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.