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DVD & DVD Encryption

Getting commercial (encrypted) DVD's to play in Ubuntu or any Linux distribution for that matter out of the box will be difficult. It is difficult not because Linux is unable but because licensing laws prevent the playing of DVD encrypted or CSS encrypted software. All DVD movies are usually produced with CSS encryption which is why they are difficult or impossible to play without suitable decryption software. Well Linux has such decryption software and it is available under Ubuntu and can be downloaded and installed using "apt-get" or "synaptic-package-manager". It may be necessary to make available other repositories, however the simplest method is usually the best.

The problem.

We found that once the appropriate libraries were installed, Xine a DVD player, would come up with an error:

xine: malformed mrl for >dvd:///dev/hdb

(your error message may vary)

The Internet is peppered with this error message, but little appears to be written on how to overcome the problem, and what is written bellow is only one such possible solution.

The Solution.

After much research (and cursing) the solution proved to be remarkably simple.

Go into apt-get or synaptic and install all the necessary files listed and any dependencies required:

#> apt-get update
#> apt-get upgrade
#> sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mpegdemux gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
#> sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
#> sudo wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
#> sudo apt-get update
#> sudo apt-get upgrade
#> sudo apt-get install libdvdread3 xine-ui libxine1-ffmpeg debhelper fakeroot build-essential
#> cd /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3
#> sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

Additional downloads may result in the execution of this script, allow to proceed as necessary.

We now have installed most of the libraries we are likely to need to play video content all that is but for one exception these being the w32/w64 codecs, obviously we wouldn't need 32bit libraries for 64bit Pc's and laptops, nor would we need 64bit libraries for 32bit machines. Examples installations for each contingent are given below:

Win 32 codecs library installation This library is necessary when playing files ending with the extension of "filename.wma" or "filename.wmv" this type of library would only be needed for 32bit Operating System installation.

#> sudo apt-get install w32codecs


Win 64 codecs library installation This library is necessary when playing files ending with the extension of "filename.wma" or "filename.wmv" this type of library would only be needed for 64bit Operating System installation.

#> sudo apt-get install w64codecs


xine-ui

Xine would in our view be the better interface for playing DVDs, why fundermentally it is the closest functioning package to that of a standard "DVD Player box", with similar and familiar controls, chances are you can use "Totem", "Kaffine" plus many others with good effect, yes they work and to some extent very well, these applications do almost as much as Xine, but almost is not quite as good as all.

With Xine you can skip, fast fwd, block jump or slide the slider to any single position for immediate playback from any given previous slider position. Follow the installation above and on certain DVDs with dual language or multiple language support you can alter the default language to any given language supported by the DVD even "English".