On 27/02/2015 06:29, jd1008 wrote:
Rented a DVD movie (the 3rd in the series Atlas Shrugged). It would not play with any media player (such as smplayer, vlc, Dragon Player, xine, totem, ... etc)
No errors in /var/log/messages.
I told the vendor, and they stuck it into a machine the "tests" it for playability. It took 5 seconds and it declared it playable :) :) Whatever .... The surface seemed OK on visual inspection. So, what could have gone wrong? Anyone have this problem?
I don't know about that particular DVD, but many commercial DVDs are encrypted. [1] While hardware players will decrypt out of the box, when playing on a computer you may need to install a specific decrypting library. As far as I know, on linux the only possibility is to install the libdvdcss library [2] which cannot be distributed as its legality is in a gray area (i.e. it may be illegal in certain countries).
What I usually do is to compile it by hand (it's not too hard) installe it system-wide and players (esp. VLC) seem to pick it up automatically (VLC forom my experience seems the best in playing commercial DVDs).
A couple of specific fedora-related pages in [3] and [4]
Hope this helps. Lorenzo.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System [2] http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html [3] http://studyhat.blogspot.it/2014/12/fedora-21-post-installation-guide.html [4] http://geekface.ca/fedora/?q=installing (scroll to end of page)