Originally posted by: yukichigai
From what I can find in the documentation, the
K-lite Codec Pack comes with a DVD decoder, courtesy of Cyberlink. The documentation also indicates that
Media Player Classic has a built-in DVD decoder. Both of these are free, and I've not heard anything about them being illegal. (
K-lite, maybe, but Media Player Classic doesn't seem very "warez" to me)
EDIT: Oh yeah, and a quick google search found me
this.
That codec pack is distributing Cyberlink's DVD decoder. I'm pretty sure this is not allowed to be freely distributed, although I suppose it is possible they somehow got permission from Cyberlink. That page doesn't say. Like I said, AFAIK there's a royalty fee per license of anything that has the DVD Consortium's blessing to decrypt/play DVDs.
MPC indicates it has an MPEG2 decoder included, but not one that will play encrypted DVDs (which is most commercial DVDs). Of course, you can use DeCSS to strip the encryption, but this is not exactly something the MPAA would be real happy about (although whether or not this should be illegal under fair use laws is still up for debate). If it will play encrypted DVDs without any further software or a full DVD decoder installed, that's news to me.
VLC's
features page has this note next to the DVD playing feature:
[1] DVD decryption is done through the libdvdcss library.
ie, it only plays unencrypted DVDs without that library installed. It looks like it includes that library with the package, though, so it will probably work -- but again, the legal status of anything like this is unclear.