One of the first things someone is going to do when they first install Linux is try to play a DVD. Watching DVD’s in Linux is disabled in most distributions by default because of legal issues. Linux is offered for free, and your supposed to pay for the rights to play DVD’s. In my opinion if you bought the DVD drive, and the DVD movie, you’re good to go so I’m going to tell you how to get around this anyways.

There are a few steps involved in getting DVD playback working in Linux. The first is to download Mplayer, one of the best movie ay available for Linux. There are many movie players you could download and try for DVD playback but I could only get Mplayer to play DVD’s. After installing Mpayer you’ll need the DVD decryption library called libdvdcc. Using your software installer you can install this library. If you can’t find libdvdcc, install libdvdread3 which also contains libdvdcc.

Once the libraries are installed you’ll have to run a script from the command line. Open up a terminal and run the following command, make sure your software installer is not opened when you do this.

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

If the script could not be found try this:
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

After this is done I recommend rebooting your computer. You should now be good to go for watching DVD’s. While you’re at it, you may want to install all the gstreamer modules and ffmpeg libraries so that you can play other formats as well. I also recommend installing the programs and libraries listed below to give better support for video playback.

* rec: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer

* rec: gstreamer0.10-pitfdll [i386]
GStreamer plugin for using MS Windows binary codecs

* rec: gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
GStreamer plugins from the “bad” set

*rec: gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
GStreamer plugins from the “bad” set (Multiverse Variant)

*rec: gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
GStreamer plugins from the “ugly” set

*rec: gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
GStreamer plugins from the “ugly” set (Multiverse Variant)

*rec: libdvdread3
library for reading DVDs

*rec: liblame0
LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder

About libdvd read:
libdvdread provides a simple foundation for reading DVD video disks. It provides the functionality that is required to access many DVDs. It parses IFO files, reads NAV-blocks, and performs CSS authentication and descrambling.
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About Mplayer:
MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4, DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MMX/SSE(2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs. It has basic VCD/DVD playback functionality, including DVD subtitles, but supports many text-based subtitle formats too. For video output, nearly every existing interface is supported. It’s also able to convert any supported files to raw/divx/mpeg4 AVI (pcm/mp3 audio), and even video grabbing from V4L devices.
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