Watchin’ DVDs

Watching a DVD in Linux is a bit of a legal quagmire if you live in the United States. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other issues make it tricky for any open source program to navigate the licensing maze when it comes to movies that are encoded or protected in various fashions. However, not all DVDs have such countermeasures enabled: There are DVDs that Americans can watch under Linux with no trouble. (Note that I say watch, and not copy or pirate.)

For more on the DMCA and the problems it causes, see anti-dmca.org.

To watch a DVD in Fedora, you can use our friend Totem. However, as you saw when trying to view video files, the version of Totem that comes with Fedora is stripped-down in terms of formats it can support — again, this is a legal issue more than anything else. Often it is possible to replace this version with the full one by uninstalling Totem, adding software repositories that contain multimedia tools, and then installing the full version of Totem from the repositories (all these skills are discussed in Chapter 16). This is the solution I recommend for watching DVDs.

The Unofficial Fedora FAQ Web site (www.fedorafaq.org) provides some more tips on ways to view DVDs on your Fedora computer.

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