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Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

DVD Playback on Ubuntu Gutsy

This afternoon, while doing nothing in particular, I decided to listen to one of my Jools Holland DVDs. I popped the DVD into my laptop and started Totem, only for Totem to spit out an error message. The error message told me that I didn't have the correct plugin to handle DVD playback and pointed me in the direction of this page: http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/#codecs

I checked my system to make sure I had the listed plugins and found that I already had them. I then realised that I hadn't actually tried to playback a DVD since upgrading Ubuntu from Feisty to Gutsy. I guess something has changed since the upgrade as DVD playback now requires a little hack. For future reference here is what I did to enable DVD playback on my system:

1. Open a terminal and install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install totem-xine libxine1-ffmpeg libdvdread3

2. Issue the follow command to download and enable to libdvdcss2:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

The output from the command should look similar to this:

corenominal@kermit:~$ sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
--18:20:22--  http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/deb/libdvdcss2_1.2.5-1_i386.deb
           => `/tmp/dvdcss-Cc6164/libdvdcss.deb'
Resolving www.dtek.chalmers.se... 129.16.30.198
Connecting to www.dtek.chalmers.se|129.16.30.198|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 25,178 (25K) [text/plain]

100%[====================================>] 25,178        33.15K/s             

18:20:23 (33.05 KB/s) - `/tmp/dvdcss-Cc6164/libdvdcss.deb' saved [25178/25178]

Selecting previously deselected package libdvdcss2.
(Reading database ... 62172 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libdvdcss2 (from .../dvdcss-Cc6164/libdvdcss.deb) ...
Setting up libdvdcss2 (1.2.5-1) ...

Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
corenominal@kermit:~$

Now, I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell the libdvdcss package is required for DVD decryption. And as I understand it, the reason that Ubuntu can't play DVDs out-of-the-box is due to legal restrictions, although I'm not sure those restrictions apply here in the UK. Anyhow, geography aside, it begs the question, should DVD playback require this much effort?

Tagged with: ubuntu

6 Responses to “DVD Playback on Ubuntu Gutsy”

Maxo wrote, Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

I great thing about a fresh install of Gutsy, is that when you try to play DVDs it will simply offer you a one or two click solution that automatically downloads the codecs.
Philip wrote, Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

@Maxo: But it didn't, at least not for the DVD. It did for various other file formats, mp3, wmv etc, but not for DVD playback. And it wasn't an isolated case, I had to perform the same procedure on three different machines.
Sokraates wrote, Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

The application handling installation of codecs (Restricted Manager?) does not yet support addition of DVD-playback or video-codecs. At least the addition of video-codecs should be supported in Hardy.

The lack of support for some formats or the lack of easy installation is annoying, but from a legal point of view it's better to leave them out. Actually, even providing easy access could be considered illegal but that's a compromise a modern desktop system has to make.

Whether supplying codecs or easy access to them is in fact illegal, is a completely different story.
Peter Gasston wrote, Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

When you choose your country of residence in the setup, Ubuntu should install the codecs if legal to do so, or let you know if not.
treb0r wrote, Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Philip,

It's much better to simply add:

http://packages.medibuntu.org/ gutsy free non-free

as a repository - then everything you need is installable by apt/synaptic.

treb0r
leprof wrote, Saturday, January 26th, 2008

Many thanks for this! The funny thing is that in the past, I stuck in a DVD and Ubuntu found and installed the codecs. When I did a clean install on a new PC, I had the same problem as you despite it insisting everything was there.

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DVD Playback on Ubuntu Gutsy

6 Responses to “DVD Playback on Ubuntu Gutsy”

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