Unable to play DVDs in Suse 10

[rik]

I created a DVD from some home movies that I have, then figured to play them on my Suse box. To my surprise (as I had not tried this before) is that Kaffeine or any Xine based player cannot play most DVDs. The explanation from the Suse website:

Situation
You want to use movie player applications under SuSE Linux.
Procedure
Movie player applications on SuSE Linux are unable to play a number of movie file formats, especially movie DVDs. Due to patented codecs and copy protection, SuSE is not allowed to deliver full-featured movie players with the distribution.

The xine lib package is especially affected. It is missing some plug-ins, so all xine-based players (like kaffeine, totem or noatun) are also unable to play these media.

Please do not write bug reports to these projects when you are unable to play files, because this is not a bug, but a legal requirement and neither the authors nor SuSE have a chance to fix this.

Unfortunately there is, to our knowledge, no legal DVD player for Linux currently sold by anyone.

References:
http://www.xinehq.de/

So what are my choices at this point other than just play them under Windows?


[update]

I booted into Xandros 3.0 which has the actual Xine player installed. It was able to play the DVD just fine. Anyone have a clue why then Suse (Novell) would have the odd, innacurate post on their website?

[rik]

Following the recommendations found here: http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/, I was able to at least get Xine installed and am using that instead of Kaffeine. I now have full DVD playback although it skips and I assume that has to do with the DMA settings for the drive. It is set to DMA33 which being an old system is all it's capable of, but it still skips. I can live with that for now.

[Curio]

You need libdvdcss which will then enable you to play DVDs just fine you will find it easier to install if you first get Kpackage installed (part of kdeutils I believe - just search through the packages for one that references kpackage) then download and open http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/rpm/libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1.i386.rpm with it. There is a page on the web somewhere with instructions about this and adding alternate installation sources - I will try to find it for you to save me typing it.

Wahoi that didn't take long here you are
http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/178/42/

[rik]

Great info there Curio. Thanks