GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Linux Command Line Tools Disks Documentation DVD Emacs Email Evolution Files File Hosting Services File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks FreedomBox Fonts Ghemical GIMP Git Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting IOT Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan MATE Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Screens Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Swap Teradata Data Warehouse Themes TV Unity USB Version Control Video Video Processing Virtualization Voice over IP Web Sites and Beyond WebCam Web Sites using WordPress Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

DVD and Video Viewing

Debian Packages: https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=w32codecsw32codecs

All forms of video viewing are supported by Linux. You can view AVI, DVD, SVCD, and many more codecs (video encodings). The https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=w32codecsw32codecs package allows viewing of many MS Windows video codecs.

There at least five DVD players available for Debian: https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=totemtotem (the default Gnome DVD player), https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=gxinegxine, https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=xinexine, https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=mplayermplayer, https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=ogleogle, and https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keywords=vlcvlc. gxine, whilst not the default, is a good choice for a DVD viewer for Gnome. Under Ubuntu totem will seek to install packages for any codecs that are not installed.

There is considerable uncertainty in the legal situation with respect to the position of the US movie studios. Certainly, illegal copying of DVDs can not be condoned, but unfortunately the CSS copy protection scheme (used on DVDs) has become a view restriction scheme, thereby, according to many, restricting freedom of speech. Thus the required library to read many commercial DVDs needs to be obtained separately.

  # sh /usr/share/doc/libdvdread2/examples/install-css.sh

To allow users access be sure they are in group cdrom.

Some packages expect the DVD device to be called /dev/dvd. If it does not exist, and your DVD device is /dev/hdc, for example, then simply:

  # ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd

Subsections

• Xine
• Ogle