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Playing Encrypted DVDs in Ubuntu Linux

By iintens

We all know that the ‘big companies’ out there think throwing copy-protection on everything they sell is going to save the world from these evil hacking pirates that blow up vans and such…and copy protection on DVDs is just another way they like to fudge us over, With enough effort you can watch and rip copy-protected DVDs and it isn’t that hard…i don’t see why they bother really. Today I’m going to show you how to watch copy-protected DVDs on Ubuntu Linux (9.04) – luckily the people who make this codec sells ‘licences’ for around $50 a pop and you can grab one from..joking…you’re using Ubuntu so you obviously want your stuff free .

Ubuntu comes with a pretty nice movie/music player called Totem, it is based on the xine/GStreamer – since GStreamer is the default library used with the Totem application we will work with GStreamer for this example.

All of this will be done in Terminal, so open a terminal (Applications –> Accessories –> Terminal) and lets get started.

1. Installing the GStreamer library packages.

Enter this command in your Terminal window.


Now you can play Music, UNencrypted DVDs and DivX content, but that isn’t why we came here..is it now.

2. Installing libdvdcss2.

Enter this command in your Terminal window.


There we go, that’s all you need to do…now insert a DVD and let Totem do its magic.

If you liked this tutorial check out my blog! - It's filled with useful stuff.

This is all good but change topic subject

Ehh yea, that'd probably help.