Getting DVD on Linux Laptop to play
 

I am a Linux newbie and am still just learning the language. I have CentOS loaded on my Linux laptop that has a CD/DVD READ/WRITE drive. I can't get the machine to play a DVD(music cd's are fine)and have been advised that I may need to have Mplayer or 'zine' as well as a few dvd 'libraries' loaded to make this work. OK! Now where or how do I find and install Mplayer, where and how do I find and install these libraries and how do I tell the machine that all of this is fine and dandy and that it can now play the DVD's???

Thanks in advance, for your patience and advice.

xine maybe easiest to install. Before searching for it on www.sourceforge.net try typing xine & at the shell prompt. Centos may have it installed already.

Mplayer should play DVD's just fine, with the proper codecs installed. Although I find I do prefer Xine or Totem. I suspect you are missing the libdvdcss package that allows encrypted DVD's to be played.

You don't say what version of CentOS you have, so I'll just assume CentOS 4....

First, just on a whim.. open a terminal and as root...

yum install libdvdcss

If one of your enabled repos has the libdvdcss package it should download and install. If it appears it downloads and installs, let it finish, and open up Mplayer, and try to play a DVD.

If that doesn't work, try the link below. It has some more detailed steps on enabling additional repositories, and installing libdvdcss(look under Installing Mplayer and plugins)

http://soundlinuxtraining.com/portal...p?id=2330#ch55

IGF

Just to add that MPlayer is very limited as a DVD player, for instance it doesn't support DVD menus. Xine-based players are far better for DVDs.

I don't usually use MPlayer for DVD's, but I just fired one up and you're 100% correct. Kinda surprising, I wonder why they left out this feature? I think if you go to their homepage, you an probably download menu support, as I seem to remember reading that somewhere...

Thanks for the heads up...

IGF

Thanks all,
Tried the xine & command and got message 'command not found'
Tried yum install libdvdcss and got error message 'could not find valid baseurl' Am now trying to download xine software from sourceforge.
Oh yes my Centos is version 4.4.

I try to do yum install libdvdcss and I get:


I assume that means I need a different repository?

Any idea which one please?

I am using CentOS 5.

I downloaded

libxine
xine-ui
libdvdcss
w32codec

from Sourceforge and installed these.

Now I have Xine, which plays my DVDs. :)