Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: jerryjg
Originally posted by: drag
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: jerryjg
One problem though is that with LINSPIRE, there is no dvd player software included in the bundled retail package, and that is very important to me.
There are licensing issues that may be involved here. It depends on if you live in the US or a free country really.
Yes. we live in a very legalistic country and there are licensing and legal issues with CSS encryption on DVDs (which is pretty much standard).
CSS is a form of encryption commonly used to protect the contents of DVD movie cdroms. In order play dvd content a programmer is required to sign a licensing agreement with the 'DVD consortium' (sony, hitachi, time warner, etc etc) in order to obtain a universal key that he can then hide in his program and use that to decrypt 'protected' media.
Technically it's illegal to have any Linux distro that is capable of displaying CSS-protected dvds. It's illegal to tell people how to work around css, it's illegal to provide code or programs that are not licensed.
And since Linux and the majority of everything that is distributed by Linux distros is open source it's impossible for anybody to get licenses to get the CSS keys for legally distributed dvd players.
However CSS is very weak and was broken long ago. The code to do this was included in the Libdvdcss library and the (at the time) teenager responsable for breaking it was arrested for his actions.
Lately there was a judge ruling in the US that the restiction against libdvdcss was uninforcable due to the wide spread nature the code. It's been put on t-shirts, and some people have even had it tattoed on parts of their bodies.. (technically making it a felony to leave the US with their skin on).
So now it's a gray market thing. Responsable distros can't distribute the software by default because it could put their customers and users into legally tight spot unintentionally. However the functionality is generally supported in some fasion, you just have to obtain the actual libraries and sometimes players from third party sources.
A popular DVD playing program is Xine.. Check out their website, and do some searches ffor libdvdcss. It shouldn't be to hard to find a package you can on your distro.
Since then however there have been many released restricted formats.. WMV 9 or Apple's AAC for instance. Restricted by licensing, or encryption, or patents, or all of the above.
If your using a x86 computer it's very possible to play these formats due to many programs that have been adopted to use Windows *.dll codecs to play them. Typically aviable in the pre-package format for your disto. Often called win32-codecs or win32 or such.
Look first for a pre-packaged version of these codecs for your distro. If you can't find one then you can get a copy of them from
http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/codecs.html
They generally are put in your /usr/lib/win32/ directory. There are some docs about it aviable there and probably at Xine's website, too.
Also another very popular media player is VLC and is able to play pretty much all the media formats you can throw at it as long as it has the codecs.
I dont get it. In LINUX, Arent I just supposed to be able to play a dvd as long as there is a dvd playing program like XINE onboard? Are all those codes and codecs which i am supposed to find and install- arent they for just Burning dvd copies? That would be nice too, but as long as i can just PLAY the dvd, that would be okay for now. Thats why i am probably going to use MEPIS. MEPIS has XINE, if im not mistaken, and with that , and dvdr, you can at least watch movies, no? LINSPIRE does not have a dvd player like XINE at all. Its like 50.00 to buy it off their click and run "gallery". Now i DO have a DVD_RW (sony dual layer) , but i guess i wont be able to do anything like copy dvd's unless i install the codecs, however i did see some software that lets you do that for WINDOWS XP- i cannot recall where i saw it, but i need to find out cause i guess i will buy it for windows. For linux( i run a dual boot) I guess i will need to install the codes/codecs. Thanks again for the Rant.
Linspire probably has a license for their stuff. Either that or they don't give a crap and want to charge you for Xine + libdvdcss with a different name. Most linspire stuff is like that.. they take normally freely aviable software, rebadge it, then offer it thru their online service. Not all is like that, I think they offer cross over office or cedega, which you have to pay for anyways..
Basicly your paying Linspire for the hand-holding that they can provide for the end-user... which is fine in itself. That's why they say they want to be the AOL of Linux.
Some DVD's will work just fine, as long as they are not protected by CSS. Most are.protected.
The CSS protection doesn't care if your making a ripping a DVD or playing it... Becuase, of how computers work, you are actually reading data digitially off of the disk and into Memory in order display it on your computer screen.
It doesn't make a difference if your sending that data to a program like Xine to be displayed on the screen or to be copied to a file on your harddrive. It's the same digital data either way.
Even stand-alone dvd players like you buy at a store for watching movies have to deal with CSS protections on them.
Now music cdroms are a bit different, which is maybe what your thinking of. With music cdroms you can play the cdrom like a regular cdrom player and there is a analog cord that you can attatch to your sound card or onboard audio.
Another way to play cdroms is to read the music like data directly off of the disk like you would if your copying a file from a cdr. Like instead of using the analog cord they use the IDE cord and read it like any other data. People do this during ripping because it will provide them a 100% digital copy of the cdrom. If they used the sound card then it would introduce flaws and reduce the quality of the copy. But you don't have to be ripping to use it. I use it for playing because I like the better quality and I don't have a analog cord hooked up to anything (and have multiple sound cards anyways)
DVD players in your computer don't have anything hooked up to your video card or anything like that. There is no way for your dvd player to immediately play directly on your computer monitor like a music cdrom to your sound card. The digital media is read off of the dvdrom drive just like any other data and is then decoded by your computer's cpu and displayed on your monitor.
Due to the nature of video, video takes up MUCH more space then audio. So in order to get a movie to fit on a DVD they use Mpeg2 encoding to compress the file.
Similar to how you use mp3's to compress audio files.
So in order to play mpeg2 files (either from your harddrive or dvdrom, or even from 'digital cable') you have to decompress it to display it, and if it uses CSS encryption you have to break that to get access to the data first.
The CSS protections were something that was designed to limit piracy and was created by companies like Sony and Time Warner (and many many others)
You shouldn't have to worry about it much though. Most distros make it very easy to get this stuff, you just have to read the documentation to find out how.
In fact many just ignore such limits competely and provide you with the ability to do this stuff by default.
edit:
For instance here is a wiki page describing how to get support for DVD's and other stuff in Ubuntu. It's pretty straight forward.
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com//RestrictedFormats">https://wiki.ubuntu.com//RestrictedFormats</a>
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