Were you shocked as well when you found out that your Ubuntu (in my case Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10) wouldn’t playback DVD’s that you’ve LEGALLY purchased in shops or through Amazon? That ain’t fair, I’ve paid a good amount of money for my DVD collection and I should not be able to play them on my computer? The reason Ubuntu or probably any other Linux distribution doesn’t ship with an out-of-the-box dvd playback feature is that manufacturers of proprietary Software (e.g WinDVD, PowerDVD, etc..) pay money to ship these CSS (Content Scrambling System codecs which is a Digital Rights Management scheme which is used on almost all commercially produced DVD-Video discs. However at the end of the day, the costumer (we) pay for these DVD-player software, when we buy a DVD/CD Burner or a new graphics card.

This doesn’t apply for Linux or Open Source User – OpenSource Tools as the VLC Player or Kaffeine doesn’t pay these fees to support CSS, because VLC and Kaffeine are non-profit open source programs. There’s no money to gain by “selling” VLC or Kaffeine, therefore its users (we) don’t pay any money to be legally allowed to view our legally purchased DVD’s.

However, last night I finally found a work-around to view my favourite DVD:

Open a Konsole/Terminal and enter the following:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

Before doing that make sure you’ve installed the libdvdread3 library on your computer – if not you might get an error that this file doesn’t exist.

Feisty Fawn users should search for “install-css.sh” on their computer (because allegedly it has a different path) – apparently it can be found in

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh

This basically downloads and installs the libdvdcss2 library, that should enable you to watch your copyright protected DVDs.

You can now enjoy your favourite DVDs – enjoy!