Help! My [INSERT MOVIE/TV SERIES NAME HERE] DVDs Won’t Play on Kubuntu 9.10!

Just when you thought it was safe to buy DVDs again, after a Ubuntu upgrade of course, things decide to go wrong with the Dragon Player.

I hate when that happens.

Okay, this one is an easy fix. I am running 64-bit Kubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Studio 17 and I performed the (practically) flawless upgrade/reinstall a few weeks ago. I had not run a DVD…until now.

Now I have House Season Five.

Let me tell you that the black screen I was greeted with when I tried playing the first episode of the first disk was rather frightening. Black. Unchanging. Almost like my prospects of a raise at work (no, that is not a euphemism). I watched the hard disk light flash on and off, the DVD player whirr up and down…and nothing.

Very sad to watch. Almost made me want to grow a five o’clock shadow, rip out some muscle from my right leg, get a cane, start downing Vicodin and start calling every one an idiot. I know…it would be an improvement over my normal behavior, but I think you know where I am going with this.

Where am I going with this? Google, of course. It led me to the Ubuntu help pages which led me to the Medibuntu site at:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu

While the Medibuntu documentation was taut, exciting prose (and I highly recommend you read it if you decide to go down this path) here are the three things I did to make Dragon Player work with the House DVDs that are apparently encoded with horrible horrible (that’s two horribles) encryption (I know, it is hard to say horrible and encryption in the same sentence since I’m such a fan of algorithmic munitions, but sometimes these things need to be said).

Here are the three steps. Remember: Kubuntu 9.10, 64-bit, Intel CPU. YMMV.

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

sudo apt-get --yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Consider this my post-Christmas present.

Oh, were you waiting for the next part of the Eclipse custom navigator post? Oh, sorry. I can’t even find the cat’s box…

Help! My Dragon Player is not working in Kubuntu 9.04!

It is unacceptable to have Battlestar Galactica on DVD and be unable to watch it on Kubuntu. However, out of the box, Dragon Player does not know how to play standard DVDs which makes the unacceptable perfectly horrendous.

This fix is an easy one: the Dragon Player doesn’t work without certain drivers that are legally encumbered (that’s code for proprietary with the risk of strongly worded legal letters arriving uninvited at your home) so you have to go get the drivers yourself so as to keep various people, most notably Canonical, from declaring bankruptcy or being embarrassed in court when they kick the RIAA‘s butt (did I say that out loud?).

If you have 64-bit Kubuntu running on a Core 2 Duo and the Dragon Player does not work when you try to play a DVD movie run the following lines from a terminal window (if you want to run them all together put a semi-colon after each command):

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install w64codecs libdvdcss2

I found this information a few months ago at http://www.ubuntugeek.com/install-mplayer-and-multimedia-codecs-libdvdcss2w32codecsw64codecs-in-ubuntu-810-intrepid-ibex.html. It just made it possible for me to watch my legally purchased copy of BSG.

The cat was alive again.