FC5 Totem and DVD

[Styma, Robert E (Robert)]

> antonio montagnani wrote:
> > When I use Totem and I want to play a DVD a get the message 
> that it is
> > impossible to reproduce this kind of file as an appropriate 
> plugin is
> > missing.
> > 
> > What am I missing (and why it is not loaded as standard, 
> playing a DVD
> > seems to me a standard operation also for a non-geek-user??)
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems
> 
> See "DVD Playback"
> 
> Paul.

This issue and it's colleagues dealing with forbidden items
comes up on a regular basis.  All the issues can be overcome with
some digging.  I have waded through much of this myself although
as maintenance is applied to the machine, much of the dvd handling
seems to degrade with time.

One possibility is to have the people who understand this well generate
a concise list of livna and other repository packages needed to play 
the commonly available formats.  A perl script could then be written
to scan the output of rpm -qa and assemble the yum commands.

For example:
If you have xmms,  you need xmms-mp3 from livna
If you have xine, you need xine\* and libdvd\*
If you have mplayer, you need the mpeg2dec and mpg123 and the 'essential codecs' package.
If you have firefox you need the sun java rpm (need a script to find it)
                    you need the mplayer plugin (script required)
                    you need the flashplayer plugin (script required)
                    etc.
(I realize I do not have all the dependencies correct and there is overlap
 between dependencies.)

As Linux makes inroads into the end user market, a simple way to make Linux do
what a Windows box will do out of the box would be nice.  This would have to be
done by people other than the GPL purists and it would probably be wise to do
this outside the United States.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Bob Styma