I'm trying to watch a DVD with Kaffeine player (my video player of choice) and it is encoded and I can't remember how to install the mplayer codecs for it...can anyone give me a list of steps to do so I can watch my DVD's again?

THANKS!
djljjm

Kaffeine uses the "xine" media player engine, so you can search for documentation on getting xine to work. Anything the makes xine work will make Kaffeine work!

To get DVD playback working, you need libcssdecode (or something like that). I use Debian based systems; ages ago I found and downloaded a .deb package for libcssdecode, so all I do with a new system is type in "sudo dpkg -i libcssblahblah". It sets things up so both mplayer and xine can use it. I don't remember where I originally found this file; in any case it only works for Debian based systems.

To get mplayer's excellent codecs for other video file formats working, you need to download the "essentials" pack from mplayer's homepage. Then, as root your create a directory /usr/lib/win32 and unpack the contents of mplayer's essentials pack to that directory. Both mplayer and xine will find the codecs in that directory by default.

That's it! With those two steps, you'll be able to play anything and everything that's worth playing!

Oh, you may have to or want to upgrade to the latest version of libxine. This gives you the most up-to-date xine media player engine, which will generally be more efficient and support more formats and stuff.

To get many of the codecs to work with Xine/Kaffine go here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html and download the "essential codecs" package.

Then as root (or some other super user)
That will allow you to play almost any video format known including Windows Media, RealPlayer, Divix, and Quicktime.


Have fun!

I tried unpacking the file to the /usr/lib/win32 directory (which worked) but that didn't get the DVD to work at all...any other suggestions?

To play encrypted DVD's you need libdvdcss. You can also get it from the xine nightly builds page.