In theory, DVD playback with xine should work out of the box. If it does for
you, consider yourself lucky and skip over to the next section. There is nothing
interesting for you in here.

But in a lot of cases, it does not work that easily. This can have various
reasons. At first, make sure xine can find your DVD drive. There should be a
symbolic link called /dev/dvd pointing to the device node of your DVD drive.
When your drive is connected as the first IDE device on the second IDE channel,
this would usually be /dev/hdc. You need to have read and write access to that
device. If your xine installation was prepared for you by the distributor of
your Linux setup, this should all have been taken care of for you, but it is
never a bad idea to double check.
If you do not want to have the symbolic link, you can alternatively change the
config option media.dvd.device accordingly.

The next set of problems you should be aware of comes with the various
restrictions the DVD officials try to enforce on us.


CSS
---

Almost all commercial DVDs are encrypted with a system called CSS, Content
Scrambling System. This is a quite weak cryptographic mechanism that was meant
as a way of copy control. Since circumventing copy protection mechanisms is
illegal in some countries, xine does not come with any means to break CSS.
Because of that, you will be unable to play commercial DVDs with an out-of-the-
box version of xine. You should inform yourself about the legal situation of
copy protection and bypassing it in the country you live in. If it is allowed
to you, install libdvdcss and xine will play those DVDs.


The region code
---------------

From a DVDs point of view, the world is divided into eight regions. The idea is
that drives bought in one region shall only play discs made for that region.
To ensure that, every DVD carries information, in which regions it wants to be
played.

Older drives are so called RPC-I drives and do not check this region code at
all. If you have such a drive, treat it well and be happy. xine will be able to
play any disc on this planet for you without any trouble.

Newer drives fall in the RPC-II category. They have an internal region setting,
which is checked against the region code of the DVD you insert. If they match,
everything will work just fine. If they don't it is up to the drive's firmware,
what exactly will happen. Some nicer drives just don't allow you to read the
parts of the disc where the cryptographic keys for CSS are stored. Most likely,
you will still be able to play the disc in that case. But there are more
restrictive drives, which deny any access to the disc. In that case you will be
out of luck.

With RPC-II drives, it therefore seems to be a good idea to have the drives
internal region setting match that of the DVDs you intend to buy. There is a
Linux command line tool to modify this setting in the drive and the drive even
allows you to change this setting for a limited amount of times, usually five.

But if you just bought a fresh RPC-II drive, do not be too hasty setting the
region. The factory default might be worth a look. Some drives already come
preset to a specific region. Bad luck, go ahead and set the right code, if the
preset does not fit your needs. But some drives come with a default setting of
region 0. This region does not exist on the globe, it generally means "region
code free". And with some drives you are really lucky, because with the
factory setting of 0, they will behave like RPC-I drives. You should do
everything to keep it that way. Be extremely careful, when using commercial
operating systems on the same machine. Some change the region code without
asking you. But unfortunately, other drives will simply not play any DVD when
set to region 0. This leaves you with no choice but to set the region code to
a setting you see fit.


Authentication
--------------

Most DVD drives need a step called "authentication" before they grant you access
to a DVD. This is a process, where the software tells the drive what it wants
and the drive decides whether to allow that or not. Unfortunately, this special
negotiation can in rare cases confuse the Linux kernel. Some drives cannot be
authenticated, when they are running in ide-scsi emulation. Others work only in
this mode, while a third group has no problems with either. It seems that USB
drives currently are not supported at all.


If you still have questions to these points or experience any problems not
mentioned here, have a look at the xine FAQ. If that still does not help you,
post your question on the xine-user mailinglist.