A few years ago, DVD's were problematical on Linux. "Protected" by encryption (that didn't really protect anything), DVD's could only be played with obscure hacker-crafted software, even the possession of which was of questionable legality. But that was then - and this is now.
DVD-playing software is actually easily obtainable, easily installable and very fully functional.
Ogle displays a setup menu from a test/demo DVD
One of the most popular DVD-player programs is Ogle, which is available from http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/
1. Check that your audio is set up correctly. On Red Hat, run sndconfig or start the Sound Card Configuration Tool (Main Menu -> System Settings -> Soundcard Detection. If ogle complains about not being able to open /dev/dsp, this is the first thing to check.
2. Download the required files: libdvdcss, libdvdread, ogle, and optionally ogle_gui. Select the appropriate ogle RPM for your sound setup: for a basic Red Hat setup, you should choose ogle-0.9.1-ogle1.i586.rpm, but if you are using Alsa sound modules, you should use ogle-0.9.1-ogle1alsa.i586.rpm (or obviously, later versions if available).
3. As root, change to the directory where you saved the files, and issue the command
rpm -ivh libdvdcss-1.2.6-fr2.i386.rpm libdvdread-0.9.4-ogle1.i386.rpm ogle-0.9.1-ogle1.i586.rpm
4. If your Linux installation did not detect you had a DVD drive, rather than a CD-ROM drive, you will need to create a symlink to the correct device. First, check which device is your DVD drive:
[root@freya2 ogle]# ls -l /dev/cdrom lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Aug 27 2001 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc [root@freya2 ogle]# and then create the symlink [root@freya2 ogle]# ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd 5. That's it! Now, as a user, run Ogle: [les@freya2 les]$ ogle You will see a lot of messages as Ogle runs, reporting the frame rate, etc. To suppress those, run it with stdout and stderr redirected to /dev/null: [les@freya2 les]$ ogle > /dev/null 2>&1 & Now you should get your command prompt back. IIf playback pauses every few seconds, it means that the Linux kernel has not enabled DMA on your drive. You can turn it on with the hdparm command: hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc You could also use the kernel argument "ide=dma" on the boot command line in /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/grub.conf. Red Hat 9 and other recent distributions will use DMA by default, so this should not be a problem. The US Navy Blue Angels in action, from the "Ultimate Collection" DVD
If you do not install the Ogle GUI, then you can control ogle from the keyboard. The most important keys are: