how to get totem-gstreamer to play dvds
 

Wouldn't that be nice.

However - I cannot find any way of doing this.
If anyone knows better - pleasepleaseplease tell me. I'll give you an affero for it.

In FC4 and Ubuntu 5.04 I get "no url handler for dvd://" error.
What does this mean?

Installing libdvdcss2 just makes totem hang on a black screen.

Googling, and I find that everyone, and I do mean everyone, installs totem xine. And that does the trick. (But, it seems, libdvdcss2 must be installed first if you want to play encrypted dvds.)

The only reason I can think of for prefferring gstreamer to xine in the distros is that perhaps the distro folk want people to develope a dvd plugin for it - y'know: encourage development. Or maybe it has a more open licence?

Comments?

I remember having this annoyance while testing Ubuntu. I solved it by removing the Totem package that came on disk and also removing Totem-gstreamer. I then installed Totem and Totem-xine packages from apt (debian etch repository packages). :p

Yes - this is what everyon does.

The ubuntu guide seems to think you can get dvds playing in totem gstreamer if you install all the plugins, the codecs, and libdvdcss.

OTOH: the same guide then goes on to talk about installing xine-ui and mplayer ...

Anyway - I have done what everyone else has done for my ubuntu laptop - installed totem-xine, all the codecs, xine-ui and mplayer for good measure ... all following the uuntu guide.

Now - if I try to play a dvd, the player (any player) hangs with a black screen. It seems to be libdvdcss2 that is doing it - since, after removing it, dvds stop playing at the menue and I get an error message telling me I need libdvdcss2 ... <sigh> but I don't even get that far if I install it.

Now: the mirrormax apt backports repo returns "cannot stat" errors ... what is it with that?

Hmmm...
I don't remember using Ubuntu repositories though. Always used apt with debian-etch sources

The mirrormax and other repo troubles seem to stem from repos changing around. New repos up, but still same troubles.

This is not just totem - also mplayer and xine-ui have been used.

However - I have wondered if I may have something slightly broken in my installation ... have installed ubuntu-breezy last night. Havn't updated the packages yet.