So I picked up a couple of DVDs the other week, Airplane and Jackie Chan’s Police Story. I wanted to watch Police Story while surfing, so I popped the DVD in the drive and…. nothing.
I couldn’t get it to work with Mplayer, not with Totem. I futzed around with a couple things and it was probably a good 15-20 minutes before I realized… hey dummy… you never installed the codec’s after you installed 8.04 on this box. duh!
Ubuntu really does word “right out of the box” for.. well.. 99% of what you’d need it to do I suppose. That last 1% they can’t do because of licensing issues – least not without charging fees and crud. But they do make it easy as heck to add the codecs you need. (For those that don’t know what a codec is, think of it like the driver software you need to get your computer and printer to talk to each other, but this allows your media player to read what’s on commercial DVDs.)
