Installing codecs and decryption

Playing DVDs

Most commercial DVDs are encrypted with CSS (the Content Scrambling System), which attempts to restrict the software that can play a DVD. By installing the libdvdcss2 package you can play encrypted DVDs. To get it installed you need to fallow this steps:

• Open a terminal. Select Applications->Accesories->Terminal if you are in a Gnome session or ALT+F1 (ALT+F11 to go back) if you are using the LinuxMCE interface.
• Type this set of commands:

sudo apt-get install -y libdvdread3
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

• Insert a Video DVD in the LinuxMCE drive to test it ;)

Playing WMV, WMA, and RealPlayer formats

Support for WMV, RealMedia and other formats has been bundled into the w32codecs package. This package is not available from the Ubuntu repositories or supported by Ubuntu, due to licensing and legal restrictions. You can download the package from debian-multimedia.org:

     wget -c http://www.debian-multimedia.org/pool/main/w/w32codecs/w32codecs_20061022-0.0_i386.deb
     sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20061022-0.0_i386.deb

• Note: The w32codecs package from the Debian repositories have been tested and work with Ubuntu systems however not all Debian packages will work correctly with Ubuntu, so for your safety do not add Debian repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list
• WMV files encoded with DRM (Digital Rights Management) cannot be played with this package.
• If you are experiencing choppy audio when playing WMV files, try [the fix described here].
• If you still cannot play WMV files after installing w32codecs, try [the method suggested here].