What's with this new encryption companies are pushing on the dvd's? Now they tell us with which software we have to see OUR dvd? I recently bought Iron Maiden's "The Early Days" dvd and a few weeks ago a friend of mine gifted me the Star Wars trilogy. Both of them can't play in Linux. Looking into posts about linux and the starwars dvd I read about some new encryption or something. Trying to play the dvd by by-passing the first chapters as in something like: xine dvd://1:1 didn't help (xine complained it didn't understand the dvd protocol). If I push the dvd button on the interface though I can watch all myolder dvd's. Can anyone help/know anything more on this?

Ok, BIG error. I just realized that I hadn't installed libdvdcss, just installed and now everything works fine. Sorry about the hastle everyone. For those having similar problems try starting xine from command line and start playing a dvd, if you see that there's no dvd encryption support (check the command line) install libdvdcss.
I was tricked because I had a French dvd that wasn't encrpyted, so I thought everything was installed. Hoorey for the French for not encrypting their dvds (Le Gendarme de St. Tropez )
Sorry about the hastle again.

I'm having the same problem you were originally having (id est, encrypted DVDs were not playing for me). I originally installed the Slackware package of libdvdcss (1.2.8), ran ldconfig, and my DVDs wouldn't play. I removed the package and compiled from source; that didn't work either.

I assumed that it was a problem with a new encryption method until I read this thread. Now I'm afraid that there is no hope for me. :P

I wouldn't give up yet.

I simply compiled everything related to xine from the source tarballs; libdvdcss, libdvdnav, libdvdread (which you may not need), xine-lib and xine-ui. I can watch the encrypted DVD's with it just fine. The exact tarball names are:

libdvdcss-1.2.8.tar.gz
libdvdnav-0.1.3.tar.gz
libdvdread-0.9.3.tar.gz
xine-lib-1-rc3.tar.gz
xine-ui-0.9.22.tar.gz

No such luck for me!

just a quick FYI if you are using debian, then libdvdcss-1.2.8.tar.gz is apt-get install libdvdcss2. without the 2 at the end you will get a return as no such package.

both xine and kaffeine work great if you have the win32 and dvdcss codec pack installed.