WOW!! I'm completely surprised. I thought it would be cool to watch DVD's on my LinuxBox, so I geared myself up for another big project.

I have an old Compaq DVD Rom from like '97 or so. I could never get it to work in windowsXP. So, I cleared my evening in order to experiment with RH9. After compiling mplayer for the most part of a wknd a while back, I wasn't really looking forward to doing it again. So, I slapped in the DVD-ROM, made a symlink to /dev/dvd, slid in "The Wall", pushed DVD on mplayer and OMG!! it played!! I swear it was that easy. No codec issues, no re-compiling, nothing. I couldn't believe it. I'm so dag-gone happy!

This is the first of what will hopefully be many things that I can do in Linux that I can't do in windows. I reallly want to thank you guys. Especially those of you who spend your free time in here to help turn the clue-less newb into a zombie fraggin', DVD watchin' penguin junkie!! I LOVE IT!!!

congrats. i wish i had a dvd for my linbox

I installed xine on my system and can watch dvd's with that. It is awesome! I want to try and install mplayer next to see which is better.

I had the same experience about a week ago...physically install the dvd-rom, bootup, ln -s /dev/hdd /dev/dvd, then open in mplayer. It really is that easy.

And this is from a product which states on the box "this device was designed for Windows Xp" ha ha ha

Linux rules.

The botton line is that Mplayer rocks!!!!!!!

For those of us who don't use console, one can type in 'gmplayer' and you get the graphical version of MPlayer and you can configure your dvd and your symlinks via the graphical user interface. Easy as 1-2-9999999