[ale] Totem, GStreamer, and DVDs

[Brian Pitts]

Marc Ferguson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have Totem 2.20.1 using GStreamer 0.10.15.  When I first tried to play 
> a DVD using Totem I got an error message saying it didn't have the right 
> codex.  I installed GStreamer, but I still got the codex error.  I went 
> on GStreamer's site and found a command that tests the plugins.. it told 
> me I had over 100 plugins.  But the error message still came up.
> 
> Over the course of a day or so I must have rebooted my system.  
> Miraculously the DVD played, I thought to myself, I guess X server 
> needed to be restarted or something.
> 
> Well; I got my next DVD from Netflix (King of Kong) and I'm getting the 
> same codex error.  Does anyone know what's going on?  Thanks.

Totem doesn't support DVD menus. Do you really want to use it? If you 
want a pure DVD player, look at Ogle [0]. If you'd like a 
general-purpose media player that supports DVD menus, look at VLC [1].

Perhaps the DVD has one of the new layers of digital restrictions 
management (in addition to the usual one the libdvdcss2 can fix) that 
prevents playback. Here [2] is an example of this sort of thing and a fix.

[0] http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/
[1] http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
[2] http://tobias.rautenkranz.ch/libdvdread_ifo.html

-Brian