovo laptop running a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.10. What do I need to install to be able play movies? I have a dual boot with Vista which plays them ok..

thanks.

You didn't specify what format the movies are in, but VLC plays just about any kind of media you're likely to come across.

HTH

Or if you mean you can't play (commercial) DVDs, and know that your country doesn't forbid using libdvdcss2, try this:

1) install libdvdread3 (may already be installed, so just to make sure)
2) run the provided script to install libdvdcss2 which gets around the problem of most commercial DVDs not playing
After that try out. If you had a DVD in drive, you probably need to eject and re-insert it for it to work.

VLC is a great video player, even though it's ugly. Others do as well, but in my opinion VLC gives least headache if you need to play with DVD menus, external subtitles or anything like that.

If you mean codecs (i.e. your player says it doesn't understand the movie format), then open up Synaptic and select to install the appropriate packages for the engine you use; Totem for example uses GStreamer, so for it you should look for gstreamer0.10-plugins-name where name is the name of the plugin set, for example bad. Or if you use Xine backend, look for (lib)xine plugins. You may have to enable reposities (trough menu in Synaptic) such as "multiverse" or "universe" to find the packages.

Yep. Without knowing the format of the movie, VLC is the quickest route to a solution. Everything else b0uncer mentioned is relevant as well, of course.

I should have thought of this first, but the Multimedia Applications section of UbuntuGuide breaks down the options well enough.

The Movies, DVDs and videos page of the Official Ubuntu Documentation site offers some more details.

The totem player that comes with gnome is also able play just about anything, even digital TV in the last couple of versions. Most of the time it is a matter of installing the codec's required for the format the video is in (xvid, divx, matroska, ogm, the list is quite long).

Find out what format the video is in and search with the package manager for the right codec.

Mons

I have a whole bunch of Movies I would like to play. I don't know where to find the "format". The one I'm looking at, "Citizen Kane", just says "DVD Video". I load VLC with no luck.

Thanks.

Amazing. VLC plays every kind of video disc and file that I throw at it.

Sorry, but I'm at a loss here. Without more details about what you're doing or not doing, it's really difficult to guess what's going on.

When I load a Disk, I get a:
"An Error Occured"
"Could net read from resource"
in the VLC window.

Strangely, I've never encountered that error with VLC, even though I play all kinds of media with it. Does it look like the error message in this image? If so, then the UbuntuForums thread DVD playback errors, could not read from resource... may have the answer to your question.

Thanks. I got the image and went to the URL you gave, followed directions as best I could and now my "VLC" works, but my "Totem" gives me a permission error, but I can live with that.

Thanks, Thanks, Thanks

You are welcome, of course :D
Can I get a thumbs up?

How do I do that?

I just thought that if you found my post helpful you'd kindly click the blue thumb icon to thank me. Not a big deal if you don't want to, I just found out about it and thought it was fun.

Sorry, i just was not familar with the thumbsup symbel. I was use to a "Thanks" Item. so to sum this up. Your response was very helpful and I thank you for it.

pete perry