Notes on playing DVDs on Debian Sarge

On my Debian desktop PC I found three separate barriers to playing DVD movies.  These are:-
1. Getting access to the DVD drive.
2. Install libdvdcss so that commercial DVDs can be decrypted so that they can be played.
3. Getting xvideo to display properly on my ATI All-In-Wonder 128 graphics card, which uses a Rage 128 chipset for video output.

Each of these problems must be overcome before commercial DVDs can be played.

1. If you are running a 2.4 kernel then some kernel arguments need to be passed at boot up time so that the DVD drive can be opened correctly by the DVD player. Most DVD players look for /dev/dvd, you don't even have to mount the disc to play it, however my machine didn't have a /dev/dvd following the standard installation.  Here is how you fix it:-
edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file
there will be a line something like:-
"kernel     /boot/vmlinux-2.4.27-2-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro"
on my machine the DVD drive is hdd (second ide channel, slave), so I edit the line like this
"kernel     /boot/vmlinux-2.4.27-2-386 root=/dev/hda1 ro hdd=ide-scsi"
then reboot the PC
now you need to add a symbolic link with this command (as root)
"ln -s  /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd"
the scd0 is created by the hdd=ide-scsi command, and it is scd0 whatever ide channel you are using
I suppose that if you have two drives, and if you a second hd?=ide-scsci then you might end up with scd1 as will, but I am guessing....
Now when you launch a DVD player such as ogle or kaffeine you should at least see the disc spin up when you "open disc" in the player
Remember that /dev/scd0 must belong to a group which the user attempting to run the DVD player has read access to, or must allow all users to read

2. libdvdcss is not included in the Debian distribution, however it is easy to add an extra source so that it can be installed using the Debian package management system
edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and add this line:-
"deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sarge main"
more information on this (such as other Debian distributions) is available from http://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/
now run these commands (as root)
"apt-get update"
"apt-get install libdvdcss2 libdvdnav4 libdvdplay0 libdvdread3"
now try to play a DVD again
On my system at this point I can hear the audio track, but I get a bunch of xvideo errors and a black window, this problem is fixed in the next step 

3. If you have an ATI graphics card, then you may well need modified xfree86 drivers in order to get xvideo to work
I have not fully solved this problem on my machine, and some gatos stuff is included in Debian.  If I can't get something from the Debian distribution to work then this might mean patching xfree86 manually.  This is done using the instructions from http://gatos.sourceforge.net/ati.2.php  When I get a few moments I will try it and report back

If you have any comments then please email me using the address on the home page