You would be forgiven for thinking that playing a DVD under Debian is going to be easy but I'm afraid to say you would be wrong. The problem is not that there aren't media players. The problem isn't that there aren't codecs. The problem is that you need a CSS decoder (DeCSS) to descramble the content. This wouldn't necessarly be a problem, the CSS algorithum is well known, the problem is that it is in a bit of a legal battle ground. To cut a long story short it was meant to be secret but it's about the worst kept secret in the world. There have been numerous implimentations but no one really knows if any of them are legal. Implimentations are probably illegal in the US because of the DMCA and probalby now in Europe too because of our version of the DMCA (EMCA or something). Anyway that isn't getting you watching DVD's for free is it. If you choose to follow these instructions you do so at your own risk - you have been warned! :o)

What You Need

Basically what you need is a media player (Kaffine is nice i fyou run KDE - it's a wrapper round Xine) and the DeCSS code (libdvdcss2). Once you have those two it should just work. Kaffine you can get from the normal Debian mirrors. DeCSS you can get by adding one of the repositories below to your sources list.

WARNING

The repositories listed are non-standard. They will likely come and go over time. More importantly there is nothing stopping the owner placing a package in the repository that will replace another on your system without you necessarly noticing. The problem is simple: apt will, by defualt, go for the latest version of a package. Lets say for instance you have version 1.3 of package fooUtils on your machine installed from the Debian archive. If the new repository you add has a custom built fooUtils with added extra bits and is marked as version 1.4 apt will install that instead. That's not a problem if it works fine but what if there is a major bug or worse it's not really fooUtils but actually a root kit. The problem is that it's really hard / impossible to tell where a package is coming from when you do an upgrade.

How you can partially protect yourself

Install only the bare minimum from the non-standard repository for a start. There is then less chance of replacing something accidently. Always review changes and make sure you question why something is being replaced. A good way of finding out what a non-standard repository wants to replace is to comment out that respository run and update and upgrade. Then uncomment the respository and update again. Normally there shouldn't be anything marked for upgrade. Now install whatever you want from the non-standard repository. Since you have just done an update from the normal repositories pretty much anything the install want's to add must be coming from the non-standard repository (this isn't 100% because you might need to satisfy dependencies from the standard repositories but you will have to check that by hand by looking to see if the non-standard repository contains the dependencies).

Repositories Containing DeCSS (libdvdcss2)

Unstable

• deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sid main

Testing

Note: Over time the name of the testing distribution changes. Etch is the current name for the testing release as of 24/11/2005

• deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ etch main

Stable

Note: Over time the name of the stable distribution changes. Sarge is the current name for the stable release as of 24/11/2005

• deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main