Why can't I just play DVDs in Linux?

David M Williams
Sunday, 02 August 2009 16:12

Business IT - Technology

At the end of the last millennium three individuals (two of whom are still anonymous) desired to watch their legally-purchased DVDs in Linux. They stumbled on a flaw in a contemporary Windows’ MPEG decoder and DVD player called Xing and obtained its CSS decryption key.

The trio used their mathematical abilities to generate the algorithm and wrote a program called DeCSS to develop a DVD ripper, initially for Windows.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) found out and various court cases took place. Ultimately the individuals were not prosecuted but United States federal law prohibits any U.S. server from hosting the DeCSS algorithm.

This directly affects all Linux distributions that are manufactured in the United States. Of course, there is another factor which precludes the algorithm being included, even for distros built elsewhere – specifically, that it is not available under a completely free license and thus goes against the Linux spirit and GNU license.

This isn’t always the case; you will find Linux distributions which play non-free media straight after installation but in general you cannot count on any individual Linux system having this capability without manual steps.

Search for libdvdcss2 and libdvdread4 in your package manager. Mark both of these for installation. Execute the command
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

While at it, you may also wish to install the VLC media player which you can also find within your package manager.

That’s it; all will now be working. It would be nice if Linux just played movies without extra steps required but at least the reasons can be understood. It’s not simply because the operating system is deficient but because it is built on a specific philosophy.

The Nintendo Wii has absolutely nothing to do with Linux, and you can see that the reason it does not play DVD movies adds credibility to Linux in this regard.

Let’s have some reader feedback: what else doesn’t work in Linux right after a clean installation that you might expect to do in Microsoft Windows straight away?