HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

This article provides for setting up various Linux media players to view DVD’s
including support for CSS protection decryption , which is required practically with every commercial DVD movie. Many distributions dont offer this readily as there are “legal problems” with decryption systems for Linux - read my related post about false claims that made LinuxDVD “illegal” in Finland and why you really should ignore that legal crap as you have paid for your DVD and the lies of “intellectual property rights” “protectors” cant stop you from viewing legal DVD’s on our loved true Operating System.

MPlayer
MPlayer, one of the best and feature richest media players comes with it’s own built-in dvdread library that readily supports DVD descrambling. I don’t know yet which distributions provide MPlayer package with this feature. Some may provide a version compiled to use alternative library with no support for descrambling so you may have to compile it from source code.
Big downside of MPLayer is that it has no support for DVD menus - only for playing video chapters.
Supported systems:

• Any - Compiling from source code

Ogle with dvdcss-library
Ogle is a great choise: It’s a DVD player only, adverticing itself as “The first opensource DVD player to support DVD menus ” - and it does good!
Ogle needs libdvdcss-library to descramble DVD content and that is not available from official software repositories on every distribution - eg. Debian Etch repositories provide Ogle with compiled-in support for using libdvdcss (if it’s available ). Luckily this library is available from web as binary .deb-files for debian based and as .rpm for Red Hat, Fedora & other RPM based distributions - and also as source tarball for manually compiling under any Linux (and propably many *nix) systems if all else fails.
Supported systems:

• Debian Etch

MPlayer (built-in decryption, no DVD menus)

Compiling from source

I never tried if versions available from official repositories of my distribution (Debian Etch on the computer I use for multimedia) have MPlayer with DVD CSS encryption support compiled in.

However the source code of mplayer does indeed has this support readily available, so if everything else fails you can simply go and domnload MPlayer source code from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ , extrat the package and follow the instructions inside it. Provided that you have all build tools, library and development packages installed you should not need to do more than run following commands in the mplayer source directory:

./configure

If anything is missing you will get failure notice after running ./configure , in which case you should figure out how to install the missing tool or library on your distribution. After running it without errors you should run following commands:

make

and finally as root:

make install

I should recommend that you look a bit deeper into configuration options of mplayer before running the first command - for example without “–enable-gui” parameter you wont get the GUI version (gmplayer).

Now, watching the DVD is simply matter of running:

mplayer dvd://

If that results in errors of any kind please do read the good manual at mplayer homepage. If desperate you can leave your questions as comment from bottom of this article and I will TRY to find time to help you - however I wont guarantee anything.

Ogle (support for decryption & DVD menus)

Debian Etch

Ogle offers even better solution as it has a good support for DVD menus, which you will propably want. It has also support for using libdvdcss, if installed, for decrypting the so called “copy protection”. However it does not have that support built in and many people dont know where to get libdvdcss - I do.

First install Ogle. Under debian Etch it is as simple as running (with root priviledges) the command:

apt-get install ogle

Secondly, libdvdcss is available at: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/libdvdcss/ . It is available as RPM, DEB and source code - go get it and install it. Under debian based distributions (like Ubuntu) installing currently latest version (1.2.9) is as simple as downloading file libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb and installing it running the following command with root priviledges:

dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb
…or on Ubuntu you would propably be running: sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb

On RPM based systems the equal woud be running (as root):

rpm -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.rpm

For other disributions you might have to campile from sources.

After this ogle should automatically be using libdvdcss library with encrypted DVD’s. At optimal case you can run it simpy with (with GUI support):

ogle -u gui

Author is a 29 years old linux zealot and hacker from Finland.