problem playing video DVD

[Lorenzo Sutton]

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)