I have just searched around the forums for an answer, but haven't found something definitive. I have installed Mandriva Powerpack 2K7 and cannot play movies on it. LinDVD works for 10 minutes, then stops playing. Don't know if its a trial version, broken program or what; but that's the situation.

I've searched online and found that mplayer, xvid codec, and various other programs are available to play DVDs, but I need to know which one works. Xvid only works on SuSE and Debian, so I need to know how to make LinDVD play continuously, any advice on that?

I'm going to test xvid on SuSE, to see how it performs. I'll install 10.2 on my other machine and try it.

Have you tried playing a dvd with Xine or Kaffiene? To play copy protected dvds you need to have libdvdcss installed.

I have never used XviD or LinDVD. I have used Xine (my prefered choice) and MPlayer, both of which work well, and one of which would surely run on your system (I hope -- am I wrong?) but both of them need 'libdvdcss' as mentioned by the above poster, in order to decrypt protected DVD's.

However, I would like to think that an encrypted DVD would either PLAY, or NOT PLAY, but nothing in between, if libdvdcss were the exact problem. Atleast, that's been my experience. Generally when a movie doesn't play for me, or plays and then quits, it has been due to either a bad disc, a cheap disc (like made in China and got from Walmart) or a dirty DVD player.

Sorry I can't be more helpful...

Xvid is only a codec, used for playing certain content like .mp4 encoded vids. Does the problem you're having happen with all your dvds? Although you may not need them, I would also suggest you add the win32codec pack.

use xine or linux mplayer, both have gui.

As a matter of fact, I have tried Kaffiene. What happens is that it plays the FBI Warning, and then gives me some error message about not being able to play the file (Minority Report). Other movies play the production company logo - Paramount, Time Warner, etc - but when stops after that. I guess I need to make sure I have libdvdcss installed. Thanks guys, I'll let you know how it goes...

If you get to the logo then I would imagine that libdvdcss is already installed and working since the css handshake takes place before the dvd is even accessed (someone correct me if I'm wrong). I would try to install xine or mplayer. Find a package for your distro.