Mageia forum

Was rather surprised to find that after install I had no luck playing a DVD or the VOB (mpeg) files off of it, with either Totem or Dragon Player. (This is a DVD that I authored, so no CSS, but does have menu.)

Totem originally asked about some gstreamer plugin (don't recall which) via packagekit (whatever that is). Clicked search but nothing appeared to happen. Went and installed a few additional gstreamer packages that sounded related. Then Totem just sat there with black screen (showing no disc/file info) for DVD or VOB files.

Trying Dragon Player on the DVD, I get a popup window saying:
packagekit-gstreamer-plugin requires additional plugins:
...dvdspu
...rsndvdbin
Clicking on the search button again appears to do nothing whatsoever.

Selecting the VOB file leaves the play button greyed out.

The additional gstreamer packages I installed beyond installer selected ones were:
gstreamer0.10-mpeg-0.10.17-1.mga1
gstreamer0.10-a52dec-0.10.17-1.mga1
gstreamer0.10-resindvd-0.10.21-2.mga1

Since no luck, looked at gstreamer packages installed on Mandriva 2010.2 (which will play DVDs immediately post-install--though jerkily). Only additional one I noticed was plugins-bad, so installed: gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-0.10.21-2.mga1

This did the trick. Really makes me wonder, though. Is this right that DVDs and mpegs will not play with the default players post install, and that users have to guess about what packages to install, and then they must install plugins that are "not up to par." This is state-of-the-art for Linux video?

Hi ncarver,

Thanks for your post and sorry no one ever replied to it.
Lots of people were interested though, this post was viewed 259 times!

I don't understand much about laws and patents, if it is still like this it'll be for legal reasons. IIRC, in Mdv it worked only out of the box with a power pack. In all other cases the first thing I did after installing Mdv (and now Mga) was install a bunch of plf (in Mga tainted) plugins and codecs.
We are working on getting more and better documentation for Mageia.

For DVD playback, you'd need libdvdcss2 from the tainted repositories, and i'd recommend VLC
as media player, because it does not need additional codecs and can play mostly all media out of the box.
It's way better than totem.

That's where you hid libdvdcss !
Old post still useful.
Thanks
LP